Shooting Go Tigers!

I caught a bit of Go Tigers!, the high-school football documentary, on IFC the other day. Shooting Go Tigers! explains how it was made:

The documentary film Go Tigers! takes the viewer on a journey to Massillon, OH, a small town where football means everything to its residents.The behind-the-scenes chronicle follows three star high school football players through a season. The film captures the town's enormous infatuation with the Massillon Tigers high school foot-ball team. Roughly 80 percent of Go Tigers! was shot on HDCAM, 15 percent on miniDV, with the remaining 5 percent on Super 16mm film. The resulting 300 hours of footage was eventually edited into a 103-minute motion picture.Go Tigers! screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, where IFC Films picked it up.

To be honest, it did not look like 80 percent of Go Tigers! was shot on HDCAM. It didn't look high-def at all. It looked like a typical documentary.

Like other documentaries, however, Go Tigers! was burdened with a limited budget — roughly $350,000.

I guess a third of a mil doesn't go as far as it used to...

To obtain personal perspectives from the football players themselves, team stars Dave Irwin, Ellery Moore, and Danny Studer were given a Sony DV-6 one-chip miniDV camera to shoot practically anything they wanted, anytime they wanted. They ended up delivering a great deal of fascinating personal footage that furthered storylines.The Sony miniDV cameras were set to their built-in 16:9 aspect ratios to maintain consistency with the HD widescreen footage. Although it wasn't the best 16:9 image the producers had seen, they felt the quality compromise was worth it to get the personal footage. In fact, the Go Tigers! crew added a DV-6 camera to their own kit and used it extensively throughout the shoot. Much of the players' footage made it into the finished film.

Maybe I just caught a lot of the cheap DV-6 footage when I tuned in.

The Most Beautiful City of the Twentieth Century

I enjoyed "recovering architect" John's The Most Beautiful City of the Twentieth Century — especially the intro:

Santa Fe, New Mexico is the most beautiful city of the 20th century. This simple statement requires some explanation.

First of all, you have to realize that Santa Fe is not the equal of Renaissance Florence or Baroque Rome. But neither are the other cities built in the 20th century.

After 1930 or so, the 20th century was the century of Modernism, and the principles of Modernism never produced, and probably never will produce, a beautiful city.

From News Hound to Hollywood Animal

In From News Hound to Hollywood Animal, Ellen E. Heltzel interviews screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, best known Basic Instinct and Flashdance. Before becoming a screenwriter though, Eszterhas started as a journalist:

In my first job, at the Dayton Journal-Herald, mostly I drove around listening to the police radio. One night I heard there'd been a shooting in a suburban neighborhood. I got there before the police did, and I heard someone crying in the house, so I walked in. I moved toward where I heard the crying, and in the first room I saw blood and tissue all over the wall, and a dead body on the floor. I kept going, and there was another body, and more blood and tissue. And then, in the next room, I found an old lady with white hair, and the surreal thing was that she was crying and talking in Hungarian, which is my native tongue. Her son-in-law had shot her daughter and himself. In terms of everything I covered, this really moved me. But I never used it in a movie.

Creepy:

I'd recently come out from Cleveland, and he and I went to some party, where Hunter [Thompson] took out this gigantic needle and proceeded to shoot himself in the navel. I said, "-----, what was that?" He said, "Ether. Would you like some?" I declined.

Eszterhas has described screenwriters as the "discarded whores" of the business:

They cheat and steal from all screenwriters, including me. [...] When I sold "Basic Instinct" for $3 million — mind you, the director still got $8 million and the star got $15 million — immediately after that, Jeff Katzenberg wrote a very famous memo saying we can't keep paying these prices to screenwriters, because if we do, it's going to affect the amount we have to pay directors and actors.

I've heard other screenwriters make this point before:

My problem with film critics is that they never read the screenplays. They see the movie, and if they don't like the movie, they tee off on the screenwriter — even if the screenwriter's work has been mutilated by other people the director brought in to "fix" whatever he thinks is wrong.

Secret of Homing Pigeons Revealed

I wasn't expecting this. From Secret of Homing Pigeons Revealed:

The secret of carrier pigeons' uncanny ability to find their way home has been discovered by British scientists: the feathered navigators follow the roads just like we do.

Researchers at Oxford University spent 10 years studying homing pigeons using global positioning satellite (GPS) and were stunned to find the birds often don't navigate by taking bearing from the sun.

Instead they fly along motorways, turn at junctions and even go around roundabouts, adding miles to their journeys, British newspapers reported on Thursday.

"It really has knocked our research team sideways," Professor Tim Guilford said in the Daily Telegraph.

"It is striking to see the pigeons fly straight down the A34 Oxford bypass, and then sharply curve off at the traffic lights before curving off again at the roundabout," he said in The Times.

Guilford said pigeons use their own navigational system when doing long-distance trips or when a bird does a journey for the first time.

But when they have flown a journey more than once they home in on an habitual route home.

"In short it looks like it is mentally easier for a bird to fly down a road...they are just making their journey as simple as possible."

Guilford said pigeons use their own navigational system when doing long-distance trips or when a bird does a journey for the first time. Perhaps we should study that navigational system then.

Exposing Hucksters, Cheats and Scam Artists

In Exposing Hucksters, Cheats and Scam Artists John Stossel discusses his new book and makes a few basic libertarian arguments:

But how much of this government do we need? For most of the history of America, government was less than 5 percent of GDP. America did very well then. We grew fast. We accommodated millions of immigrants. So how big should government be? Do the politicians ever ask this question? No. They just want more. But how big is government? Should it be 6 percent of the economy? 8 percent? 10 percent? What nobody realizes is that it's approaching 40 percent now and still growing.

