Valerie Waters Personal Fitness: The Muscle Truck

I managed to catch a reference to The Muscle Truck on some VH1 gossip show:

State of the art, convenient, and private, The Muscle Truck brings the quality of a top level health club on site, anywhere. Long, exhausting days of shooting are no longer a problem for that person who wants to stay in shape while filming. The Muscle Truck goes where you go and is always ready whenever you need it.

A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations

I haven't studied David Friedman's A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations (from the Journal of Political Economy, 1977, vol. 85, no. 1), but I find its basic thesis intriguing:

If territory goes to the nation which values it most as a source of revenue, nations will be shaped to maximize joint revenue, net of collection costs. Trade, as a major potential revenue source, should imply large nations; rent should imply small nations; and labor should imply that nations will have closed boundaries or be culturally homogeneous (to maximize exit costs). I show how this fits the pattern of European experience from Roman times to the present. Results of preliminary numerical tests of predictions of the theory are given.

New Breed of Islamic Warrior Is Emerging

New Breed of Islamic Warrior Is Emerging describes "al Qaeda 2.0":

Evidence in the Madrid train bombings points to the participation of a new breed of Islamic holy warrior, unfettered by many of the religious and ideological constraints that defined Islamic terrorism in the past.

These Islamist warriors — schooled in the North African doctrine known as Takfir wal Hijra and trained by Afghan veterans of al Qaeda — think, recruit and operate differently from traditional Islamist networks. For Europe, that makes the threat particularly acute. The Takfir movement is strongest in Morocco and Algeria, the primary sources of Muslim immigration to Western Europe. Takfiri theorists openly advocate using immigration as a Trojan horse to expand jihad, or holy war.
[...]
Many elements common to the suspects in custody for the Madrid bombings so far, investigators say, bear hallmarks of the ultrafundamentalist Takfiris or their close cousins, the Algerian-based Salafists. These include the use of petty crime and drug trafficking to raise funds, the recruitment of women, and operatives who adopt a Western lifestyle to keep a low profile. The virulent brand of Takfiri Islam makes all-out armed jihad an obligation for all true believers; even apostate fellow Muslims are fair game.
[...]
Unlike previous generations of radical Islamists, who attracted police attention by their long beards, public proselytizing and orthodox postures, the newer generation of holy warrior blends in better. They are encouraged to lead a double life in the ultimate pursuit of jihad, according a German intelligence report.

"Outwardly they pretend to lead a modern lifestyle," says terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp. "But deep inside they adhere to a pure medieval strain of Islam." Many Takfiris shave their beards and avoid mosques for security reasons. "Recruits conceal their true beliefs until the time is right," Dr. Ranstorp says.
[...]
Takfiri ideology originated in a similarly named sect in Egypt in the 1970s and burst into notoriety with the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The doctrine spread during the Afghan war in the 1980s and was brought back to North Africa by veteran mujahedeen who preached to young people.

Although Takfiris espouse a hard-line interpretation of Islam, the ideology is popular because it encourages followers to reconfirm their faith by breaking its own rules. That flexibility, coupled with their seemingly deeper integration into Western life, makes it harder for police to detect them. It also gives Takfiris an ability to choose soft, civilian targets that will have the biggest political impact in each country. The Madrid attacks came just three days before national elections and helped lead to an upset victory for the Socialists, who want to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.

Domestic Policy Archives - No Fat Tax by Russell Roberts

In Domestic Policy Archives - No Fat Tax, Russell Roberts shares a surprising economic fact:

But if obesity causes health problems, doesn't that justify government's involvement? After all, if we taxpayers have to foot the bill for some of those higher health care costs, don't we have the right to intervene in each others lives?

This argument has been used to justify the on-going and growing regulation of tobacco. It's actually a lie. Smoking causes people to die earlier and relatively quickly, saving enough in Social Security expenditures to overwhelm the health care outlays. That actually justifies subsidizing tobacco rather than taxing it if you think that we should base public policy based only on the impact on government spending.

Smoking causes people to die earlier and relatively quickly, saving enough in Social Security expenditures to overwhelm the health care outlays. Crazy.

The Loom: Chew On This

The Loom: Chew On This discusses the recently discovered MYH16 mutation — and another similar mutation that probably dates to the same period in our evolutionary history:

For one thing, a hominid with a weak jaw can't grind up tough foods the ways its ancestors did; it needs new foods. The oldest tools, interestingly enough, date back to about the same time as the MYH16 mutation. Scientists suspect that hominids were using these simple stone axes to hack meat off of carcasses and dig up tubers. This new diet might have meant that a mutation to MYH16 wouldn't have mattered much. The new diet may have been just as important as the missing jaw muscles to letting the hominid brain expand. For one thing, a big brain requires lots of energy. One way to make more energy available is to shrink the size of other organs, and it turns out that we humans have one particulary small organ: our intestines. Other primates use their long bowels to digest tough foods poor in nutrients; we can survive on our abbreviated bowels because we eat better grub. So here's a prediction: scientists will eventually discover genes that control the development of intestines in humans. When they compare them to ape genes, they'll discover that they underwent an evolutionary change around the same time that MYH16 shut down. Our brains did not evolve in a vacuum; they coevolved with the rest of our bodies in a complicated dance of tradeoffs and feedbacks.

The pledge of allegiance

In The pledge of allegiance, Alex Tabarrok gives his take on the pledge:

Yesterday at the Supreme Court, Michael Newdow argued his own case against the phrase 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance and apparently he did very well — managing to elicit a rare round of applause from the audience and ending gracefully on time and on point. Personally, although I am not religious, the phrase 'under God' doesn't raise my hackles. It's the rest of the pledge that I hate.

Then he cites Cato's Gene Healy on the topic:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club....

By the way, that image depicts an early recommended salute. Look familiar? It gets worse. Take a look at these photos (complete with paranoid commentary).

The IRS's chosen people?

I'm not "clear" on how the Scientologists pulled this one off. From The IRS's chosen people?:

According to this NYTimes article, a secret 1993 agreement between the IRS and the Church of Scientology lets Scientologists deduct the cost of a religious education as a charitable gift. The secret ruling appeared to come to light when the Sklar's, who are Jewish, attempted to take a deduction for the religious portion of their children's education at a Hebrew school. The IRS wrote them back asking for receipts from the Church of Scientology! The Sklar's provided receipts from the Hebrew school and the IRS denied the deduction. The Sklar's are now suing on the basis that all religions, or none, should be offered the deduction.

Scarlet Letters (and Numbers)

In Scarlet Letters (and Numbers), Alex Tabarrok explains the economics of punishment — using this unusual punishment as a jumping-off point:

In Ohio, drivers convicted of drunk driving will be issued special red on yellow license plates.

