Sports economics puzzle of the day

Sports economics puzzle of the day addresses "the old sports chestnut: why is soccer not a major professional sport in America?":

It seems easy enough to add commercials when the ball goes out of bounds. And we have plenty of land for soccer fields. Maybe soccer is too boring on television, but hey (no brickbats please) what about baseball? Could it be that soccer is too hard to describe on radio, noting that this medium drove the initial popularity of baseball?

I have the vague intuition that soccer is too "working class" for the non-unionized United States, but it is hard to go far with this hypothesis.

My best shot at an answer was the following: Americans prefer professional sports where they know (or feel) that they are the best in the world. This applies to baseball, football, and basketball, the major professional sports in the United States. At tennis we are no joke. Chess became massively popular, but only briefly, when Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky.

The implicit prediction, of course, is that basketball will decline in popularity.

Marine Corps Snipers Aim to Strike Fear

Marine Corps Snipers Aim to Strike Fear interviews a Marine sniper in Fallouja:

'It's a sniper's dream,' he said in polite, matter-of-fact tones. 'You can go anywhere and there are so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are.'

Their equipment:

Marine sniper teams are spread in and around the city, working night and day, using powerful scopes, thermal imaging equipment and specially modified bolt-action rifles that allow them to identify and target armed militants from 800 yards or more.
[...]
The sniper rifle, a M-40A3, is a bolt-action model specially assembled at the Marine Corps armory in Quantico, Va. The scope magnifies to the 10th power.

Fairly gruesome:

Weapons change, but the goal of the sniper remains the same: harass and intimidate the enemy, make him afraid to venture into the open, deny him the chance to rest and regroup.

The Marines believe their snipers have killed hundreds of insurgents, though that figure alone does not accurately portray the significance of sniping. A sign on the wall of sniper school at Camp Pendleton displays a Chinese proverb: "Kill One Man, Terrorize a Thousand."

"Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies," said the Marine corporal. "Then I'll use a second shot."
[...]
Although official policy discourages Marines from keeping a personal count of those they have killed, the custom continues. In nearly two weeks of conflict here, the corporal from a Midwestern city has emerged as the top sniper, with 24 confirmed kills. By comparison, the top Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam had 103 confirmed kills in 16 months.

(Hat tip to the Belmont Club.)

Marines in Fallujah appear 'geared up'

Marines are hard core. From CNN.com - Reporter: Marines in Fallujah appear 'geared up':

There were two that had gunshot wounds. And they pulled a huge slug, a bullet, out of the leg of one of the Marines. And another one had a bullet wound right through the back.

And, amazingly, they were trying to convince their commanders that they were ready to go and go back out. I have been really surprised at ... the high degree of morale that these Marines have shown.

Marines in Fallujah appear 'geared up'

Marines in Fallujah appear 'geared up' reports back an interview with Marines on how they have adapted to Iraq — and to Improvised Explosive Devices:

There have been so many explosions and casualties and injuries caused to Americans by these types of weapons that, in some cases, U.S. forces here, especially the Marines, have actually begun to modify their armor.

They're now using the — they're now using Kevlar shoulder patches and shoulder guards to cover the parts of the extremities that are particularly prone to getting injured when some these IEDs and roadside bombs explode. They're using now new ballistic glasses which have become standard issue. And they have made orders for thousands of these in the last couple of months to make sure — because they were seeing so many eye injuries from these things.

Is the welfare state good for growth?

Tyler Cowen's Is the welfare state good for growth? examines Peter H. Lindert's Why the Welfare State Looks Like a Free Lunch, which makes a few interesting points. First, an unexpected fact:

Whatever one might have thought, the smaller-government countries such as Japan, the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia tax capital and private property at least as heavily as the welfare states of Scandinavia, Germany or the Netherlands.

Second, a potential explanation for why welfare states might tax and spend a bit more wisely:

The higher the social budget as a share of GDP, the higher and more visible is the cost of a bad choice

If you can stomach an econ research paper, read the whole thing.

The House Doesn't Always Win When It Comes to Investing

The House Doesn't Always Win When It Comes to Investing, because real estate doesn't typically appreciate much. Instead it pays off a dividend — you get to live there:

Folks think the real-estate game is all about price appreciation. But in reality, long-run gains have been fairly modest, with home prices outpacing inflation by just 1.2 percentage points a year since 1975.

Instead, the big benefit of home ownership comes from the dividend, which is the ability to collect rent or to live rent-free

Remodeling doesn't typically pay for itself in dollars and cents, but in "imputed rent":

Typically, homeowners get back 70 or 80 cents for every $1 they spend. The other 20 or 30 cents? That's gone.

Don't they hold bake sales any more?

Tyler Cowen's Don't they hold bake sales any more? points to an article on Norwegian high school girls paying for their graduation highjinks:

It is a Norwegian tradition that high school seniors, so-called russ, throw themselves into a month of partying to celebrate the fact that 13-years of schooling is drawing to an end. Many graduating russ buy old vans or buses which they drive during the month of partying, but everything has its costs and it is far from cheap. It's common for students to acquire sponsorships from local business by putting their logos on their means of transportation in order to help finance their partying.

The girls have signed a contract with 21-year-old porn star Thomas Rocco Hansen to tape a scene for a porn film in their own bus as they lack other types of sponsorships to finance their party costs. They are also going to be interviewed regarding their sexual habits and sex fantasies. The girls will be paid about NOK 20,000 (USD 2900).

Zombie Infection Simulation

You can find anything on the Net, including a Zombie Infection Simulation (implemented in Java):

Zombies are grey, move very slowly and change direction randomly and frequently unless they can see something moving in front of them, in which case they start walking towards it. After a while they get bored and wander randomly again.

If a zombie finds a human directly in front of it, it infects them; the human immediately becomes a zombie.

Humans are pink and run five times as fast as zombies, occasionally changing direction at random. If they see a zombie directly in front of them, they turn around and panic.

