Tinkertoys and Tic-Tac-Toe

Tinkertoys and Tic-Tac-Toe further elucidates just how cool MIT can be:

In 1975, when Hillis and Brian Silverman were in their sophomore year [at MIT], they participated in a class project to build something digital from Tinkertoys. The students sat down to play. One made an invertera logic device that converts a binary 1 signal to a 0 signal and conversely. Another made an OR gate; if either of the device's two input signals happened to be a 1, then its output would also be a 1. It quickly became clear to the students that Tinkertoys were 'computation universal,' the theoretical term for a set of components from which a fully programmable computer can be constructed. Theoretical possibility was one thing, the practical demands of money and time another.

Mechanical Computing

Mechanical Computing reports that "Tim Robinson has built a computer capable of solving polynomial equations — using Meccano." What's Meccano? Well, according to Meccano, a Short History, Meccano was a construction toy — think "Erector set" — designed by Frank Hornby of Liverpool, England, in 1901. It was know as Meccanics Made Easy then. In 1908 it became Meccano. After a long run, Meccano Ltd. went into receivership in 1979.

Meccano is still available however. Their original French subsidiary, now an independantly owned company, still produces Meccano from a factory in France. Around 1990, Meccano France purchased the rights to the "Erector" trademark in the U.S.A. and started selling Meccano sets marked "Erector Meccano" in the U.S.A.. Exacto Ltd. of Buenos Aires, Argentina still produces Meccano.

The Brio Erector Meccano sets are pretty impressive.

But creating a working mechanical computer out of them is just plain crazy:

This model operates on principles very similar to Babbage's original designs, though the constraints of using only standard Meccano parts inevitably mean some aspects of the operation are somewhat different. The model can handle decimal numbers with up to four digits, and up to three orders of differences — similar in scope to the fragment of the original Difference Engine #1 which Babbage actually realized in 1832. There is no reason in principle (other than the limited world supply of 2¹/₂" gears and ratchet wheels!) why it could not be extended to arbitrary sized numbers and an arbitrary order of differences. Only two basic mechanisms are involved, those for the addition of individual decimal digits, and for the propagation of carries. The rest is repetition. The machine calculates reliably, producing a result about every 4 seconds — somewhat faster than they can be read off and written down. I have no doubt that if the Meccano of the 1920's had existed 100 years earlier, Babbage would have been entirely successful in his quest. It may be amusing one day to attach a Meccano steam engine to drive the mechanism and therefore realize "computing by steam".

PLATO People: A History Book Research Project

PLATO People: A History Book Research Project explores PLATO, the first on-line community:

Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of instant messaging, chat rooms, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations.

Some background:

The PLATO system, started way back in 1960, was developed as a technological solution to delivering individualized instruction, in thousands of subjects from algebra to zoology, to students in schools and universities across the nation. As the system grew and evolved, it became, pretty much by accident, the first major online community, in the current sense of the term. In the early 1970s, people lucky enough to be exposed to the system discovered it offered a radically new way of understanding what computers could be used for: computers weren't just about number-crunching (and delivering individualized instruction), they were about people connecting with people. For many PLATO people who came across PLATO in the 1970s, this was a mind-blowing concept.

Thirty Years with Computers

In Thirty Years with Computers, Jakob Nielsen makes the usual points — and a few points only a usuability expert would make:

I started using computers in 1974, when I was still in high school. My first computer took up an entire room and yet had only five kilobytes of RAM.

Punched paper tape was the main form of data input, and the operator console was an electric typewriter. No screens, no cursor. The CPU (central processing unit) ran at a speed of about 0.1MHz.

Despite its primitive nature, this early computer was much more pleasant to use than the monster mainframe I was subjected to a few years later, when I started at the university. The early, simple computer couldn't do much, though I did design a few text-based games for it. Still, it was a single-user computer — basically a PC the size of a room. When you used it, you had total control of the machine and knew everything it did, down to the spinning and whirring of the punched tape.

Although the bigger, newer mainframe had an actual CRT (cathode ray tube) screen, it also had obscure commands and horrible usability. Worst of all, it was highly alienating, because you had no idea what was going on. You'd issue commands, and some time later, you might get the desired result. There was no feeling of mastery of the machine. You were basically a supplicant to a magic oracle functioning beyond the ken of humankind.

Atari Classics 10 In 1 TV Games

I recently caught an ad for Atari Classics 10 In 1 TV Games — a retro Atari 2600 joystick with an entire 2600 system and 10 cartridges built right in:

Today's video games with all their bells and whistles had to begin somewhere, and that somewhere was your living room, in, say, 1982. Remember Asteroids, Missile Command, and Breakout? How about Centipede, Adventure and Gravitar? This TV Games Video System — just a "smart" joystick and nothing else — delivers 10 classic games in all. The joystick has the typical up-down-left-right movements, and single functions to select, start, and reset games. Front-and-center is a big, red fire button ("fire" being the only way to propel or kill things back then). The unit hooks up to your TV via those yellow and white AV output jacks (which should already be on your TV or VCR), and requires 4 "AA" batteries.

Build Your Own Model B-52

Build Your Own Model B-52 reports that "Wren Turbines, a UK based manufacturer of scale modeling jet engines (usually for remote control aircraft), has provided the engines for a 300-lb scale replica of Boeing's B-52." Check out the video:

B52_Test1.wmv
B52 008.wmv
B52 006.wmv

Of course, now we're all waiting for scale-model bombs — especially one with a scale-model Slim Pickens ridin' it down to ground zero. Which leads to this next piece, on the Davy Crockett, the smallest and lightest nuclear weapon ever deployed by the U.S. military:

The W54 warhead used on the Davy Crockett weighed just 51 pounds and was the smallest and lightest fission bomb (implosion type) ever deployed by the United States, with a variable explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the ammonium nitrate bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995), or 0.02 kilotons-1 kiloton. A 58.6 pound variant — the B54 — was used in the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), a nuclear land mine deployed in Europe, South Korea, Guam, and the United States from 1964-1989.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick, writer Karey KirkPatrick interviews himself about the new movie that recently started filming:

So we're six weeks into filming HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and the powers that be (PTB) thought it would be a good idea to kick it off with an interview with me, the screenwriter, since that is, after all, where this incarnation of the film started.

So I decided to interview myself because a) I think I�ll be harder on myself and know what sort of questions an interviewer might ask and b) no one has asked to interview me.

And why should they? Who am I? "Not Douglas Adams" is the answer that concerns most people. So with this in mind let�s proceed.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

Obesity Battle Should Be EU Priority, Experts Say

From Obesity Battle Should Be EU Priority, Experts Say:

Obesity is becoming the world's biggest health problem, experts said on Thursday, as they called for the newly expanded European Union to make fighting the flab a top priority.

They are pushing for controls on marketing and television advertising for children and a labeling scheme to distinguish which foods should be eaten as part of a healthy diet.

'Obesity has now become a strong candidate for being the number one health problem mankind is facing,' said Professor Claude Bouchard, president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity.

From The Nazi Seduction:

Nazi "nutritionists mounted a frontal attack on the Germans' excessive consumption of meat, sweets, and fat, and argued for a return to 'more natural' foods such as cereals, fresh fruit, and vegetables." Repudiating the public/private distinction central to liberal societies and liberal political philosophy, the Nazis declared that the personal was indeed the political. One slogan declared: "Nutrition is not a private matter!" Each person's diet was a matter of state concern, for the state was responsible for the health of the body politic. Hitler himself declared that "reforming the human lifestyle" was "far more important" than anything else he might accomplish. Hitler loathed obesity and launched campaigns against it both within the SS and in the polity at large.

Once you find Hitler's ringing endorsement of a progressive cause — vegetarianism, fitness, eugenics, gun control, whatever — it's entirely too tempting to use it as an argument against that cause.

Giant Mushroom Baffles Experts in Congo

From Giant Mushroom Baffles Experts in Congo:

The giant fungi stands 45 centimeters (18 inches) high and has three tiered caps on top of a broad stem. The bottom cap measures one meter across, the second one 60 cm and the top one is 24 cm wide, Botaba said.

Perhaps a long-lost Smurf tribe lives in the Republic of Congo?

But can you teach it?

As But can you teach it? points out, applications for MBA courses are counter-cyclical: they tend to rise when executive jobs are scarce and shrink when they are plentiful:

Applications to business schools are down this year — at least in America, where management education was born and where business schools still award about 85% of the world's business degrees. Kenneth Dunn, dean of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, says that applications for the full-time MBA programme, one of the country's best, are about 30% lower than this time last year. Allan Conway of the University of Calgary, and programme director of the MBA Roundtable, an industry body, estimates that applications this year for MBA programmes in America are down by between 15% and 25% on 2003.

Pump Power

Pump Power offers up some facts that may surprise the average driver:

And in spite of what you read in the paper — outrageous gasoline prices entered into Google gets you 15,000 links — its current inflation-adjusted price of $2 a gallon is about its median price over its 85-year existence, and with the exception of the 1980s spike, it has been steadily declining over the decades.

Better still, improving technology has increased the number of miles one can drive on a gallon of gasoline, to 22 in 2000 from about 13.5 in the early 1970s . So the cost of gasoline per mile driven has fallen nearly in half, from more than 13 cents to a bit more than seven cents. Meanwhile median income for a family of four (in inflation-adjusted dollars) has increased to more than $63,000 today from less than $46,000 in the 1970s.

Gas isn't just cheaper; it's cleaner too:

Burning gasoline is very much cleaner than it was 20 years ago too. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, lead emissions have nearly disappeared; carbon monoxide is down 62%, sulfur dioxide 52%, nitrogen dioxide 24% and ground-level ozone (smog) 18%.

Stop the Moral Equivalence

Garry Kasparov, the world's leading chess player, has written on opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Stop the Moral Equivalence:

The Islamic public-relations offensive is focused on proving that the West is corrupt and offers no improvement on the despots in charge throughout the Islamic world. At the same time, Al Jazeera isn't examining Vladimir Putin's war against Muslims in Chechnya. All of Chechnya is one big Abu Ghraib, but the Islamic world pays scant attention to the horrible crimes there because Mr. Putin shares their distaste for liberal democracy. The war is not about defending Muslims; it is about Western civilization and America as its representative.

Private Duty: Army Brings Home Its Dead Without Fanfare

Private Duty: Army Brings Home Its Dead Without Fanfare puts some things in perspective:

As of today, about 800 soldiers have died in Iraq. About 290,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in World War II; about 59,000 died in Vietnam.