In many ways, fines make good economic sense:

From an economic point of view, fines are the best punishment because they benefit the punisher as they punish the violator and imprisonment is the worst punishment since it punishes the punisher as well as the violator.

Many people don't like fines, however, because they seem to allow the rich to get away with anything so long as they pay the price . But in theory, if the fine is set equal to the expected cost of the crime, everyone should face the same fine irrespective of wealth and if the benefit of violating the law exceeds the fine then paying the fine and violating the law is the efficient solution. Economists think this argument is obviously correct but it leaves most people cold.

The first half of this next point should be pretty clear; the second half isn't quite as obvious:

Fines do have another disadvantage if you don't trust the government (i.e. take this disadvantage seriously). Precisely because the fine is a revenue to the government it encourages them to fine more. And precisely because imprisonment is costly we expect government to be more restrained in its use.

Social sanctions form a middle ground, between fines and imprisonment:

Social sanctions punish the violator, and are perhaps a better signal to others about the costs of crime than are fines, but have neither benefits nor costs to the punisher - thus they lie in-between fines and imprisonment. If fines are thought unfair or too dangerous and imprisonment is too expensive then social sanctions seem ideal. It's surprising that we don't see this form of punishment more often.

The benefits of no-fault divorce

The benefits of no-fault divorce cites a Washington Post article on Stevenson and Wolfers' research:

After states adopted no-fault divorce laws, suicides among women dropped by 20 percent, the rate of domestic abuse fell by a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by about 10 percent, Stevenson and Wolfers found.

Tyler Cowen's take? "I'm all for family values, but let's not forget that some families should split up."

Yahoo! News - George Michael Considers Wham! Musical

From Yahoo! News - George Michael Considers Wham! Musical:

Pop singer George Michael is considering whether to turn the music of Wham! into a musical. Michael tells a London radio station two or three producers have approached him and Andrew Ridgeley with the idea.

Michael says on a creative level, he hates the idea. However, he says he knows a certain generation of people would love it.

I'm not sure it's the age demographic that's the perfect match...

An Un-Funny Valentine

An Un-Funny Valentine describes how a printing error turned an amusing cartoon character into...what most old cartoon characters, like Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, always looked like:

Somehow, boxes of SpongeBob SquarePants Valentine's Day cards are popping up in local Wal-Mart stores — but the popular cartoon character found inside isn't his traditional yellow color.

He's black. And with his trademark big teeth and wide eyes, this SpongeBob seems similar to offensive images of African Americans portrayed in minstrel shows decades ago.

Yahoo! News - Man on Trial for Decapitating Mother with Sword

I was going to joke about stricter samurai-sword-control laws — if you outlaw swords, only outlaws will have swords — then I thought, aren't swords already controlled in Germany? From Yahoo! News - Man on Trial for Decapitating Mother with Sword:

A German man has gone on trial accused of decapitating his mother with a Samurai sword.

Prosecutors say the 22-year-old, identified only as Axel T., beheaded his mother last June after his parents wanted to move him out of the family home in Munich, a court spokesman said on Tuesday.

The man, who has a history of drug problems, ran into the kitchen where his mother was reading a newspaper and cut off her head with the 45-centimeter blade, the spokesman said.

'Then he wanted to kill his father who was in another room.'

But the son called the police instead and blamed his father for the crime.
The trial started on Monday.

Bunless Burgers Old News to California Chain

Bunless Burgers Old News to California Chain brought a smile to my face — and a longing in my heart (and stomach) to return to California:

As one fast-food behemoth after another jumps on the bunless burger bandwagon, devotees of a small Southern California-based chain of drive-through eateries are taking some pride in saying, 'We told you so.'

Patrons of In-N-Out Burger have been ordering high-protein, low-carbohydrate hamburgers wrapped in lettuce for more than 30 years.
[...]
The protein-style burger is part of the "secret menu" that has developed over the years as the privately held chain of restaurants has strived to accommodate its customers' fondness for customized food.

(Another entry on the secret menu is the "animal-style" burger, a beef patty cooked in mustard with grilled onions, pickles and an extra helping of a secret "special sauce.")
[...]
(For serious eaters, the secret menu also includes the "four-by-four." As its name implies, it includes four hamburger patties and four slices of cheese.)

Restaurant consultant Edward Engoron attributes In-N-Out's success to sticking to a simple approach for more than 50 years: fast food made from scratch and made-to-order. The restaurants' butchers select and grind the beef and the buns are baked daily. All produce is delivered fresh, and none of the restaurants has freezers or microwaves.

How I miss my four-by-four!

Interestingly, In-N-Out is not a franchise:

The company, which says it "has no plans" to offer stock or franchise its operations, does not release financial data, but Engoron estimates that each restaurant earns an average of $2 million annually — about 20 percent of which is profit.

Those are numbers "considerably higher" than McDonald's and Burger King in per store volume and net earnings, he said.

"It seems the biggest complaint about In-N-Out is that there aren't enough of them," Engoron added.

Indeed.

Fructose Sweetener Linked to Obesity Rise

I'm not sure how much faith I put in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and its peer-review process. Fructose Sweetener Linked to Obesity Rise summarizes a recent study from the journal:

Researchers say they've found more evidence of a link between a rapid rise in obesity and a corn product used to sweeten soft drinks and food since the 1970s.

The link?

The data showed an increase in the use of high-fructose corn sweeteners in the late 1970s and 1980s "coincidental with the epidemic of obesity," said one of the researchers, Dr. George A. Bray, a longtime obesity scientist with Louisiana State University System's Pennington Biomedical Research Center. He noted the research didn't prove a definitive link.

At least he noted the research didn't prove a definitive link.

Here's some misguided science writing:

The debate over high-fructose sweeteners centers on how the body processes sugar. Unlike glucose, a major component in table sugar, fructose doesn't trigger responses in hormones that regulate energy use and appetite. That means fructose is more likely to be converted into fat, the researchers said.

Table sugar, or sucrose, is composed of glucose and fructose.

Why is high-fructose corn syrup so popular compared to table sugar?

The sweeteners are also cheaper to produce and use in food manufacturing than cane and beet sugars, the study noted.

Why are they cheaper? Because American sugar producers got huge protective tariffs put on sugar.

Weaker Jaws Were Traded for Big Brains

We may owe our amazing human mental powers to a mutation that weakened our ancestors' jaws. From Weaker Jaws Were Traded for Big Brains:

A genetic mutation that occurred 2.4 million years ago could be the reason why modern humans have such big brains and weak jaws, scientists said on Wednesday.
[...]
All humans have the MYH16 mutation but other primates, including chimpanzees and macaques, still have the intact gene. Over the past few million years, since the genetic fault occurred, human skulls have grown three times in size and the outwardly elongated jaws have receded.
[...]
"The coincidence in time...may mean that the decrease in jaw muscle size and force eliminated stress on the skull which released an evolutionary constraint on brain growth," said Nancy Minugh-Purvis, a member of the team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, that made the discovery.