"Passion" Revives Hope for Dying Language

With all the hype surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I'm surprised I never caught this factoid. From "Passion" Revives Hope for Dying Language:

Some linguists, who fear the language spoken by Jesus could vanish within a few decades, hope for a boost from Mel Gibson's new film, "The Passion of the Christ," opening Wednesday in U.S. theaters. It is performed entirely in Aramaic and Latin.
[...]
Gibson's film, depicting Christ's final hours, uses subtitles. The script was translated into first-century Aramaic for the Jewish characters and "street Latin" for the Roman characters by the Rev. William Fulco, director of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

While I recognized Aramaic as an ancient, biblical language, I didn't realize it was the language spoken by Jesus and friends. I also didn't realize that Aramaic wasn't quite dead yet:

Among the few places in the world where Aramaic is still familiar is a small Syrian Orthodox church in Jerusalem, though even here it is little more than an echo these days. [...] Today, the Syrian Orthodox community in Jerusalem offers Aramaic in summer school, but there is little interest and fewer than half the 600 members speak the language.
[...]
Just a half-million people around the world, mostly Christians, still speak Aramaic at home.
[...]
Today, a few people speak it in parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, India, Europe, Australia and some U.S. cities, including Chicago.

In Syria, once the core of indigenous Christian Aramaic speakers, the language is still heard among 10,000 people in three villages perched on cliff sides in the Qalamoun Mountains north of Damascus.
[...]
A few thousand Israelis who immigrated from other Middle East countries still speak Aramaic, but few pass it on to their children.

A short history lesson on Aramaic:

Aramaic is one of the few languages that has been spoken continuously for thousands of years. It first appeared in written records around the 10th century B.C. although it was likely spoken earlier.

It is a Semitic language and has similarities with Hebrew and Arabic. Carpenter, for instance, is "nagouro" in Aramaic, "nagar" in Hebrew and "najar" in Arabic.

Aramaic reached its widest influence when it was adopted by the Persian empire around 500 B.C. Written in a 22-letter alphabet — similar to Hebrew's square-shaped letters — it was a relatively simple language, and scribes and intellectuals helped spread it in a largely illiterate world, Bar-Asher said.

Aramaic texts have turned up as far apart as India and Egypt. Jews returning from exile in Babylon around 500 B.C. helped spread the language to the eastern Mediterranean, where it largely supplanted Hebrew.

Scholars believe Jesus might have known Hebrew — which by that time was reserved mainly for use in synagogues and by upper classes — and some Greek, but Aramaic was the language of his native Galilee.

The New Testament records Jesus' last words on the cross in Aramaic: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" St. Mark, most likely writing in Greek, adds, "... which means, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" (Mark 15:34).

Michael Sokoloff, a professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, said it is believed that parts of the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic, but only Greek writings have been found.

Aramaic was largely replaced by Arabic during the Islamic conquest of the 7th century.
[...]
However, the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts are written in Aramaic. It appears in the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and in Israeli marriage and divorce contracts.

The Dubious Quick Kill, part 1

The Dubious Quick Kill, part 1 contrasts the modern sport of fencing against its dueling roots:

Take for example the case of the duel fought in 1613 between the Earl of Dorset and Lord Edward Bruce. According to the Earl's account, he received a rapier-thrust in the right nipple which passed 'level through my body, and almost to my back.' Seemingly unaffected, the Earl remained engaged in the combat for some time. The duel continued with Dorset going on to lose a finger while attempting to disarm his adversary manually. Locked in close quarters, the two struggling combatants ultimately ran out of breath. According to Dorset's account, they paused briefly to recover, and while catching their wind, considered proposals to release each other's blades. Failing to reach an agreement on exactly how this might be done, the seriously wounded Dorset finally managed to free his blade from his opponent's grasp and ultimately ran Lord Bruce through with two separate thrusts. Although Dorset had received what appears to have been a grievous wound that, in those days, ought to have been mortal, he not only remained active long enough to dispatch his adversary, but without the aid of antibiotics and emergency surgery, also managed to live another thirty-nine years.

Brutal? Consider this anecdote:

However, consider the duel between Lagarde and Bazanez. After the later received a rapier blow which bounced off his head, Bazanez is said to have received an unspecified number of thrusts which, according to the account, "entered" the body. Despite having lost a good deal of blood, he nevertheless managed to wrestle Lagarde to the ground, whereupon he proceeded to inflict some fourteen stab wounds with his dagger to an area extending from his opponent's neck to his navel. Lagarde meanwhile, entertained himself by biting off a portion of Bazanez's chin and, using the pommel of his weapon, ended the affair by fracturing Bazanez's skull. History concludes, saying that neither combatant managed to inflict any "serious" injury, and that both recovered from the ordeal.

Sometimes real life beats Hollywood:

While the previous tale seems amazing enough, hardly anyone can tell a story more incredible than that witnessed by R. Deerhurst. Two duelists, identified only as "His Grace, the Duke of B" and "Lord B", after an exchange of exceptionally cordial letters of challenge met in the early morning to conduct their affair with pistols and swords. The combat began with a pistol ball inflicting a slight wound to the Duke's thumb. A second firing was exchanged in which Lord B was then wounded slightly. Each then immediately drew his sword and rushed upon the other with reckless ferocity. After an exchange of only one or two thrusts, the two became locked corps à corps. Struggling to free themselves by "repeated wrenches," they finally separated enough to allow the Duke to deliver a thrust which entered the inside of Lord B 's sword arm and exited the outside of the arm at the elbow. Incredible as it may seem, his Lordship was still able to manage his sword and eventually drove home a thrust just above Duke B 's right nipple. Transfixed on his Lordship's blade, the Duke nevertheless continued, attempting repeatedly to direct a thrust at his Lordship's throat. With his weapon fixed in His Grace's chest, Lord B now had no means of defense other than his free arm and hand. Attempting to grasp the hostile blade, he lost two fingers and mutilated the remainder. Finally, the mortally wounded Duke penetrated the bloody parries of Lord B's hand with a thrust just below Lord B 's heart.