Panicked humans are bright pink and run twice as fast as other humans. If a human sees another panicked human, it starts panicking as well.

There's also an advanced version, with humans who catch on to the zombie threat and start to fight back.

XM-25 Grenade Launcher

The XM-25 Grenade Launcher was originally one of two weapons (the other being a 5.56mm rifle, now known as the XM-8) incorporated in the 18 pound XM-29 OICW. Rather than fire small lead rounds, it fires fairly large "smart shells":

The 20mm and 25mm "smart shells" use a computer controlled fuze in each shell. The M-25 or M-307 operator can select four different firing modes via a selector switch on the weapon. The four modes include "Bursting" (airburst). For this to work, the soldier first finds the target via the weapons sighting system. This includes a laser range finder and the ability to select and adjust the range shown in the sight picture. For an air burst the soldier aims at an enemy position and fires a round. The shell is optimized to spray incapacitating (wounding or killing) fragments in a roughly six meter radius from the exploding round. Thus if enemy troops are seen moving near trees or buildings at a long distance (over 500 meters), the weapon has a good chance of getting them with one shot. M-16s are not very accurate at that range, and the enemy troops will dive for cover as soon as M-16 bullets hit around them. With smart shells, you get one (or a few) accurate shots and the element of surprise.

The other modes are "PD" (point detonation, where the round explodes on contact), PDD (point detonation delay, where the round detonates immediately after it has gone through a door, window or thin wall) and "Window", which is used for firing at enemy troops in a trench, behind a stone wall or inside a room. The round detonates just beyond the aiming point. For buildings, this would be a window or door frame, cave entrance or the corner of a building (to get enemy troops thought to be around the corner.)

12.7mm M-16

The 12.7mm M-16 may be the perfect weapon for movie SWAT teams facing comicbook supervillains and/or supernatural horrors:

LW15.499 (Leitner-Wise Rifle Company) mini-.50 caliber (12.7mm) rifle is based on the M-16, but uses a shorter (than the standard .50 caliber) 12.7mm round. The mini-.50 rifles cost $1,450 to $2,250 each and weigh 6.3 pounds unloaded. The rifle is 36.2 inches long. Ammunition costs a 80 cents to five dollars a round (each one weighs about 1.1 ounces, with the most expensive ones being the armor piercing round). For a thousand bucks, you can get an upgrade kit for an AR-15 (the civilian version of the M-16). Fully loaded, with a ten round magazine, the weapon weighs about eight pounds.

German WWII Leaflets

Fascinating! The Nazis produced numerous propaganda leaflets for Allied troops, and a small collection of these German WWII Leaflets (from shortly after D-Day in 1944) have been scanned and put on-line.

Five questions for the American soldier:

1. Are you certain of finding a job if you have the good luck to get back to the States safe and sound from the war?
2. Won't the best jobs be held by those who were wiser than you and avoided taking part in the war?
3. What security have you for your existence if you come back from the war sick, wounded, minus a limb or even blinded?
4. Is your family sufficiently provided for if you are one of the many who will never see America again?
5. Are your savings secure against the inflation which is threatening the USA as a result of the absurdly high war loans, or will you and your family be reduced to beggars after the war?

Choice Trumps Price on the Internet

Virginia Postrel's latest article, Choice Trumps Price on the Internet examines a recent economic study, Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers and its implications:

In the article, the authors, all economists, estimate just how much better off consumers are because of the variety available online. They look specifically at "obscure titles," books that rank below the top 100,000 in Amazon.com sales and probably would not be carried in a traditional bookstore. (The typical Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore carries about 100,000 titles, while large independent bookstores stock about 40,000.)

Using Amazon rankings and publisher data on 324 titles, the researchers determined that nearly half the book sales at Amazon, 46 percent in 2000, were of obscure titles.

They then "tried to calculate what people would have been willing to pay for these books versus what they actually did pay," Professor Brynjolfsson explained. That's the concept economists call "consumer surplus." If you buy an ice cream cone for $2 but would have been willing to pay $5, you get $3 of consumer surplus.

By estimating what the demand curve for books looks like, using well-established techniques, the researchers could estimate the consumer surplus for all buyers in this market.

The results are striking. People are really happy to find obscure books, and would be willing to pay far more for them.

"The consumer surplus was about 70 percent of the purchase price for each book sold," Professor Brynjolfsson said. "If a book was purchased for $20 on average, consumers would have been willing to pay on average up to $34."

All those benefits add up to big money — around $1 billion in 2000. By comparison, Amazon's lower prices saved consumers about $100 million that year.

"So they got about 10 times as much value from the selection as they got from the lower prices and competition," Professor Brynjolfsson said. "An order of magnitude more value was created from the increased choice and selection."

Autoimmune Disorders Treatable With Worms and Bacteria Wall Fragments

You probably thought leaching sounded bad. That's not a parasite; this is a parasite! From Autoimmune Disorders Treatable With Worms and Bacteria Wall Fragments:

Some scientists have been advancing theories to explain some auto-immune disorders as being the result of lack of exposure to diseases that used to be common in the human past. Among the diseases suspected as being a consequence of lack of exposure to diseases are the painful digestive tract disorders inflammatory bowel disorder (IBD) and Crohn's Disease. Joel Weinstock MD, a professor of internal medicine at University of Iowa, and colleagues have demonstrated that eggs of pig whipworm, when consumed by suffers of Crohn's Disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), greatly reduce symptoms of those diseases.