New Pill May Help Divers Fend Off the Bends

I find the focus of the article (and its headline) peculiar, given the actual research finding. From New Pill May Help Divers Fend Off the Bends:

Divers may soon be able to take a pill that fends off decompression sickness when surfacing, according to a team of Norwegian scientists.

'The bends' happen when sudden pressure changes lead to bubbles of gas forming in the bloodstream.

Researchers found that a bout of intense exercise around 20 hours before a dive dramatically reduced bubble formation, New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday.

One theory suggests exercise stimulates the release of nitric oxide (NO), which dilates blood vessels and makes them more slippery and difficult for tiny bubbles to stick to.

The Norwegian team thinks it may be possible within a decade to develop an NO-releasing drug for divers which would mimic the effect of exercise.

Is a bout of exercise the day before a dive that inconvenient?

Cabin Fever

Rotten Tomatoes interviews Eli Roth about his film, Cabin Fever:

At the end of the 1970's, horror films were written around the basic premise: what is horrifying? By the end of the 1980's, horror films were written around the premise: how can we kill this group of kids?

The movie's genesis scares me:

The initial idea for Cabin Fever came while I was working on a horse farm in Iceland when I was 19 years old. I had been cleaning out a barn and got a skin infection on my face. I woke up in the middle of the night scratching my cheek, thinking I had a mosquito bite. I looked down at my hand and saw chunks of skin. The next morning I attempted to shave and literally, shaved half my face off. The strangest part was not only did it not hurt — it actually satisfied some strange itch underneath my skin. I went to see a dermatologist, who, judging by the horrified and puzzled look on her face, had never seen anything like it before. She gave me steroid creme and luckily, my face cleared up.

The Joy of Gore

The Joy of Gore interviews Eli Roth, writer/director of the horror film Cabin Fever, Lions Gate's highest grossing film of 2003:

Nobody wanted to make it so we had no money. We made Cabin Fever for a million and a half dollars. Last Samurai was made for 170 million. Master and Commander was 150 million. It was literally made for one hundredth the cost of the big blockbusters. But once it was made [the distributors] were all fighting for it.

When you're making a movie, it's an abstract idea in your head. So, you hope first of all that the movie turns out well and then you hope that people like it. It's an incredible thing to be literally told by eveybody you've ever met — these so-called professionals — that your movie won't work and that no one wants to see it. Everybody. I just knew they were wrong.

I saw how much money low-budget horror movies make and knew that you can make the movie for a million bucks. You don't need stars — you need good actors. It doesn't have to have slick production value. It can be well crafted and well made.

Any time you make an independent movie, there's no guarantee it'll ever go anywhere other than a shelf. It was a scary thing and it was pretty incredible to risk everything on a project. But I knew it would work. I just knew that there was such a void of low-budget, really violent horror movies that were fun.

Atlantic Unbound | Interviews | 2004.02.27

Getting Over Race interviews "Debra Dickerson, the author of The End of Blackness, on why she thinks the African-American community needs to grow up":

So I went to that neglected shelf of books and read. I read The Souls of Black Folk in its entirety instead of those excerpts that you get in college. I read The Miseducation of the Negro and I read a lot of Frederick Douglass. I read the collected speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., and I read Malcolm X.

Before, I had assumed all of those books were very eloquent denunciations of white racism. But when you actually read those books you find that they spend very little time talking about white people. [...] Their thinking was so much more elevated than what our leaders are putting out there today. I felt so robbed, so lied to, so bamboozled — and not by the people I thought had been bamboozling me. I'd been lied to about my moral and intellectual traditions. I had been led to think that The Miseducation of the Negro was about how white people had miseducated us. But that's not what it's about. Those books are really about communal critique. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson — these guys faced lynchings just for being who they were at the time, but here they were talking not about white people, but about what the standards of our community should be!

Study Examines Female Rivalry

The science of cattiness, from Study Examines Female Rivalry:

Participants in the study included 57 college aged women and 47 men, all of whom were heterosexual. Women were divided into groups based on what stage they were at in their menstrual cycle.

Test subjects were shown color photographs of 35 female and 30 male faces. The models for the photographs were students from a first-year psychology class. Before the photos were taken, all models had to remove any accessories, wear a black smock, and display a neutral expression.

Women at a high stage of fertility, with elevated estrogen levels, tended to be more critical of the appearance of other women. Their views on men, however, remained the same throughout the menstrual cycle.

I'm not surprised that men's views stayed constant, but I didn't realize they'd stay constantly high:

Men's views also stayed constant. Men, however, rated other men more highly than all of the women did at any given stage.

Evolutionary psychology at work:

She explained that derogating another woman's appearance was one competition strategy. Women also are derogatory on other issues, such as fidelity, promiscuity, and maternal aptitude.

"I think women are very critical of other women — for example, there are many magazines that make money by 'derogating' the stars, showing how famous female actresses eat fattening meals and look badly without makeup," said Fisher. "To extend this to the workforce, it is quite possible that women do hold each other back by highlighting things colleagues do incorrectly to a boss, or through similar actions. The possibility deserves further study."

In her book "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman," author and women's studies scholar Phyllis Chesler came to a similar conclusion.

Chesler wrote, "As most women know, a woman can make life hell, on a moment-by-moment basis, for any other woman whom she envies, fears, or with whom she must compete for resources. For example, older women and all-female cliques tend to bully girls and women into submission; cliques shun any woman whom they view as prettier, smarter, sexually freer, or 'different.'"

Chesler added, "Female rivalries tend to support, not disrupt, the status quo. Thus, in order to survive or to improve their own lot, most women, like men, collude in the subordination of women as a class."

Low-Calorie Diet May Extend Life

How to live longer by not really living, from Low-Calorie Diet May Extend Life:

The study, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that mice at the relatively advanced age of 19 months that were placed on a restricted calorie diet lived 42 percent longer than litter mates who continued to eat a standard diet.

Other studies have shown that young mice put on a low-calorie diet live much longer than mice fed the standard fare. But the new research suggests that it is never too late to enjoy a life-extension benefit by reducing calories.

Stephen R. Spindler of the University of California, Riverside, leader of a team conducting the research, said there is little evidence yet that dietary restrictions will extend human life, but in mice, at least, sensible eating even at older ages clearly has a longevity benefit. He said a 19-month-old mouse is the age equivalent of 60 to 65 years in humans.