Allergies May All Be in the Gut, Study Finds

Allergies May All Be in the Gut, and that may explain the rise of allergies and asthma:

Experiments on mice suggest that altering the balance of these so-called intestinal flora can affect the immune system.

"After antibiotics changed the mix of microbes in the gastrointestinal tract, the mice developed an allergic response in the lungs when exposed to common mold spores," Huffnagle said in a statement. "Mice that didn't receive the antibiotics were able to fight off the mold spores."

Huffnagle told the meeting that if the findings also hold true in people, they could help explain why asthma and allergies are on the rise.

"Anything you inhale, you also swallow," Huffnagle said in a statement.

"So the immune cells in your GI (gastrointestinal) tract are exposed directly to airborne allergens and particulates. This triggers a response from immune cells in the GI tract to generate regulatory T-cells, which then travel through the bloodstream searching the body for these antigens."

The immune system cells then block the development of allergic responses.

When antibiotics wipe out the bacterial population in the GI tract, yeast and fungi move in and multiply.

Fungi may secrete compounds called oxylipins, which can control the type and intensity of immune responses, Huffnagle told the meeting, being held in New Orleans.

Having too many oxylipins may prevent the development of the regulatory T-cells, in turn allowing for a hyperactive immune response against allergens such as pollen, he proposed.

The Nazi Seduction - The Nazi War on Cancer

The Nazi Seduction cites some fascinating passages from The Nazi War on Cancer:

Nazi nutritionists stressed the importance of a diet free of petrochemical dyes and preservatives; Nazi health activists stressed the virtues of whole-grain bread and foods high in vitamins and fiber. Many Nazis were environmentalists; many were vegetarians. [Including Hitler himself.] Species protection was a going concern, as was animal welfare. [Reichsmarschall Hermann G�ring barred vivisection in all scientific work noting the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments" and he threatened to commit to concentration camps "those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property."] Nazi doctors worried about overmedication and the overzealous use of X-rays; Nazi doctors cautioned against an unhealthy workplace and the failure of physicians to be honest with their patients — allowing momentous exclusions, of course, for the 'racially unfit' or undeserving.

Nazi Germany sounds a bit like California:

The Nazis had established the link of smoking to lung cancer decades before public health officials in Western democracies acknowledged this fact. In fact, Nazi Germany first established the tobacco-lung cancer link in the late 1930s. Smoking was banned in public places. Even soldiers were barred from smoking openly on the streets. "Sixty of Germany's largest cities banned smoking on streetcars in 1941 and smoking was banned in air-raid shelters. � Smoking was banned on all German city trains and buses in the spring of 1944; Hitler personally ordered the measure to protect the health of the young women serving as ticket takers." An educational campaign blanketed the Third Reich with information and propaganda urging pregnant women not to smoke for fear of harming the unborn child. The Nazi state attempted to "curb asbestos exposure" and to "secure food quality."
[...]
There is more. Nazi "nutritionists mounted a frontal attack on the Germans' excessive consumption of meat, sweets, and fat, and argued for a return to 'more natural' foods such as cereals, fresh fruit, and vegetables." Repudiating the public/private distinction central to liberal societies and liberal political philosophy, the Nazis declared that the personal was indeed the political. One slogan declared: "Nutrition is not a private matter!" Each person's diet was a matter of state concern, for the state was responsible for the health of the body politic. Hitler himself declared that "reforming the human lifestyle" was "far more important" than anything else he might accomplish. Hitler loathed obesity and launched campaigns against it both within the ss and in the polity at large. Mothers-to-be were urged to "avoid alcohol and nicotine during pregnancy and while nursing"; one poster that blanketed the Reich urged prospective mothers to "Drink soft cider instead!"

The Nazi Seduction - Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

One fascinating aspect of the whole Nazi phenomenon, as The Nazi Seduction points out, is how completely it eclipsed Stalin's atrocities:

As Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag, although "some eighteen million people passed through this massive system," we pay far less attention to Stalin's victims than we do to Hitler's. Many of the millions killed during the Stalin era were simply "driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp — a form of murder no less 'industrialized' and anonymous than that used by the Nazis." But no archival film-footage records these scenes that played out behind the Iron Curtain, no harrowing photos comparable to those that followed the liberation of the Nazi camps. Stalin's victims "haven't caught Hollywood's imagination in the same way. Highbrow culture hasn't been much more open to the subject."

Of course, Hitler committed his atrocities with a sense of style — which brings us to another point:

A kind of conceit often overtakes the cultivated, that immersion in things of beauty and great classical creations of art, architecture, and music, must, ineluctably, refine the soul and forestall brutalities and cruelties. It doesn't — or shouldn't — take much more than one viewing of films showing orchestras comprised of camp prisoners, hence themselves doomed, playing Mozart as condemned Jews, Slavs, and others marched to be gassed, to dispel any illusion that art will, in the end, spare us much of anything.

Reform in Russia: Free Market, Yes; Free Politics, Maybe

Although the US is the example of free-market capitalism, and the US is the example of a liberal democracy, that does not mean that overnight conversion to capitalism automatically means overnight conversion to liberal democracy. From Reform in Russia: Free Market, Yes; Free Politics, Maybe:

For more than a decade, Washington and its favorites in Moscow embraced a seductive theory: Free markets would anchor free democratic politics in post-Soviet Russia by creating prosperity and property owners. Now capitalism has vanquished communism across the former Soviet empire, destroyed Marxism as a global rival to America's free-market creed and, after years of turbulence, brought Russia robust growth. But Russians' faith in Western-style democracy has withered. Liberal economics and liberal politics, instead of being an inseparable tandem, have drifted apart. Many Russians even see the two as at odds.

Russia's economy has grown steadily, but it's ruled as a "managed democracy" by an ex-KGB agent:

Russia's economy, now mostly in private hands and primed by high oil prices, has grown steadily for five years, surging 7.2% last year. The number of mobile phones, a crude barometer of confidence, doubled last year to 36 million. The share of Russians who call themselves middle class jumped to 48% from 28% in 1999.

Also distinctly on the rise is support for President Putin and his drive to replace the cacophony of pluralistic politics with the calm of "managed democracy." The former KGB officer, who once described a strong state as part of Russia's "genetic code," in March won re-election in a landslide. While relentless cheerleading by state-controlled television had something to do with that, Mr. Putin clearly is in sync with the people.

Russia, he said when he first became its leader, "will not soon, if ever, become a second edition of, say, the U.S. or England, where liberal values have deep historic traditions." The oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed last fall on fraud and tax-evasion charges, recently said in a dispatch from prison that while Mr. Putin is "neither a liberal nor a democrat," he is "more liberal and democratic than 70% of the population."

Russia remains far from a Soviet-style autocracy. Outside of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have died, Mr. Putin hasn't crushed political opposition, only muffled it. The Kremlin keeps critical voices off television but mostly gives them free run in print media, which have less impact. Parliament, though stacked with yes-men eager to rubber-stamp Putin policies, is chosen through elections.

Of course, this doesn't sound too terribly different from 19th-century Great Britain, an empire, with a queen and a House of Lords — and a powerful navy used to ensure free trade overseas. Britain, of course, evolved into a liberal democracy (with a royal family) over time. Russia might very well do the same (minus the queen):

As the Soviet Union slouched toward oblivion in the late 1980s, Adranik Migranian, a reform-minded academic, put forward a thesis in a journal of ideas that appalled Western-oriented liberals: Russia couldn't leap from totalitarianism to democracy but must transit through a long period of authoritarian rule. Only then, he argued, could Russia prosper without political and ethnic tumult.

Mocked then as a reactionary, Mr. Migranian today gloats at the disarray of Russia's liberals, whom he calls "idiots completely divorced from reality." He views Mr. Putin's tough rule as a "second chance to do what I suggested before." Though not close to the Kremlin, Mr. Migranian coined its best-known slogan: "managed democracy." He says he came up with the term in late 1993 after Yeltsin aides complained about an article in which he called a new constitution authoritarian.

His model is China, which he hails as proof that market authoritarianism is a better recipe for modernization than market democracy -- and that harsh methods are sometimes needed. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 was "absolutely correct," he argues, because "one billion people are more important than a few thousand students shouting stupid slogans." China's Communists, big fans of Mr. Migranian's theories, have translated two of his books and regularly invite him to Beijing.

Other Russian reformers have looked to Chile, where Augusto Pinochet overthrew a socialist government in 1973 and imposed radical market economics in tandem with a brutal dictatorship. Among Gen. Pinochet's most fervent admirers is Vitaly Naishul, a mathematician who in the 1980s wrote an underground tract called "Another Life." Working then at the State Planning Commission, he saw communism's failures up close and embraced unyielding "Chicago School" free-market theory with a gusto that unnerved even dissident economists.

In 1990, Mr. Naishul led a group of young Russian economists to Santiago to discuss market reform and meet Gen. Pinochet, then still head of the Chilean army. "He is a political genius," says Mr. Naishul. He praises President Putin for realizing that Russia can gain from free-market methods but "cannot copy Western democracy." One of the architects of Gen. Pinochet's economic program, Jose Pi�era, recently attended a conference at Mr. Putin's country home.

Mr. Naishul has visited Chile five times. He has a medal, given him by a Chilean economist, inscribed "Mission Accomplished." Overturning an ingrained economic system, Mr. Naishul says, inevitably triggers pain and resistance, and to continue, the effort requires either political consensus or force. "The level of repression depends on the level of resistance," he says, adding that Russia was initially slowed by foolish mimicry of Western politics.

"We tried to be good pupils in the beginning. We attempted, in a very primitive way, to imitate Western systems. It didn't work," he says. Instead of a stable, pluralistic system, the country got a "spoiled democracy" of chaos and corruption. But the people want clear orders, he says, citing a Soviet-era maxim: "One bad boss is better than two good ones."

Naturally, we have to ask if Iraq is ready for democracy.

Researcher Dies After Accidental Ebola Jab

At least we hear about these accidents nowadays. From Researcher Dies After Accidental Ebola Jab:

A researcher in a heavily guarded Siberian virology laboratory died after pricking herself with a syringe containing the deadly Ebola virus, a spokeswoman from the lab said Tuesday.

"It was an accident or an unlucky coincidence. Her hand just slipped and she jabbed herself," the spokeswoman said.