In the Hollywood swashbucklers this scene might well have have ended at this point, if not long before, but real life often seems to have a more incredible, and certainly in this case, more romantic outcome. Locked together at close quarters and unable to withdraw their weapons from each other's bodies for another thrust, the two stood embracing each other in a death grip. At this point the seconds, attempting to intercede, begged the pair to stop. Neither combatant would agree, however, and there they both remained, each transfixed upon the blade of the other until, due to extensive blood loss, his Lordship finally collapsed. In doing so, he withdrew his sword from the Duke's body and, staggering briefly, fell upon his weapon, breaking the blade in two. A moment later, the "victorious" Duke deliberately snapped his own blade and, with a sigh, fell dead upon the corpse of his adversary.

City on fire

I can't say that this scenario, from City on fire puts me at ease:

The detonation of a 300-kiloton nuclear bomb would release an extraordinary amount of energy in an instant — about 300 trillion calories within about a millionth of a second. More than 95 percent of the energy initially released would be in the form of intense light. This light would be absorbed by the air around the weapon, superheating the air to very high temperatures and creating a ball of intense heat — a fireball.

Because this fireball would be so hot, it would expand rapidly. Almost all of the air that originally occupied the volume within and around the fireball would be compressed into a thin shell of superheated, glowing, high-pressure gas. This shell of gas would compress the surrounding air, forming a steeply fronted, luminous shockwave of enormous extent and power — the blast wave.

By the time the fireball approached its maximum size, it would be more than a mile in diameter. It would very briefly produce temperatures at its center of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius) — about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.

This enormous release of light and heat would create an environment of almost unimaginable lethality. Vast amounts of thermal energy would ignite extensive fires over urban and suburban areas. In addition, the blast wave and high-speed winds would crush many structures and tear them apart. The blast wave would also boost the incidence and rate of fire-spread by exposing ignitable surfaces, releasing flammable materials, and dispersing burning materials.

Within minutes of a detonation, fire would be everywhere. Numerous fires and firebrands — burning materials that set more fires — would coalesce into a mass fire. (Scientists prefer this term to "firestorm," but I will use them interchangeably here.) This fire would engulf tens of square miles and begin to heat enormous volumes of air that would rise, while cool air from the fire's periphery would be pulled in. Within tens of minutes after the detonation, the pumping action from rising hot air would generate superheated ground winds of hurricane force, further intensifying the fire.

Virtually no one in an area of about 40–65 square miles would survive.

But that's just at ground zero. The point of the article is that a single nuclear blast would almost certainly create a firestorm (or "mass fire") of tremendous destructive force, and that fire damage has been ignored by war planners for half a century. Let's hope no one tests that hypothesis anytime soon.

Caltech Michelin Lecture

I am thoroughly enjoying Michael's Crichton's recent speeches (e.g., Why Speculate), and Aliens Cause Global Warming doesn't disappoint. I love the intro:

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.

Here's the crux of his argument:

In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. [...] As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.

Crichton points out that the "science" supporting "nuclear winter" follows the same pattern:

At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:

Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe… etc

(The amount of tropospheric dust=# warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance… and so on.)

The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.

And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made. Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic.

And here's where it gets truly damning:

The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.

While nuclear winter didn't have strong evidence behind it, it did have consensus Crichton attacks "consensus science" with numerous examples:

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

By all means, read the whole thing.

Understanding Evolution

I recently stumbled across the Understanding Evolution site (via The Loom), and I hope it does some good:

Learning Evolution

• Nature of Science: Review the essentials of how science works.
• Evolution 101: Explore the central ideas of biological evolution.
• Evidence: Examine the evidence relating to evolution.
• Relevance of Evolution: Discover the importance of evolution in our daily lives.
• Misconceptions: Delve into the misconceptions that cloud public understanding of evolution.
• History of Evolutionary Thought: Trace the history of evolutionary concepts.

Teaching Evolution

• Teaching Evolution: Focus on the basic concepts for teaching evolution and find lesson plans for your classroom.
• Overcoming Roadblocks: Identify strategies to overcome potential roadblocks to the teaching of evolution.
• Potential Pitfalls: Avoid common mistakes by reading this primer on pitfalls.
• Readings and Resources: Enrich your evolution knowledge with these readings, web sources and position statements.

New Stir in the Shire: 'Hobbit' Rights Fight

According to New Stir in the Shire: 'Hobbit' Rights Fight, MGM still holds the distribution rights to The Hobbit — and is effectively holding New Line hostage:

Mr. Tolkien, an Oxford professor who dreamed up the idea of the hobbits while marking exam papers, sold the rights to his Middle-earth tales, including 'The Hobbit,' to MGM's United Artists in 1969 for an estimated $10,000 to pay off a tax bill. MGM subsequently sold most of the film rights to Hollywood producer Saul Zaentz, who made an often-derided animated 'Lord of the Rings' in 1978.

After a series of twists and turns that included settling a lawsuit with United Artists, Mr. Zaentz eventually sold the rights to New Line after approving a treatment put forward by Mr. Jackson. However, MGM retained the distribution rights for "The Hobbit." It's unclear what rights Mr. Zaentz has going forward; he declined to discuss the matter.

MGM is no "shireling" when it comes to negotiating such deals. Owning one of the biggest film libraries in Hollywood, MGM often has found itself at the center of disputes over movie rights, including an eight-year legal battle over "Spider-Man," which it eventually settled. This time, the rights to "The Hobbit" present a potential gold mine at a moment when the studio may be looking for a merger partner.

Finally In, Facing New Fight

The Washington Post's Finally In, Facing New Fight tells the story of a group of female Marine recruits — and shares some interesting statistics:

In 1985, when a recruit named Anita Lobo became the first woman at Parris Island to be tested on her combat rifle, she broke the range record with a score of 246 of a possible 250.