Yahoo! News - Doctors: Chemo Could Help People With MS

Fascinating. According to Yahoo! News - Doctors: Chemo Could Help People With MS, doctors have used chemotherapy to intentionally kill off the immune systems of patients with MS, an autoimmune disease:

Doctors report promising results using huge doses of a potent chemotherapy drug to treat autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, though only a handful of patients have been treated so far and one MS researcher said far more study is needed before any victory is declared.

The drug, cyclophosphamide, is given at such high doses that it destroys most or all of a patient's disease-fighting immune cells.

However, the stem cells within the patient's bone marrow survive the drug's onslaught, the doctors say, and then are stimulated with other drugs to rebuild the immune system from scratch — but without the bad triggers that caused the body to attack its own cells.

Asthma Inhaler Ingredient May Counteract Benefits

The popular asthma drug, albuterol, may actually constrict airways. From Asthma Inhaler Ingredient May Counteract Benefits:

One of the drugs used in inhalers to treat asthma can counteract the benefits of the others, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
[...]
The ingredient is albuterol, in a class of medications called beta-agonists. In inhalers it is combined with steroids to open airways and ease the gasping of patients with asthma and other lung diseases.
[...]
The trouble, said Ameredes, is that albuterol has two forms or isomers — a so-called left-handed version and a right-handed one. These isomers refer to the molecular structure.

The "right" version relaxed the airways when used with the steroid dexamethasone but the "left" version in fact increased the inflammatory signals that caused the airways to tighten, he said.

That "left" version sounds pretty sinister.

Yahoo! News - Lichen Blamed for Elk Deaths in Wyoming

Elk have been dropping like flies — well, very large flies — and scientists think they now know why. From Yahoo! News - Lichen Blamed for Elk Deaths in Wyoming:

Solving a puzzle that had baffled scientists across the country, researchers have concluded that the recent deaths of 304 elk in southern Wyoming were caused by a mossy plant native to the Rockies.

State wildlife veterinarians suspected lichen as the culprit in the die-off after finding it in the stomachs of many dead elk.

Sure, the elk all had lichen in their stomachs, but what's to say the lichen killed them? This:

To confirm their suspicions, three elk were fed the plant at a research center. One collapsed and was unable to rise Sunday. A second also started stumbling, and a third is expected to be similarly afflicted. All three will be destroyed.

That's a fairly gruesome way to confirm the cause.

So why is the lichen suddenly killing elk?

The lichen, known as Parmelia molliuscula, contains an acid that may break down muscle tissue, causing the elk to lose strength, said Walt Cook, a Game and Fish veterinarian.

Native elk were not affected by the acid; those killed in the die-off were apparently new to the area where the deaths occurred and may have lacked microorganisms needed to neutralize the acid.

"Elk don't normally winter down ... where they ate the lichen," Reed said. "But, for whatever reason, this year they moved in there."

In Push to Stop Drunk Driving, Police Draw Blood

In Push to Stop Drunk Driving, Police Draw Blood:

After police stopped Robert H. Miller for driving erratically here one afternoon in February 2001, they asked for his license and registration.

Then they asked for something else: his blood. Having been convicted of drunk driving once before, Mr. Miller refused to cooperate. So after he was taken to a hospital, five officers pinned him to the floor as a medical technician stuck a needle in his arm. His blood-alcohol level was 0.266% — more than twice the legal limit. Mr. Miller, who declined to comment, challenged the tactic in court but lost. He pleaded no contest, was sentenced to up to 90 days in jail and lost his license for 18 months.

In the past, police routinely asked suspected drunk drivers to blow into devices that extrapolated their blood's alcohol content from their breath. Now, authorities in most states are taking blood, by force if necessary.

A blood-alcohol level of 0.266% is over three times the legal limit (0.08%) in many states — but not in Wisconsin. (Perhaps they've dropped the limit since 2001.)

There's something more than a little creepy about forced blood testing:

Testimony in a federal suit last year shows that authorities in Las Vegas regularly obtain blood samples in the Clark County Detention Center. The suit involved a 1998 incident. Police found Terry Jones, then 33, asleep at the wheel of a parked car, an open Budweiser between his thighs. He was arrested, taken to the jail and ordered to submit to a blood test. Mr. Jones, who had two prior DUI convictions, put up a furious fight.

Guard Daniel Kresky testified that physical resistance to blood draws was a nightly event. Guards would use "whatever force is necessary," he testified, typically handcuffing defendants' arms behind their back, bending them over an examination table in the jail nurse's office and holding them down. Sometimes, drivers were held on the floor. "We always got our blood," he testified.

Mr. Jones, 270 pounds, tossed several officers off his back with a buck of his head. Two officers testified that another stood on and kicked Mr. Jones's head; that officer denied the charge. Suddenly, Mr. Jones went limp. The coroner ruled that Mr. Jones died of acute cardiac arrhythmia, a heart-rhythm disturbance. But a second autopsy, performed by a retired deputy medical examiner at the request of Mr. Jones's widow, found that his head had been beaten and his left eye crushed. "Had it not been for that trauma, he probably wouldn't have died," that doctor testified.

Last March, a jury ruled that police and jail officials weren't responsible. Paul Martin, the jail's chief, says it now uses a specially-made chair with Velcro straps to restrain drivers brought in for forced blood draws.

Encounters over drivers' blood are beginning to give some judges second thoughts.

In a Rhode Island case, police in 1997 arrested a woman on suspicion of DUI after a car she was driving struck and killed a motorcyclist. She submitted to a breath test, which found only minimal alcohol, but she refused to give blood, so the police got a warrant. Her blood tested positive for marijuana and cocaine.

In pretrial litigation, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that taking her blood without consent violated a provision in the state's implied-consent law, which says that if a driver refuses to submit to a test, "none shall be given." The court said the provision was meant to "prevent a violent confrontation between an arresting officer and a suspect unwilling to submit." (The defendant later pleaded no contest to DUI resulting in death.) Some state lawmakers advocated changing the law to allow force, but the Legislature hasn't done so.

A year later, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that police in Edgewater went too far when they pinned a screaming, struggling suspected drunk driver to a hospital table, strapped down his legs and left arm and held him while a nurse drew eight vials of blood, which indicated that he was drunk. The court didn't bar the future use of force outright but said that under the circumstances the police used "unreasonable force." Barred from using blood evidence, prosecutors retried the man, who was convicted based on police testimony that he seemed drunk.