Ebola begins with a high fever and can lead to massive internal bleeding. It kills between 50 and 90 percent of victims, depending on the strain of the virus, for which there is no known cure. It is one of the world's most feared diseases.

Most outbreaks have occurred in Africa, far from the Siberian lab where the senior technician was experimenting on guinea pigs when the accident happened on May 5. She died two weeks later.

Set deep in Siberia, a four-hour flight from Moscow, the state-owned Vector research center at Novosibirsk does research into deadly diseases such as SARS and anthrax.

Along with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, it is one of only two places on earth with official stockpiles of smallpox, which killed around 300 million people last century.

After the accident, the woman was hospitalized in a ward specially equipped to contain virulent diseases. Anyone who came into contact with her was put under observation for three weeks.

Hair Is a Dead Giveaway

An interesting factoid from Hair Is a Dead Giveaway:

African hair grows more slowly and is more fragile than European hair, but Asian hair grows the fastest and has the greatest elasticity.

Evangelicals Give U.S. Foreign Policy An Activist Tinge

American evangelical Christians "are embracing international causes with the same moral fervor they have long brought to domestic matters." From Evangelicals Give U.S. Foreign Policy An Activist Tinge:

Led in part by the irrepressible Mr. Horowitz, a neoconservative at the Hudson Institute think tank, evangelicals are embracing international causes with the same moral fervor they have long brought to domestic matters. Since 1998, they have helped win federal laws to fight religious persecution overseas, to crack down on international sex trafficking and to help resolve one of Africa's longest and bloodiest civil wars, in southern Sudan.

In so doing, evangelical groups, once among America's staunchest isolationists, are making a mark on U.S. foreign policy. They have tipped the balance, at least for the moment, in the perennial rivalry in Washington between "realists," who believe the U.S. has limited capacity to change the world and shouldn't try, and "idealists," who strive to give U.S. conduct a moral purpose.

This, of course, sounds a lot like the British Empire of the 19th century:

This activism harks back to another world power that struggled to balance ambitions for gold and God: the British Empire. Though driven in its early years by slave traders and other rogues, the British Empire later was increasingly influenced by evangelicals — who in 1807 succeeded in abolishing the global slave trade. Fifty years later, the "Christian element" was hotly debated in London, when some critics blamed a mutiny by colonial Indian troops on heavy-handed Christian moralizing. Religion played a role in Britain's push into the Mideast later in the 19th century, too, after William Gladstone, a deeply Christian prime minister, railed against a massacre of Bulgarian Christians by Ottoman Turks.

As in today's Washington, Britain's imperial evangelicals made common cause with the neoconservatives of their era, known as liberals. The liberals' mission was spreading representative government and free trade. ("The two pioneers of civilization, Christianity and commerce, should be inseparable," said David Livingstone, the famous explorer of Africa, in 1857.) Mr. Horowitz says U.S. evangelicals are driven by the same "tough-minded Christianity" that propelled Britain's empire.

Naturally, Muslim extremists view any conflict with the US as a religious war. Acting explicitly on behalf of Christian interests supports that point of view — and may conflate democracy and rule of law with Christianity.

Gum Returns to Singapore After 12 Years

Singapore wouldn't work as a fictional nation. No one would find it remotely plausible. From Gum Returns to Singapore After 12 Years:

Ultra-tidy Singapore is lifting its notorious ban on chewing gum after 12 long years — but only for registered users. Gum dealers face jail if they break the rules.

Before Singaporeans think about unwrapping a pack of the Wrigley's Orbit gum that's just started selling here — and only in pharmacies — they have to submit their names and ID card numbers. If they don't, pharmacists who sell them gum could be jailed up to two years and fined $2,940.

Why did Singapore back down on its ban?

Gum became a sticking point months ago in Singapore's free trade talks with Washington, when Representative Philip Crane of the U.S. state of Illinois — home of chewing gum giant Wrigley — pressed the issue.

Singapore compromised, agreeing to allow only the sale of "therapeutic" gum in pharmacies. The free trade pact took effect Jan. 1.

The Health Sciences Authority, responding to questions from The Associated Press, said it's allowed the sale of 19 "medicinal" and "dental" gum products.

Wrigleys' Orbit, which the company claims is good for teeth, hit pharmacy shelves just days ago. Pfizer's Nicorette, a nicotine gum meant to help smokers kick their addiction, has been available since March.

Mayor Tells Sorcerers to Banish Evil Spirits

It's good to see responsible government in an African nation. From Mayor Tells Sorcerers to Banish Evil Spirits:

The mayor of Niger's capital has ordered "qualified" sorcerers to chase away evil spirits reported to be making terrifying appearances at night.

Nightlife lovers in Niamey have repeatedly complained of a woman who appears from nowhere, curses and threatens them before vanishing as if she had "evaporated." Young women in skimpy outfits have been particular targets for the evil spirits.

"Given the rumor which has been circulating for at least three weeks now of strange apparitions stalking people, notably young women, I have ordered all the elderly chiefs of Niamey to resort to the traditional sacrifices, with qualified people, to stop this curse," Niamey Mayor Jules Oguet said Monday.

Without state regulation of sorcerers, who knows what kind of unqualified quacks might swindle the public?

Mortensen to Speak at Event in Denmark

When I read the headline, Mortensen to Speak at Event in Denmark, I had to ask, Does Aragorn speak Danish?:

Viggo Mortensen, who played King Aragorn in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, will be the main speaker at Denmark's annual Fourth of July celebration.

Mortensen, whose father emigrated to the United States, will speak at the annual Rebild festival in northern Denmark — billed as the biggest Fourth of July party outside of the United States.

Born in New York City, Mortensen spent several summers in Denmark as a teenager and speaks some Danish.

"All Danes consider him to be nearly Danish," the organizers said in a statement Monday.

Mortensen will be joined by Etta Cameron, an 84-year-old American-born gospel and jazz singer who lives in the capital, Copenhagen.

Danes and descendants of emigrants have celebrated the U.S. Independence Day with barbecues, square dancing and country music outside Rebild, a village 155 miles northwest of Copenhagen, since 1912.

Malleus Maleficarum

I recently stumbled across an on-line copy of the Malleus Maleficarum (literally, The Hammer of Witches), a witch-hunting guide from 1486. It's as horrifyingly bad as some of the Monty Python skits mocking medieval justice. I particularly enjoyed this chapter's title:

Question IX
Whether Witches may work some Prestidigatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body.

Humor aside, the Malleus Maleficarum is a pretty scary document.

Video Game Helps Players Lose Weight

For a long time I've felt that we needed a physical video game. Video Game Helps Players Lose Weight describes how Dance Dance Revolution works:

The premise of DDR is simple: Players stand on a 3-foot square platform with an arrow on each side of the square — pointing up, down, left and right. The player faces a video screen that has arrows scrolling upward to the beat of a song chosen by the player. As an arrow reaches the top of the screen, the player steps on the corresponding arrow on the platform.
[...]
More than 1 million copies of DDR's home version have been sold in the United States, said Jason Enos, product manager at Konami Digital Entertainment-America, which distributes the Japanese game in the United States. About 6.5 million copies have been sold worldwide.

The home version, which costs about $40 for a game and $40 for a flat plastic dance pad, includes a 'workout mode' that can track how many calories the user burns while playing.

The game was designed to be fun. But 'what the creators knew is that this is a physical game no matter how you dice it,' said Enos, who says he has lost 30 pounds playing DDR. 'At some level there's going to be people who want to focus on that element of the game for their own physical health or for exercise.'

One pediatrician is so convinced of the health benefits that he's planning a six-month study of DDR and weight loss among 12- to 14-year-olds, in an effort to give the game credibility among physicians.

Anyone who's seen Lost in Translation should be familiar with the arcade version.

Bucking Tradition, Bull-Riding Fans Cheer for the Beasts

Bucking Tradition, Bull-Riding Fans Cheer for the Beasts reports on a new facet to bull-riding:

Competitive bull-riding, a staple of the Old West, has a new set of stars: the bulls, some of which these days are more famous than their riders.

Professional Bull Riders Inc., which stages competitions, aims to draw in more animal lovers, so it promotes the bulls aggressively. 'Our philosophy is that there are two athletes in every ride,' says Randy Bernard, chief executive of the Colorado Springs, Colo., organization.

Just like the riders, the bulls now have their own rankings, statistics, sponsorships, training programs and devoted fans. Top bulls also have their own line of stuffed animals, figurines and T-shirts.

Genius.

It won't work for bull-fighting until they get rid of the picadores (who spear the bull in the neck before he gets to "fight" the matadore).

In Combat, Marine Put Theory to Test, Comrades Believe

In Combat, Marine Put Theory to Test, Comrades Believe describes an instance of hand-to-hand combat in Iraq:

Around 12:15 p.m., Cpl. Dunham's team came to an intersection and saw a line of seven Iraqi vehicles along a dirt alleyway, according to Staff Sgt. Ferguson and others there. At Staff Sgt. Ferguson's instruction, they started checking the vehicles for weapons.

Cpl. Dunham approached a run-down white Toyota Land Cruiser. The driver, an Iraqi in a black track suit and loafers, immediately lunged out and grabbed the corporal by the throat, according to men at the scene. Cpl. Dunham kneed the man in the chest, and the two tumbled to the ground.

Two other Marines rushed to the scene. Private First Class Kelly Miller, 21, of Eureka, Calif., ran from the passenger side of the vehicle and put a choke hold around the man's neck. But the Iraqi continued to struggle, according to a military report Pfc. Miller gave later. Lance Cpl. William B. Hampton, 22, of Woodinville, Wash., also ran to help.

As Marines' martial arts training aims to make the tough tougher explains, the Marines have finally integrated unarmed martial arts into their training:

The tan belt is the first of 10 rungs on the new Marine Corps martial arts training ladder. For the first time, all 172,000 active-duty Marines, from the commandant on down to the newest recruit, must earn tan belts — and by no later than 2003. And all are encouraged to progress to higher belt levels throughout their careers.

The tan-belt course includes 27.5 hours of instruction in 49 killing techniques to be used on enemies who are too close to stop with bullets or grenades. Among them are bayonet thrusts, knife slashes, "vertical stomps," choke holds (and how to break them), leg-sweep throws, eye gouges, and more.

From my perspective, 27.5 hours isn't much time to drill 49 "killing" techniques. A typical jiu-jitsu blue-belt probably has 200 hours of training — and relies on the same half-dozen moves to submit an opponent.