But in spite of that first success, women since have struggled more than men to master their combat rifles, a fact that has not made fitting in any easier.

For enlisted women, the first-time pass rate is 65 percent, said Chief Warrant Officer James Fraley, in charge of the marksmanship training unit. By contrast, 87 percent of men pass the test on their first try.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Bloggers?

In Quis Custodiet Ipsos Bloggers?, Julian Sanchez comments on Alan Moore's Watchmen:

The comics you liked as a kid typically seem preposterous a few years later — unless, of course, you liked Alan Moore comics. Jim Henley looks at what emerges on rereading Moore's justly venerated Watchmen in a fine short essay.

An excerpt from that essay:

The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people? The problem is that comics have typically answered the question before they've barely asked it: "With great power must come great responsibility!" Really? Are you sure about that? And how much is "great," anyway? What part of my life can I keep back for myself?

You may have noticed that these questions are salient whether you wear tights or not. They apply to you. Because most of us, certainly most of us in the developed world, have more power, wealth or wherewithal than somebody. Certainly almost everybody reading this blog item could, in principle, quit their present jobs and work pro bono for an African AIDS clinic while subsisting on donated food, or maintain a couple of homeless people instead of taking vacation, or — join the Volunteer Fire Department. Depending on your politics, you may believe that people like yourself or people like Bill Gates really do owe some non-trivial portion of time, wealth, influence or attention to — something or someone. The poor, the ill, the frightened, alienated, the "doomed, damned and despised" as Jesse Jackson once put it.

And having had the thought, you've got more problems. Which will it be, first of all — the poor, the ill or the frightened? Just how should you help them? And when, if ever, do you get off-duty?

Soldiers Record Lessons From Iraq

The Washington Post's Soldiers Record Lessons From Iraq shares some startling anecdotes and advice from veterans of Iraq:

As the insurgency in the Sunni Triangle was heating up last fall, Lt. Col. Steve Russell was dealing with a new wave of attacks in which bombers were using the transmitters from radio-controlled toy cars: They would take the electronic guts of the cars, wrap them in C-4 plastic explosive and attach a blasting cap, then detonate them by remote control.

So Russell, who commands an infantry battalion in deposed president Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, mounted one of the toy-car controllers on the dashboard of his Humvee and taped down the levers. Because all the toy cars operated on the same frequency, this would detonate any similar bomb about 100 yards before his Humvee got to the spot. This "poor man's anti-explosive device" was "risky perhaps," Russell writes in a 58-page summary of his unit's time in Iraq but better than leaving the detonation to the bombers.
[...]
Like most of the 28 documents reviewed for this article, Morgan's is relentlessly specific. One of the most striking lessons the 1992 graduate of Georgetown University passes on: Every soldier in the unit should carry a tourniquet sufficiently long to cut off the gush of blood from major leg wounds. "Trust me," he writes, "it saved four of my soldiers' lives."

Morgan also emphasizes to incoming soldiers that they need to be ready to kill quickly yet precisely. "If an enemy opens fire with an AK-47 aimlessly, which most of these people do, you should be able to calmly place the red dot reticule of your M-68 optic device on his chest and kill him with one shot," he admonishes. "If you do this, the rest will run and probably not come back."
[...]
In the late fall, reports Russell, the infantry commander in Tikrit, "we began to see many varieties of explosive devices. Doorbell switches became a favorite, followed by keyless locks, toy cars and in one case a pressure switch."

Likewise, the placement of roadside bombs has become more sophisticated. The latest twist is to put a large bomb, such as one built with an artillery shell, in the open so that U.S. troops will stop short of it — and then hit them with a string of hidden bombs along their stopping point.
[...]
Sometimes the solutions in the field are painfully simple. Lt. Matthew Mason reports that during a firefight in the northern city of Mosul, his unit suddenly found that its mounted Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, could not be swung to shoot at the sixth story of a building. In the midst of combat, his men removed the rear pin on the gun mount, enabling the weapon to traverse to a higher angle of fire. But in the process, he said, they lost "precious seconds in which we could have closed with and destroyed the enemy."

The most effective counterbomb tactic has been the low-tech sniper, Army officers say. U.S. troops have learned to hide and spy on spots such as traffic circles where bombs are likely to be emplaced. "Anyone who comes out in the middle of the night to plant an IED [improvised explosive device] dies," a senior Central Command official explained in an interview.

British Most Highly Monitored By Video Cameras

British Most Highly Monitored By Video Cameras cites some startling comments (from a BBC discussion board) on why closed-circuit television (CCTV) is not reducing crime rates:

We had our car stolen in Dec 2000 in front of CCTV cameras. The police caught the thief by chance. He was convicted sentenced to community service (this was his EIGHTH offence), and ordered to pay us £80 compensation. We had seen nothing of the money and he has committed 4 more offences. He is only 18, which means he will probably carry out more serious crimes in the future. It is about time that the law was brought down hard on even first time offenders. First time means first time caught.
Anon, Scotland


I retired as a Chief Superintendent in 1996, having been a Divisional Commander for some years. By the time I retired I was ashamed of the service we were able to provide. A daily struggle to put out a minimum number of officers, sometimes as few as 8 or 9 from a paper total of more than 200. Where were they all? Attending courses, tied up in court, and dealing with time wasters complaints (every villain now complains as a routine, and boy does it use up police time). We need to get back to good old fashioned policing. It's time for us to return to the criminal being afraid, not the public.
John Lilley, England

I was mugged recently. The police turned up after quite some time. Records later showed that by the time they responded to my call my cards were already being used around Brixton. I was more than willing to give up my time to look at CCTV images near to where the mugging took place and where the cards were used to try to spot this guy. The police didn't seem to know how to respond to that suggestion — it was like it had never occurred to them.