Ka-Pow! Comics Fight Their Way Into the Mainstream

Somehow I missed Ka-Pow! Comics Fight Their Way Into the Mainstream when it was first published a few weeks ago:

A scene in the movie 'American Splendor' takes place inside the Cosmic Comics store in Baltimore. Joyce (protagonist Harvey Pekar's future wife) is having a mini-meltdown as she vainly looks for the latest installment of Mr. Pekar's work — the autobiographical comic of the movie's title. Her greasy, tremulous co-worker flees the store after one too many head-clutching outbursts, leaving Joyce alone in the shabby little shop where comics are arranged in disorganized piles and papered over the windows.

It's vintage Hollywood, which routinely sees the comic-book culture in terms of two stereotypes: the bag-of-neuroses-brimming-with-spleen (Joyce and Harvey Pekar) or the bloated ubergeek — a pompous misfit with a mind for sci-fi and a body for whaling — exemplified by the Comic-Book Guy in "The Simpsons."

A truer picture can be found in Portland, Ore., at Excalibur Books and Comics. Located in one of the city's blue-collar hipster neighborhoods, it is the Rick's Cafe Americain of comic-book retailing. Thanks to its proximity to three comics publishing houses (Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press and Top Shelf), the store counts a disproportionate number of writers, artists and editors among its customers. But Excalibur also caters to kids and eccentrics, regular-guy readers and collectors.

Excalibur was founded in 1974 by Peter Fagnant, 50, a bespectacled, bearded, ponytailed Yoda figure who still runs it with Debbie, his 28-year-old daughter, and two other employees.

I'm not sure the article has convinced me that the stereotypes are wrong. The store is run by a bespectacled, bearded, ponytailed Yoda figure.

While I wouldn't say that comics have gone mainstream, they aren't all superhero comics these days:

Every Wednesday is "New Comics Day" at Excalibur, when fresh material comes in — and the denizens of the comics culture come out. On a typical day, 70 or 80 customers will leaf through the new titles. This particular "New Comics Day" began as it always does, at 10 a.m. with the delivery of a pallet containing 2,000 to 3,000 new issues and other merchandise — total retail value about $6,000 to $9,000. What might surprise the uninitiated is how many of the week's new comics have nothing to do with superheroes. Indeed, these days DC and Marvel find themselves sharing shelf space with big challengers like Dark Horse and Image — plus a host of smaller studios, upstarts and self-publishers ranging from genuinely talented independents to hopelessly deluded hacks. Fully a third are anthologies of daily newspaper strips ("The Norm," "Liberty Meadows," "Li'l Abner"), adaptations of TV shows ("Powerpuff Girls"), slice-of-life autobiography (Robert Crumb's "Dirty Laundry") and works showcasing New-York-cool art cartoonists ("Blab!").

I hadn't thought about this aspect of the business:

The staff will spend the next hour sheathing over 2,000 comics in poly bags. This caters to collectors — Excalibur's core customers — and, equally important, it lengthens shelf life. Unlike other retailers, comic-shop proprietors can't return their unsold inventory. Nothing is on consignment. They must buy all their books outright, usually through wholesaler Diamond Comics Distributors, which controls the bulk of the comics-distribution market.

The fact that nothing is on consignment practically creates a collectors' market; store owners don't want to buy more issues of any one comic than they can sell, but any they can't sell become collectible back issues.

Some "fascinating" comic-store-employee philosophy:

Meanwhile, Excalibur employee Shawn Brooks is holding forth on the genre. "A comic book is a bundle of contradictions," he says. "It's a book, but it's not; it's a magazine, but it's not; it's art, but it's not; it's reading, but it's not."

A part of me wants to read Seduction of the Innocent, just to see how bad it really is:

On the shelf behind him is a copy of "Seduction of the Innocent," the 1953 book by Frederic Wertham that led to congressional hearings on the deleterious effects that comics were having on teenagers. According to a 1998 article by Kenneth A. Paulson of the Freedom Forum, "Wertham's 'findings' included his assessments that Batman and Robin represented a homosexual fantasy, Wonder Woman glorified bondage and crime comics led to juvenile delinquency."

Amusingly, the second of those three findings is basically true.

Behind the Music: Aerosmith

I could have sworn I'd seen Behind the Music: Aerosmith multiple times, but I just saw it for the first time today. A few things I didn't realize:

• Joe Perry came up with the guitar lick for "Walk This Way," and Steven Tyler, playing around on the drums, immediately came up with the drums to go with the guitar — but he couldn't think off any lyrics to go with the music. Then the band took a break and caught a showing of Young Frankenstein. When Igor ("No, it's prounounced eye-gor.") said "Walk this way," they had their lyric.
• I knew that the band broke up when their drug use got out of control. I didn't realize that when they finally got back together again and started fresh, with a new producer and a new manager, they were all still on drugs. Their new manager did eventually get them all off drugs, but it took years. Then he started micro-managing their lives, and they fired him.

When I looked up Young Frankenstein Trivia on IMDB, I found a few amusing items:

• When Victor finds his grandfather's private library, he finds a book titled "How I Did It." This is actually a joke for those people who have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the book, Frankenstein, Shelley never reveals how Victor reanimated dead flesh. The screenwriter obviously knew this and inserts the "How I Did It" book as a joke.
• The original cut of the movie was almost twice as long and was considered by all involved to be an abysmal failure. It was only after a marathon cutting session that they produced the final cut of the film, which both Wilder and Brooks considered to be far superior to the original product. At one point they noted that for every joke that worked, there were three that fell flat. So they went in and trimmed all the jokes that didn't work.
• The experiment the medical student mentions, where Darwin preserved a worm in fluid until it came to life, is mentioned in Mary Shelley's foreword to the novel "Frankenstein". The Darwin in question was Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin.

When I read Frankenstein in college, no one else in class noticed that Shelley never explains how Dr. Frankenstein creates the monster. In fact, everyone thought I was crazy for suggesting that it was left to our imagination. They all "knew" the monster was sewn together from corpses.

Warfare Undergound

Warfare Undergound discusses an aspect of ancient siege warfare most people aren't aware of:

When thinking of siege warfare we imagine many things — the thunderous discharge of formidable artillery weapons, scenes of battering rams pounding city gates, or fearless warriors scrambling up ladders thrown against mighty ramparts. Shakespeare dramatises the full-blooded intensity of the battle for Harfleur in Henry V: 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more / Or close the wall up with our English dead'.

However, ancient authorities such as the Greek historian Herodotus, describing the Persian siege of Barca in 510 BC, and the Roman general Julius Caesar on his capture of Avaricum in 52 BC, tell of a different kind of siege warfare, a type that was invisible and silent but no less dramatic. Men who were expert in underground siege methods laboured to outwit each other in subterranean passages known as mines and countermines.