This sounds straight out of jiu-jitsu class:

The urge to say, "I quit" must be considerable during a drill called "bull in the ring." Today's variant has a passing resemblance to college wrestling, only with eye gouges, face rips, and other unsporting techniques.

The unlucky "bull" has to grapple with seven other Marines in rapid succession, for several minutes each, starting each time from a seated, back-to-back position. By the time the bull faces the third opponent, exhaustion has set in — with four more fresh adversaries to go. The others cheer the bull on before and after they take him on.

"You've got a whole lot of heart, staff sergeant," one calls out. There is also some coaching: "You've got to get underneath that jaw or you're not getting any pressure on the carotid."

And I may have to integrate this into class, just for kicks:

Occasionally an instructor will toss a "weapon of opportunity" within reach — a (plastic) knife, say, or a rock — to give whichever grappler can grab it first a chance to finish his adversary quickly.

But let us return to the original narrative:

A few yards away, Lance Cpl. Jason Sanders, 21, a radio operator from McAlester, Okla., says he heard Cpl. Dunham yell a warning: "No, no, no — watch his hand!"

What was in the Iraqi's hand appears to have been a British-made "Mills Bomb" hand grenade. The Marines later found an unexploded Mills Bomb in the Toyota, along with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.


A Mills Bomb user pulls a ring pin out and squeezes the external lever — called the spoon — until he's ready to throw it. Then he releases the spoon, leaving the bomb armed. Typically, three to five seconds elapse between the time the spoon detaches and the grenade explodes. The Marines later found what they believe to have been the grenade's pin on the floor of the Toyota, suggesting that the Iraqi had the grenade in his hand — on a hair trigger — even as he wrestled with Cpl. Dunham.

None of the other Marines saw exactly what Cpl. Dunham did, or even saw the grenade. But they believe Cpl. Dunham spotted the grenade — prompting his warning cry — and, when it rolled loose, placed his helmet and body on top of it to protect his squadmates.

The scraps of Kevlar found later, scattered across the street, supported their conclusion. The grenade, they think, must have been inside the helmet when it exploded. His fellow Marines believe that Cpl. Dunham made an instantaneous decision to try out his theory that a helmet might blunt the grenade blast.

Cpl. Dunham died of his injuries — eventually — but he has been recommended for a Medal of Honor. He saved the two other Marines — and the Iraqi, until he got up and another Marine shot him down.

Normally, a modern grenade is lethal out to five meters and causes 50% casualties out to 15 meters.

News Coverage as a Weapon

News Coverage as a Weapon contrasts our current "defeat" in Iraq with previous wars:

Viewed in this context, the American "defeat" in Iraq projected by the press must be understood as being something wholly different from anything that has gone before. The 800 odd US military deaths suffered since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom a year ago are less than the number who died in the Slapton Sands D-Day training exercise in 1944. The campaign in Iraq has hardly scratched American strength, which has in fact grown more potent in operational terms over the intervening period. Nor has it materially affected the US manpower pool or slowed the American economy, which is actually growing several times faster than France, which is not militarily engaged. The defeat being advertised by the press is a wholly new phenomenon: one which leaves the vanquished army untouched and the victor devastated; the economy of the vanquished burgeoning and that of the victor in destitution; the territory of the loser unoccupied and that of the winner garrisoned. It is an inversion of all the traditional metrics of victory and defeat. That the assertion is not instantly ludicrous is an indication of the arrival of a new and potentially revolutionary form of political wafare.

Modern war is fought in the media:

The emergence of the press and media as decisive implements of warfare arose from changes in the nature of late twentieth century war itself. If battlefield reality was paramount in earlier wars it was because literally everyone was there. During the Civil War 15 percent of the total white population took the field, a staggering 75% of military age white males. During the Great War the major combatants put even higher proportions of their men on the line. Even after World War 2 it was still natural for children to ask, 'Daddy what did you do in the War?' and expect an answer. Reality affected everybody. But beginning with the Vietnam War and continuing into the current Iraqi campaign, the numbers of those actually engaged on the battlefield as a proportion of the population became increasingly small. Just how small is illustrated by comparing a major battle in the Civil War, Gettysburg, which inflicted over 50,000 casualties on a nation of 31.5 million to a "major" battle in Iraq, Fallujah, in which 10 Marines died in the fighting itself, on a population of 300 million. A war in which the watchers vastly outnumbered the fighters was bound to be different from when the reverse was true. A reality experienced by the few could be overridden by a fantasy sold to the many. This exchange of proportions ensured that the political and media dimensions of the late twentieth century American wars dwarfed their military aspects.

Iraq: the "Duh!" Theory

I can see the War Nerd's point. From Iraq: the "Duh!" Theory:

And how hard is it to turn a 17-year-old into a guerrilla? Man, if they'd had that option when I was a senior I never would've had to take another vocational aptitude test. "Guerrilla fighter" would've been my first, second and third choice. Now there are hordes of Iraqi teenagers with no jobs and no money who get the chance to fire at Americans on the streets where the USAF can't swoop down on them.

Diocletian on Why Bush Should Read Newspapers

Diocletian on Why Bush Should Read Newspapers:

"How often," was he accustomed to say, "is it the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign! Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects. By such infamous arts," added Diocletian, "the best and wisest princes are sold to the venal corruption of their courtiers."

Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization

Conservative sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card makes an argument I hadn't heard before, in Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization:

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

In order to claim that they are deprived, you have to change the meaning of 'marriage' to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.

I'm more likely to agree with this point:

You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

Emeka Okafor (and Why This B-Ball Trivia is Important)

I don't follow basketball, so I hadn't heard of Emeka Okafor until now:

The 6'10", 252 pound star center on the U. of Connecticut's national championship basketball team (men's division) is probably headed to the NBA a year early because he's on track to graduate in three years with a 3.8 GPA in Finance. He scored 1310 on the SAT. He is the son of Nigerian immigrants (his father is working on his third master's degree), but was born in Houston.

Impressive. But here's Steve Sailer's real point:

Ever since the great Hakeem Olajuwon burst on the college basketball scene in 1981, seemingly heralding a tidal wave of African talent, the number of African star basketball players has proven disappointing. Most have come from the elite (for example, Duke's Luol Deng is the son of a former Sudanese cabinet minister), with only Manute Bol coming from the poor masses. My impression is that poor people in Africa are significantly shorter than either rich people in Africa or African Americans, and thus haven't contributed many big men to the game.

And here's where his point gets a bit uncomfortable:

I suspect that many of the same conditions that cut down on the height of Africans also hurt their IQ scores, which tend to average a full 15 points below those of African-Americans. As I wrote recently, a UN report pointed to several vitamin and mineral deficiencies in the diet of poor Third Worlders that can significantly cut the national IQs of poor countries.

My point is that the average IQ found in African nations of 70 looks partly environmental. Things like nutritional deficiencies, infections, lack of mental stimulation, etc. probably contribute at least partly to the gap between Africans at 70 and African-Americans at 85. (Since African-Americans are only about 17-18% white, according to the latest studies, white genes are unlikely to explain all this gap.) Some of these environmental problems are not particularly daunting. Steps like iodizing salt would certainly cost billions of dollars, but definitely not hundreds of billions and probably not even tens of billions of dollars. If iodizing salt and fortifying grains with iron, steps taken decades ago in America to eliminate cretinism and other health problems, would raise the continent's average IQ from 70 to, say, 75, that would be a wonderful first step. Certainly, nobody else has come forward with a more constructive suggestion about what to do about Africa.

Caesarean sections & IQ

Caesarean sections & IQ posits an interesting theory:

As you would expect, there's a moderate relationship between brain volume and IQ (around 0.4 when the brain is measured by the highly accurate MRI) — after all, human brains got radically larger over the last 5 million years as we got smarter, so there is clearly a connection. One limiting factor, though, is that big-headed babies are more dangerous to birth. Big skulls don't pass through the birth canal as well. The invention of the Caesarean section has relieved that bottleneck in much of the world. Perhaps some of the Flynn Effect of rising scores on IQ tests stems from more bigger-headed babies being born and fewer women with the genes to give birth to bigger-headed babies dying in childbirth?

More on Height

Steve Sailer claims, in More on Height, that Europeans have caught up to Americans in height, because they used to be significantly inbred:

There's another reason why Europeans have caught up with Americans in height that's genetic but not racial — the recent decline in inbreeding in Europe. Most Englishmen married somebody living 900 feet away on average, according to one study (which found that the introduction of the bicycle almost doubled that traditional radius or romance). People tended to become some kind of cousins to most of their neighbors via multiple genealogical pathways. Inbred people tend to be shorter.

Americans, on the other hand, tended to be well mixed up, both by the trip across the ocean and by subsequent moves within America. It doesn't take much to eliminate most of the deficits caused by inbreeding. So, if a Puritan man married a Puritan woman in Boston, and they were from towns 30 miles apart in England, their kids wouldn't suffer much deficit. Repeat for another generation and it's almost all gone.

There were some exceptions to this process. Italian immigrants tended to cluster on streets according to their home village, and they stayed quite short. But WWII shook up Italian-American society and the next generation tended to marry anybody Italian, and the generation after married anybody Catholic.

But, now, sedentary Europeans have cars and find their mates over a much larger radius, so the inbreeding depression that held them down for a long time is no more of a problem for them than it is for Americans.

Inbred Puritans — and I was just reading some H.P. Lovecraft last night...

A Beautiful Mind

In A Beautiful Mind, Mark Bowden explains how NFL offensive linemen aren't big dumb jocks; they're skilled technicians — like the dancing hippos in Fantasia:

Despite their manly job descriptions, offensive linemen are a bit like the dancing hippos in Fantasia. Footwork is as careful and deliberate for them as for a ballerina.

The marriage tax

In Gay Marriage Penalty, Virginia Postrel notes the good news for gays whose marriage isn't recognized by the federal government: they don't pay a marriage penalty. Postrel's The marriage tax explains:

How did marriage and taxes form their unholy union? As public-finance economists point out, most Americans want the tax system to do three things: to be progressive, to treat households with the same incomes equally, and to treat all individuals with the same incomes equally, whether or not they're married.

The problem is, we can have any two of those things at the same time, but not all three.

This history explains a lot:

Once upon a time, when the income tax was new, individuals were taxed as individuals. When you got married, you didn't have to tell the feds. That's still the case in much of Europe.