School choice and school competition: Evidence from the United States

School choice and school competition: Evidence from the United States, a recent study by Caroline Hoxby, opens with this abstract:

The most frequently asked questions about school choice are: Do public schools respond constructively to competition induced by school choice, by raising their own productivity? Does students� achievement rise when they attend voucher or charter schools? Do voucher and charter schools end up with a selection of the better students (�cream-skim�)? I review the evidence on these questions from the United States, relying primarily on recent policy experiments. Public schools do respond constructively to competition, by raising their achievement and productivity. The best studies on this question examine the introduction of choice programs that have been sufficiently large and long-lived to produce competition. Students� achievement generally does rise when they attend voucher or charter schools. The best studies on this question use, as a control group, students who are randomized out of choice programs. Not only do currently enacted voucher and charter school programs not cream-skim; they disproportionately attract students who were performing badly in their regular public schools. This confirms what theory predicts: there are no general results on the sorting consequences of school choice. The sorting consequences of a school choice plan depend strongly on its design.

Did You Hear the One About the Salesman Who Traveled Better?

Mathematicians have been working on the so-called traveling salesman problem — what's the shortest itinerary a salesman can follow to visit all the stops on his route? — for a long time, largely because it maps to so many other common problems. "Applications range from scheduling cable-TV service calls and routing parcel-delivery trucks to drilling holes in a circuit board, where you want to minimize how far the drill, like the salesman, must travel." Did You Hear the One About the Salesman Who Traveled Better? also cites this interesting application:

An algorithm he developed for ILOG, which sells algorithm-packed custom software, tackled the National Football League's 2004 schedule. He had to juggle 256 games among 32 teams, subject to multiple constraints. There had to be a nationally appealing game every Monday night and at least one must-see match-up every Sunday, for example, and he couldn't send a team on the road for weeks at a time.

Dr. Lustig's algorithm created thousands of schedules that fit these constraints in a fraction of the time it took by trial-and-error computing. Even better, it can tweak a schedule in less than a day if, say, the NFL decides that a Giants-Redskins game simply won't do for Week 8 (it's Week 2). In the past, making that change would produce a domino effect taking days to fix.

Many of the new algorithms rely on the interior-point method:

A linear programming method that achieves optimization by going through the middle of the solid defined by the problem rather than around its surface.

A polynomial time linear programming algorithm using an interior point method was found by Karmarkar (1984). Arguably, interior point methods were known as early as the 1960s in the form of the barrier function methods, but the media hype accompanying Karmarkar's announcement led to these methods receiving a great deal of attention. However, it should be noted that while Karmarkar claimed that his implementation was much more efficient than simplex method, the potential of interior point method was established only later. By 1994, there were over 1300 published papers on interior point methods. Current efficient implementations are mostly based on Mehrotra's predictor-corrector technique, where the Cholesky decomposition of the normal equation is used to perform the Newton iteration, together with some heuristics to estimate the penalty parameter. All current interior point methods implementations rely heavily on having very efficient code for sparse Cholesky decomposition.

I may have to break out my old linear programming text...and read a few new papers.

The Depressive and the Psychopath

The Depressive and the Psychopath - At last we know why the Columbine killers did it, by Dave Cullen, doesn't really explain why they did it, but it does shed some light on their plan (which went awry):

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after — Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term — they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

By labeling Harris a psychopath, Cullen claims to explain his actions. I explain his behavior by labeling him a mass-murderer.

Liberals, Conservatives, and Southerners

Normally I don't particularly enjoy political humor — especially the kind that gets circulated around the Net, but, for some reason, I got a good chuckle out of Liberals, Conservatives, and Southerners:

Question: How do you tell the difference between liberals, conservatives, and southerners?
Try this. Pose the following question: You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children. Suddenly, a dangerous looking man with a huge knife comes around the corner, locks eyes with you, screams obscenities, raises the knife, and charges. You are carrying a Glock .40, and you are an expert shot. You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family. What do you do?

Liberal Answer:
Well, that's not enough information to answer the question!
Does the man look poor or oppressed?
Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?
Could we run away?
What does my wife think?
What about the kids?
Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand?
What does the law say about this situation?
Does the Glock have appropriate safety built into it?
Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message does this send to society and to my children?
Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me?
Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?
If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he was stabbing me?
Should I call 9-1-1?
Why is this street so deserted?
We need to raise taxes, have a paint and weed day and make this a happier, healthier street that would discourage such behavior.
This is all so confusing! I need to debate this with some friends for a few days and try to come to a consensus.

Conservative Answer:
BANG!

Southerner Answer:
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
click....(sounds of reloading).
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
click.
Daughter: "Nice grouping, Daddy! Were those the Winchester Silver Tips?"

Antiques Trade Gazette

The Antiques Trade Gazette warns dealers "to check their vehicles before leaving showground fairs following a sophisticated robbery attempt at Sunbury Antiques Market":

A gang struck at the popular Kempton Park Racecourse fair on Tuesday, April 13, first piercing the car tyre of a jewellery dealer and then accosting him during an unscheduled stop at a nearby petrol station. In this case the thieves had picked on the wrong man — the 67-year-old Hertfordshire man was a former fencing and boxing champion who tackled one of the thieves. The gang of four fled emptyhanded.

I love stories like that.

Some more details:

"I am sure I saw one of the gang at the fair," he said. "Clearly they were selecting their target, and I don't suppose I will be the only one.

"Obviously it was planned," he added. "They must have punctured my tyre so I would break down on the road. Suddenly [while at the petrol station] this car pulled up and a young man got out and grabbed the air hose before I got to it," said the dealer. "I told him there was a queue, but then one of his friends tried to distract me by asking the way to London. The next thing I knew, one of them had opened the car door and was running off with my bag. I rugby tackled him and he dropped it and they drove off. They even seemed to know just which bag to grab — the one with the small items of jewellery in, not the more bulky stock."

Englands demographics have changed:

The men are all described as short, slightly built and of Latin American appearance with Spanish accents. Two are in their early 20s, one in his late 40s and one in his early 50s.

(Hat tip to Cronaca.)

Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoons

On behalf of Earth Day, I thought I'd share this Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoon:

...and if you don't recycle, Suzie, the earth will heat up, the oceans will explode, and boiling rain will scald all the baby animals... Any questions?

That pretty much matches my elementary school education in California — only the emphasis was on water conservation.