The purpose of digging tunnels ('galleries') by miners was to collapse the walls of the besieged fortress, by burning ('springing') the timber props at the end of the gallery once the foundations were reached. This caused the walls to sink and split, allowing an assault to be made on the breach by main force, hopefully bringing the siege to a speedy conclusion.

In response to this fearful threat, the defenders had no choice but to send down counterminers to detect and break into the enemy's mines, to see them off before any damage was done.

There were three ways a mine and countermine could become engaged. First, if the countermine was driven above an advancing mine, the counterminers could dig through to the mine below and pump in water to flood the enemy's work. Second, if the countermine was driven below the mine, the counterminers could spring the end of their gallery, thereby collapsing the mine above. And third, the two galleries could break through head to head, leaving it to the courage of the opponents in hand-to-hand combat to decide the outcome.

Morocco to Madrid, A Bomb Suspect Grew Radicalized

Morocco to Madrid, A Bomb Suspect Grew Radicalized follows the life of Jamal Zougam:

Three years ago, Spain's national police stormed the apartment of Jamal Zougam, a 30-year-old Moroccan immigrant who ran a cellphone business in Madrid. Among items they seized: phone numbers for suspected terrorists, a video of Islamic warriors fighting Russian troops near Chechnya, and four books in Arabic on aspects of jihad, such as how to treat prisoners of war.

The raid followed a request by a French magistrate who suspected Mr. Zougam was involved in terrorism. But the Spanish police figured the evidence wasn't strong enough to arrest Mr. Zougam, or even to seek a judge's permission for a wiretap.

Now Mr. Zougam is the prime suspect in last week's bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 202 people and injured many more. An unexploded bomb had a trigger that used a cellphone police traced to Mr. Zougam's store, which Spanish authorities have reason to believe had long operated as part of an al Qaeda cell that provided logistical help to Islamists across Europe.

Remind me to stay out of Lavapies:

Around 1996, he and his half-brother, Mohamed Chaoui — also arrested in Spain after the train bombing — opened a fruit shop in the central-Madrid neighborhood of Lavapies. This area is a tumult of different languages and attire, and is one of the more violent parts of the capital, where a few years ago North Africans and Chinese waged ax fights in the streets.

WSJ.com - Beyond the Vacation

WSJ.com - Beyond the Vacation, A Guide to Planting Your Office Among Olive Trees, shares a number of anecdotes of high-power corporate types saving up a nest egg and moving to Tuscany (or Provence, or some other idyllic locale). Leaving the rat race seems to involve a lot of writing, painting, and bicycle riding.

How Do You Keep the Public Shopping? Just Make People Sad

How Do You Keep the Public Shopping? Just Make People Sad shares some fascinating studies in behavioral economics:

Some behavioral economists are now turning to the role of emotions, too, investigating how heart strings affect purse strings. Last year, researchers found that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and overestimating potential benefits (which may explain why one chronically grouchy investor I know loads up on junk bonds and is low on cash). Fear does the opposite, making us exaggerate risks and minimize benefits. In fearful times, more people gravitate toward bank CDs.

To see how two negative emotions, disgust and sadness, affect economic decision making, Prof. Lerner and her colleagues recruited 199 volunteers, age 16 to 49. Some watched a scene from the 1979 tearjerker "The Champ," in which a boy's father dies. Others watched the infamous filthy-toilet clip from the 1996 Gen-X hit "Trainspotting." A third group watched an emotionally neutral clip of coral reef fish. All wrote down how they felt afterward.

Half the volunteers, drawn equally from the three film audiences, then got a set of highlighter pens (a hot commodity at CMU) and the chance to sell it back at any price from 50 cents to $14. The other half were just shown the set and asked if they would rather receive it or get cash. This was akin to a purchase, because volunteers who opted for the pens had to forgo money for them.

Disgust, the researchers suspect, makes people want to get rid of things; they seem to feel everything is tainted. Sadness, in contrast, often reflects loss and helplessness, and so makes people want to change their circumstances. These effects carried over into the experimental marketplace.

Disgust cut people's selling prices, as the "yuck" factor made them eager to get rid of the pens. Volunteers who felt disgust were willing to unload the pens for only $2.74, on average, compared with the $4.58 demanded by the emotionally neutral fish-watchers. Disgust also reduced buying prices. Reluctant to take on anything new, the volunteers would do so only at a rock-bottom price. Yet they had no idea their feelings were affecting their economic decisions.

Sadness, too, cut people's selling price, to $3.06, compared with what emotionally neutral volunteers demanded for their pens. Feeling blue made people so desperate for change, even one as inconsequential as getting rid of a few pens, that they held a fire sale. Sadness also raised, to $4.57, the price people would pay for the very pens they were willing to sell for just $3.06. Overpaying seemed a small price for change.

This was a 180-degree reversal of one of the core tenets of behavioral economics. Called the endowment effect, it is the tendency for people to demand a higher price for something they own than they are willing to pay to buy the same item. Psychologically, we place greater value on what we already have. Yet if you've ever overpaid for something, you know there are exceptions.

The CMU results may explain why. "Sadness reverses the endowment effect, making people willing to pay a higher price for something than they were willing to sell it for," says Prof. Lerner. That fits with the common observation that compulsive shoppers tend toward depression and that having a really bad day can trigger a shopping spree.

Cold-War Thinking Prevented Vital Vehicle From Reaching Iraq

The Humvee, the modern successor to the Jeep, has a thin sheet-metal skin that won't stop even small-caliber handgun rounds. "On the eve of the war in Iraq, just 2% of the Army's world-wide fleet of 110,000 Humvees were armored," according to Cold-War Thinking Prevented Vital Vehicle From Reaching Iraq:

When the Humvee was first developed in the 1980s as an all-purpose transport vehicle, armoring it made little sense. Back then, the Army was preparing to fight the Soviets on a battlefield where heavily armored tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were out front, providing a line of defense for Humvees and supply trucks in the rear.

In 1992, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt Armoring Co., a small Fairfield, Ohio, company that made armored cars and wanted to break into the military market, built the first armored Humvee on spec to show the Army what it could do. "We could see how warfare was changing in places like Panama and Colombia," says Robert Mecredy, president of the aerospace and defense division of Armor Holdings Inc., O'Gara-Hess's parent.

A few months later, soldiers cruising the streets of Somalia in a thin-skinned Humvee ran over a land mine. Four Americans died, and the Army issued an urgent call to field 10 of the early armored Humvees. The vehicles were being offloaded in Mogadishu when Army Rangers got into a nightlong firefight that killed 18 Americans — many of them fighting from thin-skinned Humvees.