But in the 1920s and 1930s, savvy taxpayers in community-property states like California, where family law treats a married couple's income as belonging to both spouses equally, figured out that they could save on taxes by dividing their household income down the middle and having each spouse report half. Since in most cases, the wife earned much less than the husband, the result was to slash the amount of federal tax due from married couples. Federal courts upheld the income splitting.

By the end of World War II, other states were feeling intense pressure to adopt community-property laws to save their residents federal taxes, even though that would mean overturning long legal traditions governing marriage and divorce. To avoid that prospect, in 1948 Congress revised the tax code, allowing all couples to split their income in half for tax purposes.

The new law created the joint return-and a big tax bonus for many married couples. No one was paying a marriage penalty yet, but the tax code was no longer neutral with regards to marital status.

By the late 1960s, however, the growing number of single taxpayers started to notice that they were getting the shaft. Just because a young man had no stay-at-home wife to split his income with, why should he pay a higher tax than a married colleague making the same income?

So in 1969 Congress changed the tax law again, declaring that a single person's tax liability couldn't be more than 120 percent of that paid by a couple with the same income.

The greater the marriage penalty, the fewer married women work:

Various tax bills have tinkered with the treatment of marriage since then. But the greatest change occurred as a side effect of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which left only two tax brackets, 15 percent and 28 percent. This change demonstrated the greatest effect of the marriage penalty: Far more than men or single women, married women act like supply-siders. Cut their marginal tax rates, and they get jobs. Raise them, and they stay home.
[...]
After the 1986 law flattened federal rates, the average marginal tax rate faced by such married women dropped to 38 percent, and they began going to work in dramatically higher numbers. According to a 1995 study by the economist Nada Eissa of the University of California, Berkeley, the percentage of top-income married women who worked jumped from 46 percent to 55 percent-a 19 percent increase. Those who already had jobs increased their hours by 13 percent.

ClassicNotes: Emily Brontë

ClassicNotes: Emily Brontë explains how the Brontës created something that sounds shockingly like Dungeons & Dragons:

Life at home was much better for Emily and her siblings: in their isolated childhood on the moors, they developed an extremely close relationship partly based on their mutual participation in a vibrant game of make-believe. In 1826 their father brought Branwell a box of wooden soldiers, and each child chose a soldier and gave him a name and character: these were to be the foundation of the creation of a complicated fantasy world, which the Brontës actively worked on for 16 years. They made tiny books containing stories, plays, histories, and poetry written by their imagined heros and heroines. Unfortunately, only ones written by Charlotte and Branwell survive: of Emily's work we only have her poetry, and indeed her most passionate and lovely poetry is written from the perspectives of inhabitants of 'Gondal.' For Emily, it seems that the fantastic adventures in imaginary Gondal coexisted on almost an equal level of importance and reality with the lonely and mundane world of household chores and walks on the moor.

Each child chose a miniature soldier and gave him a name and character. Then they created a complicated fantasy world. If only they had funny dice...

The Fruits of Appeasement

Victor Davis Hanson doesn't pull any punches in The Fruits of Appeasement:

Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran�s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran�s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979 — and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.

His point: military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost:

The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler�s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of �appeasement� — a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of �deterrence� and �military readiness.�

So too did Western excuses for the Russians� violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence — not the United Nations — and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan�s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter�s accommodation or Richard Nixon�s d�tente.

As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty — and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost.

Hy-Wire Driving Is a Gas

Hy-Wire Driving Is a Gas in General Motors' hydrogen-powered concept car:

Eyeing the shiny silver-and-glass bubble with no acceleration or brake pedals, I muttered something about how non-adaptable other people are and climbed into the driver's seat. In almost instant retribution, I watched my feet writhe about the floor seeking just one pedal to push. My passenger, a Hy-wire design engineer, rolled his eyes and pushed a button. A footrest whirred into place at my feet.

In addition to a notable lack of floor pedals, the Hy-wire also has no engine.

Powered by 200 fuel cells inside an 11-inch-thick chassis fixed like a giant skateboard under the car, the Hy-wire's most exciting element is its environmental footprint. It has none. According to General Motors, the car takes in only air and leaves behind nothing but water.
[...]
Named for the technology it uses to replace conventional steering, accelerating and transmission controls, Hy-wire has electronic wires in its chassis instead of mechanical parts. Those wires are connected to a docking port, sitting a few feet forward of the driver's seat. With the press of another button, the controller moved toward me, with a futuristic whizzing sound.

The vertical handles, or paddles, work like a motorcycle -- twist to go, squeeze to stop. Steering is done by rotating the control mechanism like a joystick, causing the wheels to turn.

International Standard Paper Sizes

As an American with a computer printer, I was vaguely aware of European metric paper, with its "scientific" naming scheme (e.g., A4) and slightly different proportions. International Standard Paper Sizes explains it all:

ISO 216 defines the A series of paper sizes based on these simple principles:

• The height divided by the width of all formats is the square root of two (1.4142).
• Format A0 has an area of one square meter.
• Format A1 is A0 cut into two equal pieces. In other words, the height of A1 is the width of A0 and the width of A1 is half the height of A0.
• All smaller A series formats are defined in the same way. If you cut format An parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces of paper, these will have format A(n 1).
• The standardized height and width of the paper formats is a rounded number of millimeters.

A4 paper is 210 mm � 297 mm. US "letter" paper is 216 mm � 279 mm — 6 mm wider and 18 mm shorter.

A benefit of the constant square-root-of-two aspect ratio is that you can always fit two pages of one size onto the next larger size, side by side — or two pages, reduced, on the same size paper, with no loss. And you can always scale a page up or down to a larger or smaller paper size, with no loss.

Gamers Spurning TV, Movies

From Gamers Spurning TV, Movies:

Specifically, of the 180 million people who play video games, 52 percent said they are watching less television as a result, 47 percent are going to cinemas less often, and 41 percent watch fewer movies at home, according to the video-game industry's main trade association. The ESA released the study Thursday at the E3 video-game conference here.

And 87 percent said they leave the house less often.

A Delicate Balance

A Delicate Balance describes an elaborate game created last year by the McCombs School of Business in Austin teaches students about handling the delicate balance of business and ethics, and the sometimes high moral price of too much cost cutting:

'I just killed 350 people,' said a dazed David Marye, InfoMaster's 25-year-old chief ethics officer. 'I made a bad call, and people died. It's going to be hard to sleep tonight.'

Luckily for Mr. Marye, both InfoMaster and the terrorist attack were fictitious, part of an elaborate game created last year by the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. Three made-up student-run companies competed in the cutthroat computer-hardware industry, all trying to maximize revenue, keep costs down and beat back competitors. But the prizes — $11,000 and the chance to perform in front of a high-level, real-world executive panel — were real.

I love this aspect:

The results were eye opening — and painful. Idealistic students, who started the game preaching virtue, succumbed to the everyday challenges of making their numbers and whipping the competition. Buying cheaper components or hiring cheaper workers would allow more production. Not spending resources on training or quality control would let them get new products to markets faster, but there might be a price to pay down the road. The game proved so realistic that some students were stunned that, under pressure, they readily chose corner-cutting paths they had vowed never to take.

Where did this game come from?

Steven Tomlinson, a finance lecturer who has a background in theater, pushed to put students under pressure and throw choices at them. He hired Allen Varney, an Austin-based designer of video and board games, and consulted with a soap-opera scriptwriter and corporate executives. Scripts were written, rules devised and software created to track decisions.

Allen Varney, the designer of "video and board" games, actually has a long history of designing paper-and-pencil roleplaying games (à la Dungeons & Dragons).

A Trip Back in Time With Baggage

A Trip Back in Time With Baggage reviews the latest PBS House reality show, Colonial House:

Everything about the series is as accurate as anthropologists could make it. Our colonists, clad in the pantaloons and corsets of the era, arrive under sail. Unlike the originals, the new settlers (initially, there are 19) find four period houses already built for them, but otherwise they are on their own. In the cold of a May Maine, their only warmth comes from fires they must start with flints, using wood they must chop themselves. The only bathroom is a field or the forest floor, and for families with indentured servants (some young Britons) there is no privacy at home either. Everything necessary for their survival must be acquired through their own labor — carrying water, milking goats, scrounging for edibles — every day, all day.

Summer Reading

Summer Reading discusses a few new — or newly popular — genres hitting bookstands this summer:

Another wave of new books has been dubbed 'hen lit' (as in grown-up chick lit) for women of a certain age, and tend to deal with married rather than single life. These books, which didn't make our list, include Simon & Schuster's 'The Master Quilter' by Jennifer Chiaverini, about a circle of quilters facing troubled marriages and business failure, and Random House's 'Queen of the Big Time' by Adriana Trigiani, which follows a woman from youth to her sixties, who moves from farm to city. In addition to hen lit, says Simon & Schuster Publisher David Rosenthal, look for books about people with illnesses and people who leave their jobs. 'We call it 'sick lit' and 'quit lit,' ' Mr. Rosenthal says. 'We're doing whole lists of this.'

Fears of Terrorism Crush Plans For Liquefied-Gas Terminals

Protestors are fighting against new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, afraid that the new terminals — or the tankers that deliver the LNG — might become terrorist targets. From Fears of Terrorism Crush Plans For Liquefied-Gas Terminals:

The main opposition group, Green Futures, has published a series of brochures based on Dr. Fay's findings that show how an attack against a tanker and the proposed terminal might trigger an enormous LNG spill.

Upon contact with the relatively warm water, the liquid would begin vaporizing back into a gas, and under some circumstances a spark could cause part of the gas to ignite. Green Futures argues that the resulting fire would incinerate as much as five square miles of Fall River and another four square miles of Somerset, Mass., just across the Taunton River from the terminal site. Buildings would catch fire, and humans exposed to the heat radiation could suffer severe skin burns, the group warns.
[...]
The night after the meeting, Green Futures sponsored a meeting at a local church hall where one of its members, Alfred Lima, told the audience that an LNG tanker carried the explosive equivalent of "55 Hiroshimas." "My family overlooks that facility," said a woman rushing out the door during his presentation. "They could all be wiped out!"

Naturally, there's another side to it:

Mr. Katulak, a chemical engineer, says that Dr. Fay's calculations assume that the entire cargo of a 900-foot LNG tanker spills into the water. But "it would take a huge amount of explosives" to achieve that, he says, since the tankers contain five separate compartments and have two hulls separated by 8 feet of protective materials.