Studios Rush to Cash In on DVD Boom

As Studios Rush to Cash In on DVD Boom reports, Americans spend more on DVDs than they spend at the box office:

Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion — more than $3 billion more — to buy and rent DVD's and videocassettes.

Thus, studios spend as much marketing DVDs as theatrical releases:

Studios now spend comparable amounts of money on DVD and theatrical marketing campaigns. Disney spent an estimated $50 million marketing the "Finding Nemo" DVD last year, said officials at Pixar, which made the film. It was money well spent. The DVD took in $431 million domestically, about $100 million more than the domestic box office.

Rarely does a movie recoup its costs at the box office — the theatrical run is now an ad for the DVD:

The average movie now costs $64 million to make and another $39 million to market, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

"In the last five years maybe 6 pictures out of 1,000 recouped their cost in the theatrical marketplace," said Nick Counter, president of the studio alliance. "Today the hits have to make up for all the losses."

For bigger-budget movies the DVD revenue has become critical. Nowadays, "basically the movies are commercials for the DVD's," observed John Lesher, an agent for the Endeavor talent agency who represents leading directors like Walter Salles, Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell. Movies with budgets over $100 million now commonly just break even at the box office.

The financial rules have changed — and Office Space shows how:

The old Hollywood model of needing to recoup three times the production cost at the box office to make a profit is long gone. But many are asking: What is the new model?

The answer to that may lie with a little-known movie called "Office Space" (1999). The satire by Mike Judge, co-creator of the animated television series "King of the Hill," cost 20th Century Fox about $10 million to make, and took in just $10 million at the box office. But on DVD the movie has become a hit, with the studio so far selling 2.5 million units, well over $40 million worth.

There are other examples of surprising windfalls. The Lion's Gate comedy "Van Wilder" was renamed "National Lampoon's Van Wilder" and has unexpectedly become a hit on DVD, where it sits alphabetically next to other National Lampoon movies.

A moderate hit like the DreamWorks comedy "Old School" starring Will Ferrell took in $73 million at the box office, but made an astounding $143.5 million on DVD.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Financier Bets Big On Risky Venture: Family Values

"Some people know Philip Anschutz, co-founder of Qwest Communications International Inc., as a hard-charging financier who has amassed a $5 billion fortune in oil, railroads and telecommunications," but as Financier Bets Big On Risky Venture: Family Values explains, Anschutz has moved into family films:

In the last few years, he has stormed into Hollywood, bankrolling nearly a dozen projects at once. These films are meant to be uplifting and family-friendly, earning G and PG ratings, even as movie theaters are packed with darker, R-rated fare. The 64-year-old Mr. Anschutz has committed more than $300 million to film projects already. It's unlikely he will break even on many of them. But he shows no signs of stopping.

Disney picked up his latest film after Paramount refused to distribute it:

He has financed a $110 million remake of the 1956 movie "Around the World in 80 Days," which he enjoyed as a youth growing up in central Kansas. [...] The movie may benefit from a lucky casting decision: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a cameo role as a Turkish prince, filmed shortly before he began his successful campaign to become California governor.

This should surprise no one:

Succeeding in the family-film market is tricky, especially for a newcomer. Just this week, Mr. Anschutz announced he was dismantling one of his two production companies, Crusader Entertainment. He had created the company in 2000 to make films free of violence, sex, drugs, tobacco and profanity, but few of its films made money.

Does he know who Hunter S. Thompson is?

On a wall in his Denver headquarters is a plaque, with a quote from writer Hunter S. Thompson, calling the film business "a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."

You've heard the pitch: It's Lord of the Rings meets Passion of the Christ — with talking animals!

He and Disney have paired up to develop C.S. Lewis's Narnia books into a series of movies, starting with a $150 million version of "The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe" for Christmas 2005.

Does he know who Truman Capote was?

For most of its 3� years in business, Crusader struggled to find its way. At one point, the company spent $8 million to film "Children on Their Birthdays," a Truman Capote short story with so little public appeal that the finished movie rang up only $54,000 in ticket sales before disappearing from first-run distribution.

Does he know who Ayn Rand was?

For a brief time, Messrs. Anschutz and Baldwin were excited about the prospect of filming Ayn Rand's epic novel "Atlas Shrugged." They snapped up the movie rights for more than $200,000 in 2003, only to discover that the 1,075-page book's sprawling nature, long speeches and many subplots made it an extremely problematic film project. Anschutz insiders say it's an open question whether they will press on.

Work & Family

Work & Family comments on the heavily quoted 50% divorce rate:

The belief that one out of every two American marriages ends in divorce is widespread. But the heavily quoted 50% figure is actually an informed guess based on sociologists' projections of how many marriages are likely to end in divorce or separation before one of the spouses dies. Like any broad measure, that number can be misleading when applied to individual couples.

The divorce rate varies widely based on your age at marriage, income, education, length of marriage, race and other factors. And some studies even suggest the lifetime probability of divorce may be declining — particularly among certain groups. As a result, divorce can be an isolating, stigmatizing experience for many people.

As a college-educated, church-going suburb-dweller, Mr. Teusink inhabited a group with a relatively low probability of divorce. Couples from central cities are nine percentage points more likely to crash and burn than couples from the suburbs, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Regional differences also factor in: Couples who live in the South are 10 points more likely to divorce or separate than couples from the Northeast or Midwest. (Western couples fall about midway between the two.)

Some stats from the article:

Risk Factors
Divorce rates can vary significantly. Here are the percentage-point increases in the probability of divorce or separation during the first 10 years of marriage, depending on a variety of factors:

Annual income under $25,000 vs. over $50,000	+30
Having a baby before marriage vs. seven months or more afterward	+24
Marrying under 18 years of age vs. 25 or over	+24
Own parents divorced, vs. intact family of origin	+14
No religious affiliation	+14
High-school dropout vs. some college	+13
Central-city vs. suburb dweller	+9

Source: National Center for Health Statistics

Pleasing Decay

This passage from Pleasing Decay makes me feel queasy:

The Turks who lived in Athens contentedly built their hovels on and out of the remains of the Acropolis, just as they burned marble sculptures and columns for lime without a second thought.