Days later the Army withdrew, leaving a small contingent of Marines. When the Army tried to take the armored Humvees back to the U.S., the Marines protested. "I got a frantic call from a captain telling me the Marines weren't going to let the Army take their [armored] Humvees home," recalls retired Lt. Col. J.C. Hudson, who accompanied the armored vehicles to Mogadishu. Col. Hudson says he told the young captain to let the Marines keep the vehicles.

In the wake of the Somalia debacle, Army officials in charge of the Humvee program were eager to find a niche for the armored version, which at $180,000 costs more than twice as much as the regular vehicle. The program's most enthusiastic backers were military police, who specialize in riot control, peacekeeping and stabilizing an area following combat.

But officials involved in the program worried that the Army might not embrace a peacekeeping vehicle. They were also concerned the relatively small military-police force, which boasts no three- or four-star generals, lacked "the horsepower to get the armored Humvee built," says John Weaver, an Army program manager who oversaw the service's Humvee fleet. So Mr. Weaver and his colleagues instead pitched the armored Humvee as a scout vehicle that would venture out in front of the tanks during big battles and beam back information about the enemy.

The armored Humvee proved terrible at that job. Early test vehicles were too heavy, and whenever they ventured off road in soft soil they got stuck in the mud. Senior officers in the Army's armor school, which trains and equips the service's heavy-tank force, wanted to kill the armored-Humvee program entirely.

Yahoo! News - Crowd Storms Restaurant Over Alcohol

Bahrain is one of the more liberal Islamic states. From Yahoo! News - Crowd Storms Restaurant Over Alcohol:

Some 100 Bahraini Islamists shouting 'God is Greatest' stormed a French restaurant serving alcohol in the pro-Western Gulf Arab state and threatened diners with knives, witnesses said on Thursday.

One diner managed to wrest a knife away from the Islamists and stabbed one with it, causing him severe injuries, a witness said.

They said the assailants, opposed to the consumption of alcohol banned by Islam, also threw gasoline bombs at customers' cars parked outside the restaurant near the capital Manama late on Wednesday, damaging nine vehicles.

'Abound 100 young men, shouting Allahu Akbar (God is greatest), came to the restaurant carrying knives and shouted at the customers: Why do you drink?,' Jahanshah Bakhtiar, owner of La Terrasse Restaurant, told Reuters.

'They were acting as if they had the right ideas and people should obey them,' he said, adding that there were about 40 customers in the restaurant.

You gotta love that one diner.

Pripyat Ghost Town

Pripyat Ghost Town tells a peculiar story, in broken English (with an almost audible Russian accent), about one young lady's peculiar motorcyle tour — "a story about town where one can ride fast, with no stoplights, no police, no danger to hit some cage or some dog..." The town? Pripyat — four kilometers north of Chernobyl.

Very eerie. (Hat tip to Todd for the link.)

Edit: The original link has died. Here's a newer link.

With Food Sales Flat, Nestle Stakes Future on Healthier Fare

I'm a bit nervous for any company staking its future on healthier fare. From With Food Sales Flat, Nestle Stakes Future on Healthier Fare:

With the industry facing stagnant sales growth, Nestle is looking for growth in the intersection of food and pharmaceuticals — a niche of nutritionally enhanced products known in the business as 'phood.' The company is betting that health-conscious consumers will pay more for fare that provides health benefits such as lowering cholesterol or aiding digestion.

Phood. I like that. Almost as clever as pharm animals.

Anyway, it sounds like they've come up with some interesting phoods. Whether they'll make any money is the real question:

Nestle sells a breakfast bar called Nestival containing carbohydrates that are absorbed slowly and make people feel full more quickly. It has developed a type of milk protein that could help fight cavities, and a chocolate component that limits the absorption of "bad" cholesterol. And it has won regulatory approval for a cholesterol-lowering ingredient for products such as juice and ice cream.

Its most ambitious project — a line of yogurts called LC1, designed to help digestion and boost the immune system — was a bust in a number of European markets in the late 1990s. Other companies have also struggled to make nutritionally boosted food a success. Campbell Soup Co.'s Intelligent Quisine cholesterol-lowering meals flopped in the late 1990s. In 2001, Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis AG dropped Aviva, a line of foods jointly developed with Quaker Oats Co. that were designed to boost heart, bone and digestive health. The venture lasted about 18 months, and the products were launched in a number of European markets.

I didn't realize Nestle's history:

Nestle, which has $69 billion in sales and sells its products in 120 countries, has a long history of crossing food and science. The company was founded in 1866 when Henri Nestle, a German pharmacist who saw five of his 13 siblings die as children, invented baby formula.

WSJ.com - Beyond the Bubble

The Wall Street Journal has an amusing summary, Beyond the Bubble, of what happened to some of the Internet bubble's high-flyers:

Amazon's price-to-earnings ratio soared beyond 400, an astronomical level, and its stock surged toward $100 a share, pushing its market capitalization beyond those of Disney, Colgate and J.P. Morgan at the time.

But the Internet retailer lost the adoring gaze of investors in the past four years, and its stock fall as low as $10 a share.

Amazon's now over $40 a share.

EBay amazes me:

EBay is one the bubble's rare success stories. Even as the rah-rah atmosphere of the '90s evaporated, the online auction site thrived, regularly posting quarterly sales growth above 80%. No company could sustain such performance interminably, though, and eBay's empire has shown signs of stabilizing.

EBay's growth now is coming from beyond U.S. shores, and favorable exchange rates have helped pad the bottom line. But that area too may be maturing. Overseas sales growth slowed to 97% in the latest period — slipping into the double-digits for the first time ever, and big vendors at home have been griping about problems. Nonetheless, the company is expanding at a faster rate than other U.S. corporate giants like Microsoft and Wal-Mart at comparable points in their development, says Chief Executive Meg Whitman.

EBay raised its revenue forecast for 2004 by $100 million. Over the last year, eBay's stock is up 73% — higher than during the bubble. But the shares are pricey, trading at 65 times projected earnings, compared with 18 for the Standard & Poor's 500.

Lucent sells for less than $4 a share:

For an epochal tale of the excesses of the bubble, it would be tough to do better than Lucent. The company's shares soared to a split-adjusted high of $62 in late 1999 and management told investors to expect sales growth of 20% a year — all of which seemed reasonable as companies prepared to cope with breathless projections about growth in Internet traffic. But the bottom fell out. Lucent heaped discounts on customers and even loaned companies money to buy its products as it scrambled to meet its unrealistic projections.

WSJ.com - More Work Is Outsourced to U.S. Than Away From It, Data Show

The Wall Street Journal now has a dedicated Understanding Outsourcing page. It's obviously a hot topic — and people definitely need help understanding outsourcing. From WSJ.com - More Work Is Outsourced to U.S. Than Away From It, Data Show:

Despite the political outcry over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to such places as India and Ghana, the latest U.S. government data suggest that foreigners outsource far more office work to the U.S. than American companies send abroad.