I was more than willing to go out of my way to catch this guy who had caused me and doubtless many other people an awful trauma. The police just weren't interested. I'm a lawyer and I think I would have made a good witness. I am very sure about what I saw. Unfortunately, I was never given the opportunity to demonstrate this. I received three offers of counselling from the police. The best therapy they could have given me would have been to get the coward who did it in the dock.
Claire, England

Virtual Architecture?

Virtual Architecture? discusses "Time Warner's new headquarters, the latest glassy behemoth to open in Manhattan" — and shares some interesting architectural "factlets":

Interesting architecture-world factlet, by the way: did you know that one of the reasons classical buildings look as solid as they do is because architects and builders of the time took shadows into account? All those ridges and pilasters, all those recessed windows — they're there partly to help the sun demonstrate how thick and massive the structure is. And did you know that one of the reasons so many modernist and avant-garde buildings look shallow and bleak is that 20th century architects fell out of the habit of taking sun and shadow into account?

Researcher Uses Formulas for Marriage

I'm not sure how much the math adds to this analysis, but it adds an air of science to something fairly common-sensical. From Researcher Uses Formulas for Marriage:

John M. Gottman said a 20-year study involving more than 600 married couples shows that by carefully plotting how a husband and wife interact and then reducing those observations to a formula, researchers can tell which marriages will succeed and which are heading for the rocks.
[...]
To gather the data, a team of researchers observed video tapes of couples in interviews by marriage counselors and noted how husbands and wives responded to each other. Gottman said his team found that there basically are three types of stable marriages.

The first is a husband and wife who routinely avoids conflict. When a difference of opinion arises, said Gottman, 'they will never argue. They will listen to the other, but will not try to persuade.' Such marriages, which he calls the 'avoiders,' may be unemotional and distant, but they endure.

A second type is a volatile relationship 'like two lawyers in a courtroom,' said Gottman. 'They can argue at the drop of a hat. They are the Bickersons,' he said. Such marriages tend to last even though there are frequent and impassioned arguments.

The third type of stable marriage Gottman calls the 'validating' couple. They listen to each other, respect the other's opinion and only occasionally argue. 'They pick the issues they fight about,' he said.
[...]
Researchers mathematically chart the marriage interactions by plotting not just what is said, but also how it is said and the body language and facial expression behind it. Emotions such as anger, harshness and hostility get a negative number, while humor and an eagerness to talk lovingly about the partner get a positive rating.
[...]
He said an "escalating negative affect", or a steep descent on the chart below the neutral point, predicts a couple will divorce within 5.6 years after marriage.

Hostile People May Be 'Born to Smoke'

Smokers really are hostile. Hostile People May Be 'Born to Smoke':

People with hostile or aggressive personality traits may have genetic tendencies that make them 'born to smoke,' U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

Brain imaging studies suggest that the same genetic variations that give people hostile personality traits may also make them more likely to become addicted to nicotine, the team at the University of California Irvine reported.

A Bounty of Science

I'm not sure what to make of A Bounty of Science; it tries to "scientifically" explain the mutiny on the Bounty:

A count of every lash British sailors received from 1765 through 1793 while serving on 15 naval vessels in the Pacific shows that Bligh was not overly abusive compared with contemporaries who did not suffer mutiny. Greg Dening's Mr. Bligh's Bad Language computed the average percentage of sailors flogged from information in ships' logs at 21.5. Bligh's was 19 percent, lower than James Cook's 20, 26 and 37 percent, respectively, on his three voyages, and less than half that of George Vancouver's 45 percent. Vancouver averaged 21 lashes per man, compared with the overall mean of five and Bligh's 1.5.

If unusually harsh punishment didn't cause the mutiny, what did? Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century, the ship commander comes closest to capturing the ultimate cause: 'I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.'

Indeed, crews consisted of young men in the prime of sexual life, shaped by evolution to bond in serial monogamy with women of reproductive age. Of the crews who sailed into the Pacific from 1765 through 1793, 82.1 percent were between the ages of 12 and 30, and another 14.3 percent were between 30 and 40. When the men arrived in the South Pacific, the results, from an evolutionary point of view, were not surprising. Of the 1,556 sailors, 437 (28 percent) got the 'venereals.' The Bounty's infection rate was among the highest, at 39 percent.

Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong

In a recent Atlantic article, Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong, Kenneth M. Pollack, a CIA and National Security Council veteran, points out that "the U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure":

In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence community's conclusions about Iraq at the end of the Clinton Administration:

How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously — and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner.

Professors at war

In Professors at War: Searching for Dissent at the MLA, Scott Jaschik describes a recent meeting of English professors and their thoughts on the war in Iraq:

Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of 'so-called terrorism,' 'the so-called homeland,' 'the so-called election of George Bush,' and so forth."
[...]
The closest public challenge to the prevailing geopolitical views at the MLA came when one professor asked a panel that had derided American responses to 9/11 and Iraq what a good response would have looked like. She didn't get much of an answer, left the session, and declined to elaborate on her question.

But a young professor of English who followed her out the door to congratulate her did offer some thoughts on politics at the MLA. Aaron Santesso of the University of Nevada at Reno described himself as being "on the left" and sympathetic with much of the criticism of the war in Iraq. But he said that the tenor of the discussion "drives me nuts." "A lot of people here don't want the rhetoric to just be a shrill echo of the right," he said.

Just a few years ago, he noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has taken away the rights of the Afghan people.

Theatres of War

Theatres of War discusses Kagan's new book on the Peloponnesian War:

Twenty-five years ago it was easy to teach Thucydides; all you had to do was talk about the Cold War. For most of the four decades from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War seemed self-evident. You knew, as you read about Athens, about its boisterous democratic politics and fast-talking politicians, its adventurous intellectual and artistic spirit, that these were the good guys. They were clearly our own cultural forebears. And you knew, just as surely, as you read about Sparta, about its humorless militarism, geriatric regime, and deep antipathy to democracy, that these were bad guys. They, too, looked awfully familiar.