Mr. Robinson, the FERC official, says LNG won't explode and won't burn in its liquid state. In a spill, the product can be ignited, but only after it vaporizes and combines with a mixture of air ranging from 5% to 15%. Mixtures outside that range are either too lean or too rich to burn and most of the gas, being lighter than air, quickly dissipates.

Some background:

The vocal opposition to LNG terminals comes as the fuel grows ever more crucial to the U.S. Demand is rising for natural gas in this country -- but most North American supplies are flat or in decline, leading to soaring prices and the growing risk of heating-fuel shortages and blackouts. Ninety-six percent of the world's natural-gas supplies are located in places that are geographically remote, such as West Africa or Qatar. To get that natural gas to other markets, it is first cooled to reduce its volume. The cost of cooling and shipping LNG has plummeted in recent years, allowing companies to deliver it halfway around the world at competitive prices.

At the city-council meeting, Mr. Shearer, president of Weaver's Cove, and other company officials presented the industry's standard response to public concerns. Ships carrying LNG have made more than 33,000 voyages over 40 years without a significant spill. The Japanese receive 10 LNG shipments a week in Tokyo Bay.

New England — increasingly dependent on gas for heat and electricity — has received shipments of LNG by truck for decades. One storage tank has operated quietly for years in Fall River, nestled in a residential neighborhood. Government tests, so far, tend to back up industry claims that LNG risks are relatively small and that tankers carrying propane or gasoline pose relatively greater hazards.

On the Road Again, But Now the Boss Is Sitting Beside You

When I first read that workers were "chafing at GPS tracking" and "balking at having the boss constantly looking over their shoulders," I thought, what's the problem with the firm installing a GPS unit in its truck? As long as you know you're being tracked, where's the problem? Then I read the first anecdote in On the Road Again, But Now the Boss Is Sitting Beside You:

Without telling the patrolmen, the internal-affairs officer installed a global-positioning-system tracking device behind the front grills of several patrol cars in the spring and summer of 2001. Then he used a laptop to keep track of each car's precise movements on detailed maps.

Sgt. Kuczynski soon netted five officers loitering over meals or hanging out in parking lots. Their log books indicated they were patrolling the townships' streets or watching for speeders on its three highways.

Four of the officers pleaded guilty that year to charges of filing false records and were barred from working in New Jersey law enforcement. A fifth, Barry Krejdovski, a then-28-year-old officer who was literally caught napping on the job, disputed the charges. He was convicted in November on the records violation and a more serious charge that was later set aside.

Leave it to the police to entrap their own officers and punish them. Did it occur to Sgt. Kuczynski that he could have told his officers about the GPS units and eliminated the loitering without such a destructive hassle?

In Central Asia, an American Professor Finds Hostility Spiked With Cynicism

Elinor Burkett, now chairwoman of the department of journalism at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, found herself a new Fulbright professor of journalism in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in August, 2001. In Central Asia, an American Professor Finds Hostility Spiked With Cynicism demonstrates the local attitude toward America:

I caught my first glimpse into that miasma of misinformation, envy, and anxiety on the morning of September 12, 2001, when I staggered into class only to face my students' announcement that a world war between Christians and Muslims was imminent. I had been up all night surfing through 63 television channels that did not include CNN, so I wasn't exactly in the mood to teach. But the professorial gene kicked in as soon as I settled behind my desk.

"Which Christians and which Muslims?" I asked the class. Half of the students in the room called themselves Muslims although after eight decades of Soviet hegemony, few knew what Islam required. "Are you talking about yourselves?"

"Not really. Muslims here aren't really Muslims like in Afghanistan."

The quietest girl in the class shyly suggested, "But Muslims have to defend other Muslims against attack"

I stopped her mid-sentence. "What if the Muslims are in the wrong? And what happens when Muslims attack other Muslims?"

"Muslims don't attack other Muslims," she insisted.

"Iran and Iraq? The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait? Should I go on?"

A boy in the back raised his hand. "But Muslims have no choice but to hate the United States and declare a jihad, since the United States is always attacking Muslims," he said.

"Is that true?" I pressed. "Where have we attacked Muslims?"

"I don't know. That's what people say."

"In Bosnia and Somalia, we were supporting Muslims," I said. "And in the war against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, we were supporting Muslims who were attacked by other Muslims."

A stony silence, more of bewilderment than hostility, enveloped the room, as if I'd just announced to a group of American students that the earth wasn't round, or that Utah was just a cartographer's fantasy. It was the first of many retreats in the face of an unaccustomed challenge to official truths.

Texas Teenagers Arrange Street Fight on Internet

I'm horrified...and fascinated. From Texas Teenagers Arrange Street Fight on Internet:

Teenage street fighting entered the digital age in a Dallas suburb where 33 people have been arrested for slugging it out in a massive melee arranged on the Internet and videotaped by participants, police say.

Police in Garland said Wednesday several people were injured in the fight and those arrested included 27 high school students. Police were able to make arrests in this case earlier this week after reviewing a videotape of the brawl.

The date and time of the meeting of rivals from two high schools' car clubs had been arranged over the Internet, said Joe Harn, an officer with the Garland police department.

One Man's Campaign To Rid Radio of Smut Is Finally Paying Off

One Man's Campaign To Rid Radio of Smut Is Finally Paying Off reports on a certain David Smith who clearly has too much time on his hands:

Starting in 1999, David Smith often began his days by setting a trap. His quarry: 'Mancow's Morning Madhouse,' a Chicago drive-time radio show that Mr. Smith considered indecent.

At dawn, Mr. Smith, now 34 years old, would hit the record button on his boombox to document the broadcasts of Erich 'Mancow' Muller, who broadcasts his show to nine U.S. cities from Emmis Communications Corp.'s WKQK in Chicago. With the tape rolling, Mr. Smith hopped into a Saturn sedan so he could listen to the show while driving to work. When something struck him as offensive, he would make a note of it and later transcribe the day's tape so he could fire off a detailed complaint to the Federal Communications Commission.

Perhaps I could recommend not listening to the show?

As VW Tries to Sell Pricier Cars, Everyman Image Holds It Back

According to As VW Tries to Sell Pricier Cars, Everyman Image Holds It Back, VW produced a more expensive, upscale Golf, and sales dropped. The Golf is the cornerstone of VW's business and has been for some time:

Launched in 1974, the Golf was a pioneer of small-car design. It so overwhelmed competitors that the industry dubbed the category the 'Golf class.' Germans who came of age in the 1990s, when the car hit its peak of popularity, are known as 'Generation Golf.'

Analysts who follow VW estimate the car generates almost half the company's profit. The third generation inspired VW's turnaround in the early 1990s and the fourth, launched in 1997, helped power a surge that gave VW the industry's No. 4 position after General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co.

In 2000, that model's peak year, the VW produced 942,000 Golfs. Most manufacturers would be pleased with sales of 200,000 for one model. To date, VW has sold more than 22 million Golfs. That means the Golf has surpassed the Beetle.

The Golf has surpassed the Beetle.

Anyway, not only was VW selling a more expensive car, it was selling it in a more competitive market:

In the 1990s, car makers were shielded from full competition by a complicated formula that limited the number of cars Japanese companies could sell in Western Europe. The rules capped Toyota at about 3% market share in most European Union countries.

The EU and Japan dropped the quotas in 1998. In the first quarter of this year, Toyota's share of the western European passenger car market hit 5.5%, according to the European Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Meanwhile, many drivers have shifted from buying hatchbacks like the Golf to other vehicles, such as compact minivans and roadsters. VW's reputation for quality has also slipped.

I've heard a lot of people complain about VW's recent quality.

The Inside Scoop

The Washington Post's Inside Scoop suggests investing in the worst-rated stocks:

In a recent issue of Growth Stock Outlook, Charles Allmon points out that last year the poorly rated stocks of many research services outperformed their highly rated stocks. For example, Standard & Poor's one-star stocks returned 57 percent while its five-star stocks returned 43 percent. Merrill Lynch's sell-rated stocks returned 46 percent while its buy-rated stocks returned 30 percent. Schwab's F-rated stocks returned 70 percent while its A-rated stocks returned 66 percent. The biggest discrepancy came with Value Line, whose 5-rated stocks (the 100 companies with, supposedly, the worst prospects for the year ahead) returned an incredible 90 percent while the 1-rated stocks (the top prospects) returned 40 percent.

Radical Prescription

Radical Prescription describes the power of the co-pay:

A recent Rand study of 25 large firms found that raising the co-pay for pharmaceutical claims by just $5 reduced yearly drug costs per worker by $163.

It can backfire though:

Higher co-pays can cause consumers to cut back on prophylactic and maintenance medicines. Pitney Bowes, for example, found that high-prices caused their diabetic and asthmatic workers to take their medicines irregularly resulting in sudden and expensive attacks. So Pitney Bowes took a counter-intuitive strategy — to save money they would pay for more of their workers prescriptions.

Down in Texas Scrub, 'Peyoteros' Stalk Their Elusive Prey

This fellow, described in Down in Texas Scrub, 'Peyoteros' Stalk Their Elusive Prey, certainly sounds like a peyotero:

Slicing through the mesquite and bramble-ridden Texas chaparral, Mr. Johnson, 55 years old, intently searched a rocky outcropping for the small, hallucinogenic Lophophora williamsii cactus buttons that to the unpracticed eye look like round, greenish stones. "You have to let him talk to you," he said. "If you find one, he'll take you where you want to go."

Mr. Johnson is one of "four registered peyote distributors left in Texas, down from nine a decade ago":

For 44 years, Mr. Johnson, who sports a white paintbrush mustache and gray ponytail, has been gathering peyote, which is used by about 250,000 indigenous members of the Native American Church, as the main sacrament in their religious ceremonies. A 1994 law makes it legal, as long as the user comes from a federally recognized tribe.

It doesn't sound particularly lucrative:

In three hours his two brothers gathered about five potato sacks, some 4,000 buttons in all.

Mr. Johnson pays his eight brothers and nephews $50 per 1,000 buttons they collect. After cleaning and sometimes sun-drying the buttons, Mr. Johnson sells them for about $200 per 1,000. He pays local ranchers about $1,500 to $2,000 a month to lease their lands.

Peyote goes way, way back — but much of its popularity doesn't go back long at all:

Archaeologists have found evidence of peyote's use in indigenous rituals dating back 10,000 years. "Those who eat or drink it see visions either frightful or laughable," wrote Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a 16th-century chronicler. Spanish priests, for the most part, tried to stamp out its use. Mexican colonial records yield as many as 90 cases where the Spanish Inquisition brought charges ranging from heresy to witchcraft against peyote users.