The value of U.S. exports of legal work, computer programming, telecommunications, banking, engineering, management consulting and other private services jumped to $131.01 billion in 2003, up $8.42 billion from the previous year, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

Imports of such private services — a category that encompasses U.S. outsourcing of call centers and data entry to developing nations, among other things — hit $77.38 billion for the year, up $7.94 billion from 2002. Measuring imports against exports, the U.S. posted a $53.64 billion surplus last year in trade in private services with the rest of the world.

WSJ.com - Home Economics

Housewares You Never Knew You Needed describes some of the gadgets on display at the International Home & Housewares Show in Chicago this weekend:

One potential miracle worker is the space-saving Snap-Saver No-Brainer Container, a set of storage bowls whose lids, when not in use, snap neatly into their bottoms, eliminating the always annoying search for a top that fits.
[...]
onvenience combined with hygiene is also the pitch for TxF Products' Scrub 'N Flush, a toilet-cleaning tool that features a single-use brush head made of wood pulp that disintegrates after about a minute of scrubbing. Once used, the head can be ejected into the bowl and flushed away like toilet paper.
[...]
L'Equip's R.P.M. Blender, is aiming more for the swoosh, which is why it has a tachometer display instead of the more conventional blend-chop-puree settings. The unit, which will retail for about $149, has a brushed-metal commercial grade design to match its racy style, all part of a push to market it especially to "motorheads and speed enthusiasts," says L'Equip's Cheryl Slavinsky. "No one has ever put a tachometer on a blender before."
[...]
It's also hard to know what to think of another new trend from Europe, which will be featured by two companies, Toastabags and Toast-It Toaster Bags. Simply put, you can insert sandwiches or pizza — or anything else that you might want to put in a toaster oven or grill — into top-opening bags made of heat-resistant material and then stick them into a regular toaster to get cooked. Both brands of toaster bags are reusable and cost from around $6 to $10 a set. Both manufacturers claim that their aim is to provide a muss-free method of making things like grilled cheese without having to buy another appliance.

I may need that RPM blender...

The PIXPage - AMES Scientists Working on Silent Communication Technology

NASA scientists have developed a system to read the nerve signals associated with speech. From AMES Scientists Working on Silent Communication Technology:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have found that placing small button-sized sensors under the chin and on either side of the Adam's Apple could gather nerve signals that can be processed by a computer and translated into words.

'What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself. Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement,'' NASA scientist Chuck Jorgensen said.
In their first experiment, Jorgensen's team created special software that recognized six words and 10 digits that the researchers repeated subvocally. Initial results were an average of 92 percent accurate.

I don't believe the system recognizes words per se, but letters that can spell out words — at least going by this quote:

"We took the alphabet and put it into a matrix-like a calendar. We numbered the columns and rows, and we could identify each letter with a pair of single-digit numbers,'' Jorgensen said. "So we silently spelled out NASA and then submitted it to a well-known Web search engine. We electronically numbered the Web pages that came up as search results. We used numbers again to choose Web pages to examine. This proved we could browse the Web without touching a keyboard.''

I love the hypothetical scenarios they have to fabricate to justify their research:

If perfected the system could allow injured astronauts to control their spacecraft or other machines without using their hands.

Yeah, that's a common problem.

Yahoo! News - Real-World Labor Issues Too Much for MTV

MTV's "The Real World" was coming to Philadelphia in just three short weeks. Then the unions started picketing. From Yahoo! News - Real-World Labor Issues Too Much for MTV:

Bunim/Murray Productions said Tuesday it had given up plans to tape the 15th season of 'The Real World' in Philadelphia. Taping had been set to begin in three weeks.

The production company had angered labor unions by hiring a nonunion company to renovate the former Seamen's Church Institute in Old City, where it planned to have seven strangers live together and have their lives videotaped. Members of the building trades unions picketed outside the building.
[...]
"I've got kids looking at me like I killed Santa Claus," Pat Gillespie, president of the powerful Building Trades Council, said Wednesday. "Look, they come into our town and make a decision to avoid union workers. Whether they were prepared for what would happen, it was a conscious decision that they made."

So the unions cut off their nose to spite their face, and MTV wasn't prepared for what would happen?

Space Race Titan William Pickering Dead at 93

I really should read a good history of the space race. From Space Race Titan William Pickering Dead at 93:

William H. Pickering, a central figure in the early U.S. space race who as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory played a key role in launching America's first satellite into orbit, has died at age 93, NASA said on Tuesday.
[...]
A native of New Zealand who immigrated to the United States in 1929 as a student, Pickering obtained bachelor and master's degrees in electrical engineering, then a PhD. in physics from Caltech before becoming an engineering professor there in 1946. He became a U.S. citizen in 1941.

"William Pickering was one of New Zealand's most distinguished sons. His passing is a tremendous loss," New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said in a statement.

Pickering began working on guided missile research for JPL in 1944, when the laboratory was administered by the U.S. Army, and was project manager for Corporal, the first operational missile system developed there. The Sergeant solid-fuel missile was later developed under his direction.

Pickering was named JPL director in 1954 and three years later faced perhaps his greatest challenge as the Soviet Union stunned the world by successfully launching Sputnik into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, ushering in the dawn of the space age and the U.S.-Soviet space race.

The following month, JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency were assigned to put the first U.S. satellite into orbit. Pickering directed the JPL effort, which in just 83 days provided the satellite, telecommunications and upper rocket stages that successfully lofted Explorer 1 on Jan. 31, 1958. That triumph followed the embarrassing failure the previous month of the first U.S. attempt to launch a satellite, Vanguard 1, a separate project managed by the Naval Research Laboratory.

Instruments carried by Explorer 1, and its successor, Explorer 3, provided evidence that the Earth is surrounded by intense bands of radiation, named the Van Allen belts, one of the first major scientific discoveries of the space age. It was considered Pickering's greatest achievement and set the stage for future space exploration.

Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood

The more I see and hear about Sky Captain, the more I think it's right up my alley. From Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood:

Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 30's and 40's: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like ''Flash Gordon'' alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era's noir thrillers.

I may have to try this:

But like the old serials it emulates, ''Sky Captain'' is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ''blue-screen'' background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.

''The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation,'' Conran said. The reason? ''First and foremost, to do it cheaper.'' It's a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people's money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930's) but doesn't have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy.

For Conran, the question, as he put it, was ''Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?'' And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.
[...]
He realized he could build whatever he wanted, and what's more, it could be gigantic. Rockets that dwarfed skyscrapers. Airplane hangars so large that you could not see someone on the other side. Because, he explained, ''what does it cost to hit the scale