Against All Odds

Against All Odds tells the story of "the first sustained mass campaign anywhere on behalf of someone else's rights":

To fully grasp how momentous was what began at 2 George Yard, picture the world as it existed in 1787. Well over three-quarters of the people on earth are in bondage of one land or another. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumber free people. African slaves are also scattered widely through much of the Islamic world. Slavery is routine in most of Africa itself. In India and other parts of Asia, some people are outright slaves, others in debt bondage that ties them to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave to a Southern plantation owner. In Russia the majority of the population are serfs. Nowhere is slavery more firmly rooted than in Britain's overseas empire, where some half-million slaves are being systematically worked to an early death growing West Indian sugar. Caribbean slave-plantation fortunes underlie many a powerful dynasty, from the ancestors of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the family of the fabulously wealthy William Beckford, lord mayor of London, who hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. One of the most prosperous sugar plantations on Barbados is owned by the Church of England. Furthermore, Britain's ships dominate the slave trade, delivering tens of thousands of chained captives each year to French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies as well as to its own.

If you had proposed, in the London of early 1787, to change all of this, nine out of ten people would have laughed you off as a crackpot. [...] By the end of the 19th century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere. Every American schoolchild learns about the Underground Railroad and the Emancipation Proclamation. But our self-centered textbooks often skip over the fact that in the superpower of the time slavery ended a full quarter-century earlier. For more than two decades before the Civil War, the holiday celebrated most fervently by free blacks in the American North was not July 4 (when they were at risk of attack from drunken white mobs) but August 1, Emancipation Day in the British Empire.

The Wrong Stuff

The Wrong Stuff asks the decades-old question, why do we send humans into space, when it's cheaper and easier to just send machines? I enjoyed this calculation:

It had been hoped that the shuttle, because reusable, would reduce the cost of putting satellites in orbit. Instead, while it costs about $3,000 a pound to use unmanned rockets to put satellites in orbit, the cost of doing this with the shuttle is about $10,000 a pound. The physicist Robert Park has pointed out that at this rate, even if lead could be turned into gold in orbit, it would not pay to send it up on the shuttle.

Unhappy Birthday

Last month marked the 100th anniversary of Dr. Seuss's birth. Unhappy Birthday addresses the shift from Seuss the author to Seuss the brand:

A.J. Rowling famously negotiated ironclad agreements with Warner Bros. to make sure that her Harry Potter books made it to the screen in the right way. (What you saw was what you read.) The stewards of Beatrix Potter have kept a watchful eye, too, permitting animated versions of her stories that hew to the letter and spirit of her work.

The legacies of A.A. Milne and Rudyard Kipling have not been so lucky, however. Their literary greatness is unrecognizable in Disney's adaptations of "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Jungle Book." More grotesquely, Dr. Seuss, in movie form, has suffered the same fate. Hollywood cashed in as Mr. Carrey and Mr. Myers mugged and romped, earning each film about $250 million. (With its imminent video release, "Cat" is set to earn more.) But such success nearly wrecked the brand.

You Can't Say That

In You Can't Say That , Diane Ravitch discusses The Language Police:

In my book 'The Language Police,' I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by 'bias review committees' employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are 'landlord,' 'cowboy,' 'brotherhood,' 'yacht,' 'cult' and 'primitive.' Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups — feminists, religious conservatives, multiculturalists and ethnic activists, to name a few.
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Editors must delete, the guidelines said, pictures of women with big hair or sleeveless blouses and men with dreadlocks or medallions. Photographs must not portray the soles of shoes or anyone eating with the left hand (both in deference to Muslim culture). To avoid giving offense to those who cannot afford a home computer, no one may be shown owning a home computer. To avoid offending those with strong but differing religious views, decorations for religious holidays must never appear in the background.

This one can't be real, can it?

A college professor informed me that a new textbook in human development includes the following statement: "As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult." The professor was stupefied that someone had made the line gender-neutral and ungrammatical by rewriting Bob Dylan's folk song "Blowin' in the Wind," which had simply asked: "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"

The Arab World's Scientific Desert

The Arab World's Scientific Desert describes how the Muslim world once valued science:

Eleven centuries ago an Islamic renaissance occurred in Baghdad, attracting the best scholars throughout the Muslim world. For the next five hundred years, Arabic was the lingua franca of science. Cutting-edge research was conducted in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis. In the ninth century, algebra (al-jabr) was invented by a Muslim mathematician in Baghdad under the auspices of an imperial Arab court dedicated to scientific enrichment and discovery. Ibn Sina's monumental Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 12th century and dominated the teaching of the subject in Europe for four centuries.

Things have obviously changed. This stat says quite a bit:

No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.

Rule of 72

I recently stumbled across an explanation of the Rule of 72, and it struck me as exactly the kind of thing I should know (but didn't):

In finance, the Rule of 72 is a simple method of calculating the approximate number of periods over which a quantity will double. If you divide 72 by the expected growth rate, expressed as a percentage, the answer is approximately the number of periods to double the original quantity. For instance, if you were to invest $100 at 9% per annum, then your investment would be worth $200 after 8.0432 years, using an exact calculation. The rule of 72 gives 72/9=8 years, which is close to the exact answer.

I knew one instance of the rule: 10% interest will double your money after 7 years.

Somalia and the theory of anarchy

Somalia and the theory of anarchy explains how Somolia has "stabilized" with a number of competing "governments" keeping the peace:

Somalia continues to provide a unique test of the theory of anarchy (competitive governments) promoted by David Friedman, Murrary Rothbard and others. Somalia has no government but in many respects it is booming. Somalia has what is perhaps the best phone system in Africa, for example, because entrepreneurs are unburdened by any regulation.