You also knew what it was like to live in a world divided between two sides "at the very height of their power and preparedness," as Thucydides puts it, and how blind adherence to the policies dictated by such polarization could result in fearful illogic. (As Kagan observes, the Spartans went to war to save an alliance they had created precisely to protect themselves from conflict.) In the bipartite world of the Cold War, you could choose to read Thucydides� carefully structured presentation of Athens� decline as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. Or you might take Thucydides' apparent detachment to be a cautious endorsement of Machtpolitik as the grim requirement for being a superpower. ("It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can," the Athenians blandly opine during their confrontation with the Melians.)

But whichever way you read Thucydides the bipolar structure of his world was instantly recognizable.

Scrivener's Palsy

I find the placebo effect fascinating. In the London Review of Books' Scrivener's Palsy, Carl Elliott reviews Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire by Yolande Lucire and Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' by Daniel Moerman and describes the importance of the doctor's belief in the placebo:

Whatever the placebo effect is, it isn't reliably predictable on the basis of the characteristics of individual patients.

A much better predictor is the characteristics and qualities of individual doctors. The more convinced a doctor is that a drug or a placebo will work, the more likely that it really will. The pioneering study here was conducted almost forty years ago. Physicians were treating anxious outpatients with meprobamate, or Miltown, a popular tranquilliser of the 1950s and 1960s. In two clinics, patients given Miltown became no less anxious than patients given placebos. But in the third, patients on Miltown became much less anxious. The difference was that doctors in this clinic had self-consciously adopted an enthusiastic, confident attitude towards the drug's effectiveness. When they switched to a more neutral, experimental attitude, Miltown was no better than a placebo.

A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard Gracely and his colleagues in 1985. Gracely purported to be studying a pain reliever called fentanyl in patients recovering after having their wisdom teeth removed. But he was more interested in whether a clinician's attitude relieved pain. So he recruited unknowing clinicians to administer the treatment. Gracely and his colleagues told half the doctors that they would be administering one of three possible treatments: fentanyl (a pain reliever), naloxone (a drug that blocked opiate receptors and could make the pain even worse) or a placebo. But he told the other half of the clinicians that there had been an administrative problem, and none of their patients would be getting fentanyl.

The results were striking. All the patients got placebos, and all were told the same thing about their chances of getting placebos. But their pain response differed tremendously. How it differed depended on what their clinicians thought they were administering. If a doctor thought there was a one-in-three possibility that he was giving the patient fentanyl, the patient was likely to feel a lot better after an hour. But if a doctor thought there was no chance he was giving the patient fentanyl - that he was giving either placebo or naloxone - then the patient's pain was likely to get worse. Somehow, the clinicians were unknowingly transmitting their attitudes towards the medication to their patients.

U.S. Security Moves Spur Testiness

Roughly six years ago, I worked at a firm with a number of Indian and Pakistani consultants, and I almost took a few of them up on an offer to bring me back a sword or two from their homeland. From what I've read in U.S. Security Moves Spur Testiness, I won't be bringing back any weapons from the area myself:

Seventy-two-year-old Charles Grader knows how to travel the world — he spent 40 years with the State Department. Yet he ended up in a New Delhi prison cell for a week with 66 other men.

Dr. Grader came out of retirement to head a major agricultural and irrigation development program in Afghanistan for Chemonics International Inc., a Washington-based consulting firm. In Afghanistan, he bought several thousand dollars worth of antique pistols and muskets to bring back to the U.S. as gifts, and secured the proper paperwork from Afghan authorities certifying that they weren't some sort of looted museum treasure.

From Afghanistan, Dr. Grader flew to New Delhi on Ariana Afghan Airlines to catch a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, and then on to Boston. Code-sharing from Afghanistan isn't exactly seamless — it's nonexistent. So Dr. Grader was instructed by Indian authorities to claim his baggage and go through security.

When the muskets went through the X-ray machine, trouble started. Dr. Grader unwrapped the 150-year-old guns and offered his paperwork. Indian authorities accused him of trying to smuggle guns into the country. He was eventually taken to a police station at 2:30 a.m., and then transferred to Delhi's notoriously overcrowded Tihar Prisons. Dr. Grader's cell, shared by accused murders, smugglers and others, had a single bathroom that was little more than a hole in the ground.

Charge d'Affaires Robert O. Blake from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi worked to free him. It took a week, during which Dr. Grader says fellow prisoners "treated me as an older man with a lot of respect." Then he was released to house arrest at a hotel. After three more weeks and paying lawyers close to $10,000, charges were dropped and he was allowed to leave the country — without the muskets.

The Trend of Vanishing Tech Jobs

Viriginia Postrel's latest article, The Trend of Vanishing Tech Jobs, addresses the "outsourcing" crisis in IT:

What's happening now to software and services has already happened to hardware, with great economic results.

In the late 1980's, Asian manufacturers began turning out basic memory chips, undercutting American chip makers' prices and inciting a fierce policy debate. Many industry leaders argued that the United States would lose its technological edge unless the government intervened to protect chip makers.

In a famous 1988 Harvard Business Review article, Charles Ferguson, then a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development at M.I.T., summed up the conventional wisdom: 'Most experts believe that without deep changes in both industry behavior and government policy, U.S. microelectronics will be reduced to permanent, decisive inferiority within 10 years.'

He denounced the "fragmented, chronically entrepreneurial industry" of Silicon Valley, which was losing market share to government-aided Asian businesses. "Only economists moved by the invisible hand," he wrote, "have failed to apprehend the problem."

Those optimistic economists were right. The dire predictions were wrong. American semiconductor makers shifted to higher-value microprocessors. Computer companies bought commodity memory chips and other components, from keyboards to disk drives, abroad. Businesses and consumers enjoyed cheaper and cheaper prices.

Far from an economic disaster, the result was a productivity boom.