As early as the 17th century, Apaches spread the use of peyote north of the Rio Grande. Peyote really took off with indigenous Americans in the U.S. during the late 1870s. Then, the visions afforded by the sacred cactus gave solace to indigenous Americans, who, defeated and humiliated by the U.S. Army, were forced into reservations across the West.

In the U.S., Christian missionaries also tried to stamp out peyote. But in 1918, indigenous Americans, with the help of ethnographers from Washington's Smithsonian Institution, organized the Native American Church, obtaining legal status for the peyote ritual. Today, the Native American Church has members from more than 40 tribes in the U.S. and Canada.

Peyote really took off with indigenous Americans in the U.S. during the late 1870s.

It's Not Nam, But It'll Do

In It's Not Nam, But It'll Do, War Nerd compares the US invasion of Iraq to Israel's invasion of Lebanon:

But the thing is, Vietnam isn't the only way you can lose a war. Look at what happened to the Israelis in Lebanon. Iraq is a hell of a lot more like Lebanon than Nam.

22 years ago the man in charge of Israel was Menachem Begin, a real weirdo. He and Ariel Sharon were sick of taking mortar rounds from PLO in south Lebanaon. They decided they'd invade Lebanon, push the PLO into the sea.

It went fine, as long as the Israelis were heading north, attacking via combined arms. Their airforce destroyed the opposition. The Syrians lost 82 planes; Israel lost...zero. The IDF zoomed all the way to Beirut in record time, bombarded the PLO district and pushed Arafat into exile in Africa. They lost only about 400 men, but killed thousands of PLO. They kicked ass.

Then came phase two, the occupation. And that was the biggest military disaster Israel ever had. Sound familiar?

Why Pups Resemble Owners

Why Pups Resemble Owners reports on an amusing piece of research:

'It has been asserted, by children's book-illustrators, at dog shows, and by strangers passing on the street, that people often bear a striking resemblance to their pets,' wrote Michael M. Roy and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld of the University of California at San Diego in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The researchers photographed 45 dogs and their owners at three dog parks and gathered information about the breeds and how long owners and pets had been together. They then asked 28 students to try to match the people to the pooches.
The students were able to match dogs to their owners, but only when the dogs were purebred.

'The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and when they get a purebred, they get what they want,' the researchers wrote. 'A nonpurebred puppy's final appearance is unpredictable, and so the resemblance...should be confined to the much more predictable purebreds.'
There was no relationship between how long owners had lived with their dogs and the chance that their appearances would match.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Tough Love

As Tough Love points out:

In the early days of the Web, online dating was pretty much blind dating.

Digital cameras weren't around yet, and scanners were hardly common. This gave early on-line dating a very different feel from modern on-line dating:

Andrea Baker, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University's Lancaster campus who studies online dating, says that many of the early users tended to be "people who accepted that you would get to know someone through writing first and then exchange pictures by snail mail." She said many of the users of the services she interviewed said appearance wasn't important to them.

Also, some people were reluctant to post photos because they perceived online dating as embarrassing or potentially dangerous, says Trish McDermott, Match.com's vice president of romance, who has been at the company since 1995.

Digital cameras made on-line dating much more popular:

The years "2001 and 2002 were really when we started seeing the category legitimize," says Match.com's Ms. McDermott. "People began talking about the fact that they were using online dating services, which we really didn't hear in the 90s. The curtain was lifted."

Overall, the online dating industry took in $450 million in 2003, up from $302.1 million in 2002 and $72 million in 2001, according to comScore Networks and the Online Publishing Association. For the first six months of last year, the most recent data available, revenue was $214.3 million.

I knew I should've started my own matchmaking site back in 1999...

At the Pentagon, Quirky PowerPoint Carries Big Punch

When I first started reading At the Pentagon, Quirky PowerPoint Carries Big Punch, I thought, who is this guy?:

In 1998, Thomas Barnett, an obscure Defense Department analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was changing national security.

One scenario they studied was a meltdown caused by the Y2K computer bug followed by terrorist attacks designed to exploit the chaos. Mr. Barnett posited that Wall Street would shut down for a week. Gun violence, racially motivated attacks and sales of antidepressants would surge. The U.S. military would find itself embroiled in brushfire conflicts across the developing world.

His theories were met with skepticism. "People began referring to me as the Nostradamus of Y2K," Mr. Barnett says.

Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

An obscure Defense Department analyst teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was changing national security? How does that happen? Then I found out he's a Harvard-educated professor of military strategy at the Naval War College (according to this Esquire profile and his own biography).

His proposed military comprises two very different forces:

Mr. Barnett's military is a far cry from the shape of today's armed forces. Instead of a single force to wage wars and rebuild nations, Mr. Barnett envisions two. The first, which he dubs "Leviathan," would be hard-hitting, ready to take on conventional foes such as Saddam Hussein on a moment's notice. The second, more unconventional force of "System Administrators" would focus on bringing dysfunctional states into the mainstream through the type of nation-building operations seen in Iraq, the Balkans and Eastern Africa. It wouldn't only mop up after wars but would travel the world during peacetime building local security forces and infrastructure.

When I read this passage, I realized I'd read Barnett's earlier Esquire article, The Pentagon's New Map, and blogged on it:

In Mr. Barnett's world, countries are divided into two categories. His "core" countries are part of a global community linked by trade, migration and capital flows. Europe, the U.S., India and China fall into this group. Then there are "gap" countries that either refuse to join the global mainstream (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran), or are unable to because they have no central government or are struggling with debilitating crises (such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa).

"The "gap" is a petri dish of grief, repression, terrorism and disease," says Adm. Cebrowski. "And 9/11 shows we can't wall ourselves off from it."

I loved this mock personal ad from the Pentagon in the late 1990s:

ENEMY WANTED: Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms racing, Third World conflicts and general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to convince Congress of military financial requirements...Send note with pictures of fleet and air squadrons to CHAIRMAN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF/PENTAGON.

Alan Turing: Thinking Up Computers

Alan Turing: Thinking Up Computers celebrates one of "the greatest innovators of the past 75 years":

The rarefied world of early 20th-century mathematics seems light years away from today's PCs and virtual-reality video games. Yet it was a 1936 paper by Cambridge University mathematician Alan M. Turing that laid the foundation for the electronic wonders now crowding into every corner of modern life. In a short and eventful life, Turing also played a vital role in World War II by helping crack Germany's secret codes — only to be persecuted later for his homosexuality.

A shy, awkward man born into the British upper middle class in 1912, Turing played a seminal role in the creation of computers. To be sure, many other people contributed, from mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1830s to Herman Hollerith — whose tabulating company became IBM — at the turn of the century. But it was Turing who made the critical conceptual breakthrough, almost as an aside in a paper he wrote while in his 20s. Attempting to resolve a long-standing debate over whether any one method could prove or disprove all mathematical statements, Turing invoked the notion of a "universal machine" that could be given instructions to perform a variety of tasks. Turing spoke of a "machine" only abstractly, as a sequence of steps to be executed. But his realization that the data fed into a system also could function as its directions opened the door to the invention of software. "He is the one who found the underlying reason why an automatic calculating device can do so many things," says Martin Davis, professor emeritus of computer science at New York University and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.

Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG

When I came across a blogger going by the nom de plume of War Nerd, I knew I'd have to read what he wrote. In Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG, War Nerd explains that he rarely writes about military hardware:

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It's about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money — just about everything except pure hardware.

The venerable AK-47 assault rifle and RPG-7 anti-tank rocket are the weapons of guerrilla warfare:

In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they've switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

Interesting stat:

There's another stat that's even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half — half! — of US casualties in Iraq.

The American alternative to the RPG, the LAW (Light Antitank Weapon), "conveniently" weds a rocket with a disposable launcher:

We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn't nearly as easy to carry, because it didn't have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

In Somalia, RPG gunners took out US Blackhawk helicopters with a technique first used by Afghans against Soviet helicopters:

One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA [Surface-to-Air] missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile's gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

The Chechens realized that the RPG is the perfect urban weapon:

The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn't be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs — classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn't do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Iraq stockpiled RPGs, and now the country's flooded with these "perfect" urban weapons:

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It's got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It's light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It's simple enough for any amateur to use — the original non-camera example of "point and shoot."
[...]
Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you're fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn't look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn't disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you've got the occupying troops in a position like that — I mean literally blind and deaf — you're in a guerrilla strategist's idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

(Again, hat tip to iSteve.)

The Dark Art of Interrogation

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, wrote The Dark Art of Interrogation back in October. It seems apropos:

We hear a lot these days about America's over powering military technology; about the professionalism of its warriors; about the sophistication of its weaponry, eavesdropping, and telemetry; but right now the most vital weapon in its arsenal may well be the art of interrogation. To counter an enemy who relies on stealth and surprise, the most valuable tool is information, and often the only source of that information is the enemy himself. Men like Sheikh Mohammed who have been taken alive in this war are classic candidates for the most cunning practices of this dark art. Intellectual, sophisticated, deeply religious, and well trained, they present a perfect challenge for the interrogator. Getting at the information they possess could allow us to thwart major attacks, unravel their organization, and save thousands of lives. They and their situation pose one of the strongest arguments in modern times for the use of torture.

We're all familiar with the concept of torture — but torture lite?

Then there are methods that, some people argue, fall short of torture. Called "torture lite," these include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.

How much information are we getting out of captured terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

"I doubt we're getting very much out of them, despite what you read in the press," says a former CIA agent with experience in South America. "Everybody in the world knows that if you are arrested by the United States, nothing bad will happen to you."

Is it dangerously naive not to torture captured terrorists?

(Hat tip to iSteve.)

Kill Bill... Or Else!

Despite the fact that it was a Tarantino homage to kung-fu flicks and samurai films, I didn't enjoy Kill Bill; I didn't even go to see the sequel. Kill Bill... Or Else! interviews Tarantino — and reminds me of his "genius":

Is there any movie around you wish you'd made?

If I had done the opening 10 minutes and opening credits of the Dawn of the Dead remake, I'd be very proud. And believe me, I was against remaking George Romero — that was sacrilege. I don't think I would have the mania to make The Passion of the Christ, but I'd be proud of the results. Those are the only things playing around right now that are terrific.

So you saw The Passion of the Christ?