From Coke and al-Qaeda:

There are two ways to run a business in Somalia. You can pay off the local warlord, not always the most trustworthy of chaps, and hope he will stop his militiamen from murdering your staff. Or you can tell him to get stuffed and hire your own militia. After 13 years of civil war, businessmen are increasingly plumping for the latter option, and their defiance has been rewarded. A veneer of normality is returning to the world's most chaotic country. An economy, of sorts, is beginning to thrive.
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Perversely, this renaissance has been made possible by Somalia's continuing fragmentation. There is still no proper central government but, where once there was only a handful of warlords, there are now at least 24, and that is only the serious ones. With smaller fiefs to pillage, few can now afford the $100,000 or more that it costs to wage a six-hour battle, so such battles are less common. This is what passes for peace in Somalia, and it is enough to tempt many homesick exiles to return. They bring money as well as skills and contacts. In the past few years, hospitals, schools, businesses and even a university have appeared.

In some ways, anarchy makes doing business easier. There are no formal taxes — given how heavily-armed the average Somali is, these would be hard to collect — and no regulation whatsoever. But the costs of chaos outweigh the benefits. You can roar through a warlord's road block unmolested if you have ten gunmen in the back of your pickup, but you have to pay your gunmen. Nationlink, one of the country's three mobile-phone operators, employs 300 guards to protect 500 staff.

By Learning From Failures, Lilly Keeps Drug Pipeline Full

By Learning From Failures, Lilly Keeps Drug Pipeline Full explains how Lilly explores every failure, because even "failed" drugs can be turned into successes:

Lilly has long had a culture that looks at failure as an inevitable part of discovery and encourages scientists to take risks. If a new drug doesn't work out for its intended use, Lilly scientists are taught to look for new uses for a drug. In the early 1990s, W. Leigh Thompson, Lilly's chief scientific officer, initiated 'failure parties' to commemorate excellent scientific work, done efficiently, that nevertheless resulted in failure.
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Other drug companies are also seeing the importance of tolerating — and learning from — failure, a valuable strategy since about 90% of experimental drugs in the industry fail. For example, Pfizer Inc. originally developed the blockbuster impotence drug Viagra to treat angina, or severe heart pain.
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Many Lilly drugs have risen from failure. Evista, now a $1 billion-a-year drug for osteoporosis, was a failed contraceptive. Strattera, a hot-selling drug for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bombed out as an antidepressant. A promising cardiovascular drug called a PPAR-alpha-agonist, which lowers fat levels in the blood, arose from a failed asthma project. The antidepressant Cymbalta, for which Wall Street has high hopes, failed in its original trials until a Lilly scientist upped the dosage.

Dr. Nyikiza, the Rwandan mathematician, is one of Lilly's "failure" experts. He helped to save Alimta, an experimental chemotherapy drug, and to turn it into a successful treatment for mesothelioma (a rare cancer caused by asbestos):

The story of Alimta's salvation begins in 1992 with an out-and-out failure: a new drug called lomotrexol that made patients ill in its trials. For the post-mortem analysis, Lilly tapped Dr. Nyikiza, the Rwandan mathematician, who specialized in the failure analysis of complex systems — a branch of math called stochastic processes.

Dr. Nyikiza, who grew up on a peanut and banana farm, developed this interest on boyhood hunting trips in Rwanda and neighboring Tanzania. From his grandfather, he learned all about the myriad factors that lead to a successful hunt or a disastrous one. Among them were wind speed and direction, grass conditions and the presence of predators. "Don't hunt a lone antelope," his grandfather cautioned, because lone antelopes tend to attract lone lions.

Dr. Nyikiza ended up in a gifted program at a Rwandan high school run by Jesuit missionaries. After getting a bachelor's degree in statistics and applied economics in Rwanda, Dr. Nyikiza worked on a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, doing population analysis for the government of Rwanda. Then the U.S. agency and the Rwandan government sent him to Indiana University where he got a doctorate in mathematics.

Before joining the drug industry, Dr. Nyikiza analyzed failures in everything from aircraft engines to truck transmissions. In a job for the Swiss National Science Foundation, he looked at what makes certain paper money prone to counterfeiting.

In 1990, a research executive from Syntex Corp., since acquired by Roche Holding AG, sat next to him on a flight from Zurich to Chicago and concluded Dr. Nyikiza's expertise would be useful in an industry where almost everything fails. He moved to Lilly from Syntex in 1993.

At the time, Lilly was trying to learn from the failure of lomotrexol. Like Alimta, lomotrexol had induced neutropenia, a white-blood-cell disease causing immune deficiency, severe diarrhea and sometimes death. Lilly asked Dr. Nyikiza to find out why the drug failed. He and three colleagues spent most of a year on the effort, analyzing blood samples and traveling to question world experts. They settled on 64 blood markers that might predict which patients would be afflicted by the devastating side effect. Finally, one called homocysteine emerged. Every patient sickened by lomotrexol had high levels of homocysteine, a common amino acid.

Homocysteine is produced when human cells lack the vitamin folic acid. The conclusion from Dr. Nyikiza's team — that the patients who died had a deficiency in folic acid — would become crucial during the crisis in the Alimta mesothelioma study.

In short, giving Alimta patients folic acid reduced the dangerous side effects without reducing the drug's effectiveness.

U.S. Ally in Asia May Have Crossed Line in Terror Fight

U.S. Ally in Asia May Have Crossed Line in Terror Fight reports on Thailand's zealous efforts to fight terrorism and drug trafficking:

Since Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government began a crackdown on suspected Muslim insurgents in January, more than 100 Thai Muslims have disappeared in the southern part of the country, many of them taken in commando-style raids by unidentified assailants, according to witnesses, Muslim politicians and human-rights groups.
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The controversy comes on the heels of Mr. Thaksin's bloody campaign last year against alleged drug dealers. The action, criticized by the U.S. and others, resulted in the killing of more than 2,500 suspects and hundreds of arbitrary arrests. Some Muslim politicians from the south and Western diplomats in Bangkok argue that the government's tactics during the drug crackdown, and its frequent heavy-handed policing in Muslim areas, sparked the current round of violence. Moreover, they say, these tactics have helped insurgents recruit a new generation of angry foot soldiers.