Darwin's a Tory at heart

In Darwin's a Tory at heart, Peter Cuthbertson explains that famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins does not suggest emulating natural selection in our social interactions — but he (Cuthbertson) can't help but find sociobiology pointing toward conservatism:

It has regularly astounded me when discussing cultural and social issues not that people often disagree with the conservative perspective, but that they tend to do so in such a way as to suggest they think it has all simply been pulled out of the air as an arbitrary edict. Do they really think a father is superfluous in the raising of children?, I ask myself. Do they honestly think marriage is merely a piece of paper, that the link between sex and procreation is a thing of the past? Can they possibly believe that a marriage of multiple men and women would work just as well if social conventions only changed a little? From the Marxist, postmodernist and liberal left to the libertarian right, such blank slate attitudes are commonplace. But then I realise that without a basic grounding in sociobiology, I would likely think the very same.

A Conversation with Peter Calthorpe

In A Conversation with Peter Calthorpe, Calthorpe makes it pretty clear that he hates what the automobile has done to society. He also makes a number of interesting points, starting with this point about suburban sprawl's origins:

Suburban sprawl came about as a result of two major subsidies from the federal government. The first was the Federal Highway Bill which began in 1956 with the interstate system, the largest public works system in the history of mankind. The second is the single-home mortgage deduction, a huge subsidy that moves people toward single-occupancy, single-family homes. We are the only industrialized country in the world that has those deductions, and it skews the marketplace in favor of sprawl.

Ah, government bureaucrats making decisions:

For example, we did a proposal at Laguna West in Sacramento where we wanted to plant trees in the parking lanes. Part of the problem was that the streets were too wide. They had two parking lanes, so the on-street parking basically got used once a year during the Christmas party and the rest of the year the street looked like you could land an airplane on it. So we said, why don't we "park" some trees in these stalls. Then you can park cars between the trees. The public works official said, "Well, you can't do that, the cars will run into the trees." I said, "Well, why don't they run into the parked cars, they are in the same spot?" And very quickly he said, "Because the cars have reflectors on the back." We finally got the trees approved by applying reflectors to the trunks, which satisfied him. But the idea of parking a tree in a street is kind of a metaphor for the whole thing. In Sacramento, new suburbs without street trees are on average ten degrees hotter throughout the summer than the old downtown which has a beautiful tree canopy. Trees have a tremendous microclimate impact, especially in hot areas. So that is an example of passive solar design on a community scale.

This description of mass transportation in the Philippines (outside of Manila) both fascinates and frightens me:

We were able to convince them to design it according to a totally different system. It's a wonderful, ad hoc and completely unplanned bus system where each driver fights for and gets his own space and route and time and customizes his stretched Jeeps to look absolutely gorgeous. It turns out to be one of the most efficient mass transit systems on the globe, because these guys are not on anybody's schedule. It's not an engineering problem — they are organically at the right place at the right time because it's their livelihood. Everybody knows each other, and they all have their own drivers and there is a whole social dimension to it. So we said, "Look, let's build our city around this idea. This is the culture you have."

Modernizing the Mideast

In Modernizing the Mideast, Michael Blowhard (yeah, that's a pseudonym) presents his reaction to the Saudi Grand Mufti's recent statement that "allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe":

It seems to me that way too little is made of how, er, nonmodern these people are. Many Westerners seem to be under the impression that mideasterners can be talked to and bargained with as though, under the robes and behind the dark spectacles, they're just like us.

My impression is different. It's based on very little experience, admittedly. Still, a zillion years ago I spent a month with friends in Morocco; one of us was Moroccan, so we saw more of the real Morocco than most tourists at the time did. What most impressed me about our adventures was how really primitive the country was. Most of the population seemed to be living in the Dark Ages; I found it terrifying that they had access to any modern technology at all.

(Hey, did you ever read about New Zealand's Maori people? Ferocious inter-tribal fighters who, for centuries before Euros arrived, inflicted and survived feuds and raids on each other. But when the Euros arrived and the Maori suddenly had access to guns? Well, they just about wiped themselves out.)

I found it terrifying not just that some of these Moroccans had guns; I found it terrifying that so many of them had transistor radios. Who knew what they were making of what they were listening to? I was a kid at the time, but I still remember thinking: "It's going to take generations, and not decades, for these people to enter the modern world."

From the FT's story about the anti-woman Mufti, it sounds like progress is being made at about the rate I guessed it would be.

Facts from The Economist

Facts from The Economist:

• Dairy cows attract 1000 flies per cow.


• Dairy cows generate 100 pounds of manure per animal per day.


• Angola, two years out of a civil war, seems to be one fantastically corrupt country. Its rulers have been accused of having 'filched or misspent $4.2 billion in five years ... The missing cash was equivalent to nearly a tenth of GDP each year — as if an American administration had 'lost' $5 trillion — and roughly as much as was spent on all social services.'


• Half of Angola's children are malnourished while 20 Angolans are worth $100 million or more.


• Only 23 of Angola's 168 municipal courts are functioning. The government says it will fix the problem 'by 2051.'


• Mexico has an illegal-immigrant problem of its own — people attempting to migrate north from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. 'Last year, Mexico deported 147,000 illegal immigrants in all, some 20% more than in 2002.' Most seem to be trying to make their way to the U.S.

In the Lead

In the Lead takes another look at why women aren't in senior-executive positions:

A recent study of women in corporate leadership by Catalyst, a New York research organization, found that women accounted for only 15.7% of corporate-officer positions and 5.2% of top earners at Fortune 500 companies in 2002. Even more telling, the vast majority of women in top jobs are in staff rather than line positions, which rarely lead to the very top. Women hold only 9.9% of line corporate-officer jobs — where they would be overseeing a business that earns money for their company — compared with 90.1% for men.

Researchers and female executives cite a variety of reasons for this meager showing: male executives' reluctance to mentor women, women's exclusion from informal networks, a hesitancy to consider women for the toughest posts, and women's own struggle to balance careers and families — sometimes leading them to settle for less-demanding roles at work.

But a big factor holding women back is their good-girl, or good-student, behavior. 'Women will work themselves to death in the belief that if they do more and more, that will get them ahead, when it isn't so,' says Terri Dial, former vice chairman of Wells Fargo, and president and CEO of its Wells Fargo Bank. 'They think, 'If I do the work, my bosses will see it and reward me.' '

An interesting anecdote:

Lisa Jacobson, CEO of Inspirica, a New York high-school and college tutoring company, agrees that women often don't ask for what they deserve. In the 20 years since she founded her company, none of the female lawyers, graphic designers, public-relations experts, accountants or others she has interviewed to do work for Inspirica has ever quoted her as high a fee as their male counterparts. "The women almost always seem to say, 'I'm $125 an hour, but for you I'd charge $75, when the guy just says flatly that he charges $350," she adds.

Where Are the Women?

Where Are the Women? addresses the dearth of women in senior positions depite the plethora of women, for instance, graduating with MBAs:

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. By 2004, after three decades of the women's movement, when business schools annually graduate thousands of qualified young women, when the managerial pipeline is stuffed with capable, talented female candidates for senior positions, why are there still so few women at the top?

In part, the answer probably still lies in lingering bias in the system. Most women interviewed for this story say that overt discrimination is rare; still, the executive suites of most major corporations remain largely boys' clubs. Catalyst, the women's business group, blames the gap on the fact that women often choose staff jobs, such as marketing and human resources, while senior executives are disproportionately plucked from the ranks of those with line jobs, where a manager can have critical profit-and-loss responsibility. Others fault the workplace itself, saying corporations don't do enough to accommodate women's often more-significant family responsibilities.

All those things are true. But there may be a simpler — and in many ways more disturbing — reason that women remain so underrepresented in the corner office: For the most part, men just compete harder than women. They put in more hours. They're more willing to relocate. They're more comfortable putting work ahead of personal commitments. And they just want the top job more.

Let's be clear: Many, many individual women work at least as hard as men. Many even harder. But in the aggregate, statistics show, they work less, and as long as that remains true, it means women's chances of reaching parity in the corner office will remain remote. Those top jobs have become all-consuming: In today's markets, being CEO is a global, 24-hour-a-day job. You have to, as Barnes says, give it your life. Since women tend to experience work-life conflicts more viscerally than their male peers, they're less likely to be willing to do that. And at the upper reaches of corporate hierarchy, where the pyramid narrows sharply and the game becomes winner-take-all, a moment's hesitation — one important stint in the Beijing office that a woman doesn't take because of a sick child or an unhappy husband — means the odds get a little worse for her and a little better for the guy down the hall.

I think O'Reilly's tournament analogy is dead on:

Charles A. O'Reilly III, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, has been particularly interested in women's career attainment and the problem of why, despite notable gains in education and experience, women are still so woefully underrepresented in the top ranks of American corporations. In 1986, he began following a group of University of California, Berkeley MBAs to see if he could isolate those qualities that led to a corner office. His conclusion is starkly simple: Success in a corporation is less a function of gender discrimination than of how hard a person chooses to compete. And the folks who tend to compete the hardest are generally the stereotypical manly men.

Think of careers as a tournament, he says. In the final rounds, players are usually matched pretty equally for ability. At that point, what differentiates winners from losers is effort — how many backhands a tennis player hits in practice, how many calls a sales rep is willing to make. "From an organization's perspective," he says, "those most likely to be promoted are those who both have the skills and are willing to put in the effort. Individuals who are more loyal, work longer hours, and are willing to sacrifice for the organization are the ones who will be rewarded."

Today's women, he says, are equal to their male counterparts in education, experience, and skill. But when it's a painful choice between the client crisis and the birthday party, the long road trip and the middle schooler who needs attention, the employee most likely to put company over family is the traditional, work-oriented male.

Now I have to rent The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

There's a scene near the end of the 1956 movie The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in which Fredric March, who plays a work-obsessed network president, turns on Gregory Peck, who plays his conflicted speechwriter. "Big, successful companies just aren't built by men like you, nine-to-five and home and family," March says. "They're built by men like me, who give everything they've got to it, who live it body and soul." March, of course, has sacrificed his own happiness to the company, a choice that Peck is unwilling to make.

Americans work more hours than any other nation, and American men work more hours than American women:

As a nation, we now clock more time on the job than any other worker on earth, some 500 hours a year more than the Germans, and 250 hours per year more than the British. But the true heavy lifters in the productivity parade are American men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men work longer hours in every industry, including those traditionally identified with women. In financial fields, for example, men worked an average of 43.8 hours per week compared with women's 38.7; in management, it was men 47.2, women 39.4; in educational services, men 39.2, women 36.0; in health services, men 43.1, women 36.4.

The same pattern holds true in professions whose elaborate hazing rituals are designed to separate potential chiefs from the rest of the tribe. Young associates at prestigious law firms, for example, often put in 60- to 70-hour weeks for long periods of time. "It's almost an intentional hurdle placed by the firms to weed out those who simply don't have the drive and ambition to do it," says Stanford University economist Edward Lazear. "It may be excessive, but you select out a very elite few, and those are the ones who make it to partner and make very high salaries."

Some people take this all as evidence that women have less power than men. Others point out that women are under less pressure to kill themselves for that CEO position:

"When a woman gets near the top, she starts asking herself the most intelligent questions," says Warren Farrell, the San Diego-based author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993). The fact that few women make it to the very top is a measure of women's power, not powerlessness, he maintains. "Women haven't learned to get their love by being president of a company," he says. "They've learned they can get respect and love in a variety of different ways — from being a good parent, from being a top executive, or a combination of both." Free of the ego needs driving male colleagues, they're likelier to weigh the trade-offs and opt for saner lives.