Coercion vs. Consent

Coercion vs. Consent includes this passage from David Friedman:

While we cannot logically derive our values, we have them. So do other people. Fortunately, human values vary a good deal less than one might suppose from reading political philosophers. Few egalitarians would prefer a society where everyone had a real income of $1,000 to one where incomes ranged from $90,000 to $100,000. Few Rawlsians would choose to improve the lot of the world�s worst-off person by one dollar at the cost of massively reducing the welfare of everyone else in the world. And few libertarians, however hard-core in theory, would choose a perfectly free society of desperate poverty over one slightly less free and very much wealthier. Almost everyone, in my experience, values most of the same things, although not with identical weights. It is easy for both libertarians and socialists to claim to support their principles whatever the consequences — when each group believes the consequences would be, on very nearly all dimensions, the most attractive society the world has ever seen.

If most people have at least roughly similar values, and if libertarians are correct about what sort of society libertarianism would produce, we need not justify our own values in order to argue for libertarianism. All we need do is to show that a libertarian society would be more attractive, by widely shared standards, than any alternative — wealthier, wiser, freer, more just, better for poor as well as rich. That is, after all, what most libertarians believe.

Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself

Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself is discussing now-in-vogue ethics workships, but this passage applies to all work-related workshops:

The cultural observer and sociologist Philip Rieff once told me that the modern idea of "workshops" is used to hide the obvious fact that, unlike real workshops, in which material goods are actually produced, the kinds of workshops we sit through today result in no products.

Burgers, Fries, and Lawyers

Burgers, Fries, and Lawyers, by Todd G. Buchholz (in Policy Review, No. 123) attacks the notion of suing fast-food restaurants for causing obesity. In the process, the article describes how efficiently fast-food restaurants deliver quality nutrition, measured in grams of protein per dollar (or cents per gram of protein):

On average, a gram of hamburger protein found in a Burger King Whopper or McDonald�s Big n� Tasty costs about 7 cents. Each sandwich provides 25 grams of protein. During a recent national campaign, both of these restaurant chains slashed their prices, bringing the dollar/protein ratio down to just 3.8 cents. The supermarket survey shows that a gram of protein from a ground beef patty and bun costs about 8 cents (leaner beef would cost somewhat more, standard ground beef somewhat less). Again, the cost of supermarket beef does not include the cost of accompaniments such as lettuce and tomato, nor does it include any time or labor costs for preparing a sandwich yourself.

Happy Birthday, Man of the Year 1938

You'd never know that today was the birthday of the TIME Person of the Year 1938. (I only realized what today was while reading a Reason retrospective on Columbine. What does that have to do with anything? Read the article.)

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has experienced amazing, sustained growth:

How big can Wal-Mart grow? With $256 billion in sales in the year to January 31st, the firm is already the world's biggest company by that measure. Its nearest retailing rival, a French supermarket chain called Carrefour, is less than half Wal-Mart's size. In America, Wal-Mart manages nearly 3,000 giant discount stores and hypermarket �supercentres�. Abroad, it has ventured into Mexico, Britain, Japan, Canada, Germany and China, as well as making smaller investments elsewhere. Eight out of ten American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year. Worldwide, more than 100m customers visit Wal-Mart stores every week.

Eight out of ten American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year. I guess I'm one of the two out of ten...

In fact, I seem to love Wal-Mart's "upmarket" competitors:

A number of retailers in America have gone up against Wal-Mart and survived — even thrived. They have deliberately avoided trying to do the same thing as Wal-Mart. Hence Target, based in Minneapolis, competes as a sort of �upmarket� Wal-Mart with low prices, but a more edited selection of goods. It also employs its own designers to create exclusive ranges. Costco, based in Issaquah, Washington state, operates a chain of membership discount-warehouses, which rival Wal-Mart's Sam's Club chain. Costco carries international brands and is particularly noted for its wines and surprises: it recently had $52,000 diamond rings for sale. Costco also has a reputation for paying its staff well above the average union rates.

Winning Back the Frustrated Golfer

Winning Back the Frustrated Golfer reports that golf's growth has stagnated, because three million of the 26 million adult golfers in the U.S. quit each year. It's too hard:

Winning pros make the game look easy. They usually score well below par (72 for most courses, the number of shots it should take expert golfers to play 18 holes). In contrast, only 0.1% of all golfers shoot par, says the U.S. Golf Association, which keeps rules and scores. The average score for men is 96 shots, or 24 shots over par. For women, the average is 108 shots.

Only 0.1% of all golfers shoot par.

2004 Wired Rave Awards

Peter Jackson, director of the three Lord of the Rings films, is interviewed in the 2004 Wired Rave Awards:

There were two shots of Gollum in Fellowship. We kept him in the shadows — he wasn't good enough for dialog or a close-up in daylight. We worked on him for another year, and he was in 300 shots in Two Towers. A month before delivery of that film, [visual effects supervisor] Joe Letteri insisted on redoing all of it because we'd finally gotten the code for Gollum right. Even so, after Two Towers, we still weren't happy with the subtlety of Gollum.

I have to say, Gollum will date those movies in a bad way. If they saved all their motion-capture data, audio, etc. though, they can keep refining those scenes and releasing new editions of the trilogy — year after year after year.

The Case for a War Tax - on Gas

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, opens his Case for a War Tax — on Gas with these words:

Gas prices are too low. There. I said it.

What's his argument for pumping up the federal gas tax from 18.4 cents per gallon to one dollar?

• Taxes are not an option; they're a necessity. The only relevant question is, Which taxes?
• Gas prices are strikingly lower in America than anywhere else in the world.
• Gas taxes are easy to collect.
• Gas taxes encourage conservation, accelerate fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, and cut traffic.
• Gas taxes help wean Americans off the oil that requires the U.S. to be so intimately involved in that wonderful cesspool of rival hatreds, the Middle East.

Certainly his first point is hard to dispute — but it doesn't argue for a gas tax (or against it). His second point carries no weight with me. ("If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?") His third point seems valid, but increasing the income-tax rate is just as easy.

What I find odd is that he didn't frame his fourth point in any kind of economic sense. An efficent gas tax internalizes economic externalities; it charges people for the pollution they produce. It's also a use tax; it charges people for the public roads they use.

I'm fairly ambivalent about his last point.

I don't see a gas tax going over well with the electorate, but I enjoyed this spin nonetheless:

The real reason so many Americans hate gas taxes is that they see them. The government can eat away at your life with payroll taxes, but because they are usually deducted before you get to see your paycheck, you don't notice. But the price of gas is broadcast on big placards across the country. When it goes up, eyebrows rise a notch. But that's a good thing! The government has to tax you somehow. Isn't it better to shift taxation to places where people notice it, so they can demand accountability? The gas tax is therefore a win-win conservative-liberal synthesis. It cuts the deficit, helps the environment and keeps the government fiscally honest and accountable.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Un-Electric Fridge

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Un-Electric Fridge reports on Pot-in-Pot, the Rolex award winner:

The device owes its cooling powers to a simple law of thermodynamics. When moisture comes into contact with dry air, it evaporates, causing an immediate drop in temperature. When the water in the sand between the two pots evaporates, the inner pot is kept cool, preserving the goods inside.

Although this invention is new to Nigeria, it seems that the Quakers, Amish, et al. have been using similar "technology" for quite some time (only using wooden boxes rather than clay pots).

Call It Puck Rock

Dropping the Gloves, Picking Up Guitars: Call It Puck Rock reports on a new genre of novelty tunes:

Mr. Spagnolo, 30 years old, is the lead vocalist in Two Man Advantage, a Long Island, N.Y., band in a tiny but feverish musical subgenre known as puck rock. He and his four band mates compose and play songs about hockey, a sport that for decades inspired very little music that couldn't be played on a Wurlitzer between whistles.

The article jokes about hockey music played on a Wurlitzer, but I noticed years ago that hockey games had much hipper, much edgier music than other sporting events.

Several NHL arenas have played their song "Hockey Junkie" during games. Royalty Records of New York signed the band and released its first CD, "Drafted," in 1998.

I really should get around to writing a song specifically for sporting events — another "We are the Champions" or something, just to collect royalties.

Italian hostage 'died a hero'

Italian hostage 'died a hero' shares an important piece of the story I had not yet heard:

The Italian who was the first civilian hostage to be killed in Iraq was today hailed as a hero who defied his captors and told them: "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies."

Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, confirmed Fabrizio Quattrocchi's death, and said that an Italian official had seen a videotape of the killing of the 36-year-old security guard, one of four Italians taken hostage on Monday.

The tape of his killing was sent to Qatar-based Arab television station Al-Jazeera, which said that it was 'too bloody' to show.

Mr Frattini said: "This boy, as the assassins were pointing the gun at him, tried to take off his hood and shouted: 'Now I'll show you how an Italian dies' ... he died as a hero."

The hostage makes a show of bravado...and Al-Jazeera decides the killing is "too bloody" to show. Hmm...

I'd heard simply that the hostage was a baker:

Like two of the other Italian hostages, Quattrocchi worked for a US-based security company. The fourth captive was employed by a Seychelles-based firm, Mr Frattini said.

Born in Sicily and raised in the northern city of Genoa, Quattrocchi used to work as a baker until he moved into security in 2000.

He took courses in the field before working as a nightclub bouncer and then a bodyguard, Italian newspapers, quoting his family, said. He was also a keen practitioner of martial arts.

Captain's Quarters - A Contractor Tells About His Mission

Captain's Quarters - A Contractor Tells About His Mission reprints an e-mail from a security contractor in Iraq:

As you may or may not know I am not on active duty as [Special Forces] this year. For the last 6 months, I have been one of the government contractors you may have heard about in the news operating in Iraq. I work with many other contractors who, like me, are on Authorized Absence (or discharged) from either Special Forces, Marine Recon, SEAL Teams, etc.

His description of Iraq is...different from CNN's:

The Iraqi people as a whole�love us. You read it right�love us. Terrorists may hate us and radicals in different ethnic groups within Iraq may hate each other�but in general, the common Iraqi people, Shias, Sunis, Kurds, Chaldeans, Turkomen, all have one thing in common�For one instant in time, they have hope for their future and the future of their children�and that hope is centered around one group of foreigners�you guessed it�Americans�the good old USA.

And there are dozens of coalition forces who help us�young military people from most of the free countries in the world are here�and willing to lay down their lives because America has led the way in spreading the good news of freedom and democracy to the oldest land on Earth.

He then shares some "recent examples of how we Americans deal with indigenous people and their dead and prisoners we take."

The marginal product of NBA players

Tyler Cowen's The marginal product of NBA players points to a Washington Times article on how Wayne Winston, professor of decision sciences at Indiana University, has tried to apply Moneyball style statistics to basketball — starting with a popular hockey statistic:

Winston ran the concept by Sagarin, a close friend since their days as fellow MIT undergraduate math majors. They settled on a variation of hockey's plus-minus system, in which players are judged by how well their team plays while they are in the game.

In the NHL, for instance, a player who is on the ice when his team tallies a goal earns a rating of +1; if the team yields a score, that same player would receive a -1 mark.

"Basketball's a team sport, and lots of things aren't tracked," Winston says. "Like taking the charge, going through a screen, tipping a ball to your teammate, saving a ball from going out of bounds. That's where our system comes in. All these little things should translate into points."

It takes a bit more analysis than that though:

One problem: Traditional plus-minus systems tend to overrate average players on