I loved it. I'll tell you why. I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies — as far as telling a story via pictures. So much so that when I was watching this movie, I turned to a friend and said, "This is such a Herculean leap of Mel Gibson's talent. I think divine intervention might be part of it." I cannot believe that Mel Gibson directed it. Not personally Mel Gibson — I mean, Braveheart was great. I mean, I can't believe any actor made that movie. This is like the most visual movie by an actor since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter. No, this is 15 times more visual than that. It has the power of a silent movie.

(Hat tip to iSteve.)

Whitewashing War

iSteve repeats a snippet of a longer Winston Churchill quote cited in Whitewashing War:

When all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.

Semi-Narcotic Khat Now a Kenya Cash Crop

According to Semi-Narcotic Khat Now a Kenya Cash Crop, the "narcotic" (really a stimulant) has finally spread beyond Africa and the Middle East:

Kenyans first began exporting khat to Europe in the late 1970s, but the trade was a relatively small-time affair until about a decade ago.

Since then, exports have grown more than 50 percent, says Leandro Bariu, chairman of Nyambene Miraa Trade Association, the country's largest khat industry group.

These days, khat exports bring in about $250 million a year, making the leaf one of the country's largest foreign exchange earners, Bariu says.

Most of the 150 tons of khat exported a week from Kenya goes to Somalia and to European countries like Britain and the Netherlands, where khat is legal and large populations of Yemeni, Somali and Kenyan immigrants eagerly await their daily shipments.

Most Americans know khat as the drug that the Somalian gunmen from Blackhawk Down chewed. The University of Pennsylvania has an Everything About Khat page:

Khat contains cathine (d-norisoephedrine), cathidine, and cathinine. Cathine is also one of the alkaloids found in Ephedra vulgaris. It is fortunate, perhaps, that khat is also very rich in ascorbic acid which is an excellent antidote to amphetamine-type compounds.

In animals, khat produces excitation and increased motor activity. In humans, it is a stimulant producing a feeling of exaltation, a feeling of being liberated from space and time. It may produce extreme loquacity, inane laughing, and eventually semicoma. It may also be an euphorient and used chronically can lead to a form of delirium tremens. Galkin and Mironychev (1964) reported that up to 80% of the adult population of Yemen use khat. Upon first chewing khat, the initial effects were unpleasant and included dizziness, lassitude, tachycardia, and sometimes epigastric pain. Gradually more pleasant feelings replaced these inaugural symptoms. The subjects had feelings of bliss, clarity of thought, and became euphoric and overly energetic. Sometimes khat produced depression, sleepiness, and then deep sleep. The chronic user tended to be euphoric continually. In rare cases the subjects became aggressive and overexcited.

If khat weren't already illegal in the US, I'd expect to find it in new ephedra-free Ripped Fuel.

The Declaration of Independence

After reading the Communist Manifesto, I mentioned that fact to someone and commented that we never read the other side's Declaration of Independence in school, not even to mock it. Then I realized that I'd never read The Declaration of Independence all the way through. Shame on me. Of course, I knew the opening passage:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I also knew the closing:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

I realized though, that I didn't know much of anything between the opening and the closing.

Atomic Dog

It's been a long, long time since I read Testosterone Magazine, but I went to read up a bit more on Hypertrophy Specific Training (a bodybuilding protocol I recommended to my younger brother-in-law), and I found myself reading the most recent Atomic Dog column, which attacks government regulations with a peculiarly amusing example from France:

A few years ago, in France, politicians became alarmed because French street gangs were using pit bulls to attack or intimidate rival gangs. [...] To put a stop to this, the French Government banned all pit bulls. It became illegal to breed them and any existing dogs had to be neutered, tattooed with a serial number, and kept on a chain. This is exactly what local authorities tried to do to me, but the bill fell a couple of votes short in the State Senate. But I digress.

The French thought they had solved the problem. Wrong.

French gang members simply looked for an alternative and the alternative they found was the Barbary ape. Imported illegally from Gibraltar, Morocco, or Algeria, the apes are known for their powerful limbs, sharp teeth, and extreme aggressiveness. What�s more, they regard smiling — showing your teeth — as a sign of aggression.

They also regard other males — even human males — as rivals and will sometimes attack their sexual organs.

Which all brings us to ephedrine and pro-hormone regulation...

Red Dawn

I had an unusual Saturday morning. First, I woke up at 5:00 AM. I don't normally do that. (Of course, I don't normally fall asleep by 10:30 PM either.) I couldn't fall back asleep, so I got up, taking a few books with me into the living room — where I started to read the Communist Manifesto of all things.

It turns out that The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings (from Dover Publishing) was just $3.50, and it rounded out an Amazon order quite nicely (bringing it just over $25 and earning me free shipping).

Anyway, I briefy tried reading the first essay in the book, a piece by Rousseau — boring! — then skipped to the middle of the book to read the Communist Manifesto — because I realized I'd never read it.

It's odd. Quite odd. It opens with this introduction:

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

This is to demonstrate that, "Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power." Then the first chapter, Bourgeois and Proletarians, opens with a famous declaration:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

In many ways, the first chapter makes sense — this economic history isn't too far off:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class.

Then chapter two kicks in: Proletarians and Communists. While I didn't agree with the first chapter, and I didn't find it convincing, it made a certain kind of sense. The second chapter makes little sense to me. E.g.:

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Riiiiiggghhhht.

I'm also not sure how this statement could be true:

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage?

I can understand this "fight the power" moment appealing to the disenfranchised:

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

Why support property rights if you have no property?

The Manifesto spells out how to destroy an economy — pardon, the "generally applicable" steps toward Communism:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.


2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.


3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.


4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.


5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.


6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.


7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.


8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.


9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.


10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Then it gets comical:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The third chapter, Socialist and Communist Literature, and the fourth chapter, Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties, didn't hold my interest — except for the snazzy close:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workers of all countries, unite!

The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent

I don't know the first thing about piano, but The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent amused me:

Vladimir Horowitz once observed that there were three kinds of pianists — Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists and bad pianists. Over the years Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has sometimes been thought to belong in all three categories. His father, a prosperous Canadian furrier, changed the family name from Gold to Gould; many admirers have assumed that the reclusive musician — hypersensitive, fussy, and in his youth almost effeminately pretty — must have been a closeted gay; and at one time or another nearly all his recordings have been derided as perverse in tempo, willfully disdainful of the composer's intentions, and marred or ruined by Gould's quite noticeable humming. To this day, that Bible of classical music, the Penguin Guide, seldom bestows more than two stars on Glenn Gould CDs and nearly always points out that his renditions of, say, Beethoven's late sonatas will appeal only to committed fans. One can tell that the Penguin critics privately regard such fans as essentially insane cultists.

In fact, as musicologist Kevin Bazzana shows in this authoritative, beautifully composed biography, Gould was English-Irish and not at all Jewish, enjoyed several heterosexual love affairs (one quite serious, with a married woman), and was judged by Sviatoslav Richter — arguably the greatest all-round pianist of the latter half of the 20th century — as nothing less than a genius of the keyboard.

The model-maker's quest

Peter Hofschröer's Wellington's Smallest Victory isn't about the battle of Waterloo, but about a huge, nine-inch-to-the-mile model of it made 15 years later by Captain William Siborne. The model-maker's quest opens with an anecdote and some factoids from the actual battle's aftermath:

News of the Battle of Waterloo was rushed to London by Harry Percy, Wellington's only surviving unwounded ADC. He carried the despatch in a velvet handkerchief sachet an admirer had thrust into his hand as he hurried from the Duchess of Richmond's famous Brussels ball on the eve of battle. He had no sleep that night, nor the five nights following, and had to row himself ashore from the middle of the Channel. His scarlet and gold tunic was still torn, dirty and blood-stained when he burst into a St James's ballroom, a captured French standard in each hand, and dropped to one knee before the Prince Regent. It was Shakespearean.

The battlefield became a tourist attraction almost before the corpses were cold. Most were buried in mass graves and later disinterred, their bones crushed into fertiliser; teeth were recycled as dentures, known as "Waterloo teeth".

Waterloo teeth. Ewwww.

The nuclear merit badge

The nuclear merit badge looks at The Radioactive Boy Scout, a book about the teenage kid who started to build his own nuclear reactor:

David's aptitude for science was phenomenal. From a 1960s-era book of chemistry experiments, he quickly gleaned the principles and skills of manipulating reactions, and expanded his capabilities with long hours of research at the library.

His safety record was literally stunning. Taking only the barest precautions, he remained unfazed by accidents that turned his hair green, burned his skin, or knocked him out cold. Larger blunders alarmed his father and stepmother, but he learned to cover up his failures.

At school, he was a poor student and terrible speller (the wall of his potting-shed laboratory carried the admonition: "Caushon"). His occasional claims of chemical and, later, nuclear research were dismissed by parents and teachers as attempts to get attention.

And so it was that with ingenuity and supplemental information from letters to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 17-year-old David gathered and refined - mostly from household products — enough radioactive material to make a crude breeder reactor in his backyard.

It was small and would never create an appreciable amount of fissionable fuel, but by the time David disassembled the runaway experiment in 1994, his Geiger counter was detecting radiation from several houses away.

Steppes towards the future

Steppes towards the future describes some of Genghis Khan's exploits:

Genghis Khan conquered more people than Napoleon or Alexander. He ordered and inspired more massacres than any other tyrant before Hitler and Stalin. He destroyed more states, razed more cities, demolished more monuments, uprooted more fields than any predecessor. He left at his death an unequalled reputation for lust and bloodlust. "My greatest joy," he was remembered for saying, "is to shed my enemies' blood, wring tears from their womenfolk and take their daughters for bedding.'

Genghis, what is good in life? To shed my enemies' blood, wring tears from their womenfolk and take their daughters for bedding.

If recent research in Oxford's biochemistry department is to be believed, he was one of history's most philoprogenitive studs, with 16 million living descendents. Meanwhile, he made the streets of Beijing — according to an imaginative eye-witness — "greasy with the fat of the slain". His tally of victims in Persia amounted to millions.

A real man's man, that Genghis.

In the long run, however, he was a constructive destroyer. His empire, at his death in 1227, spanned Eurasia, creating havens of peace around the silk roads and steppelands. Accelerated contacts enriched Eurasian civilisations. Technologies that trans- formed Europe's future — gunpowder, the blast furnace, paper money — arrived in the West. Traditions of scientific empiricism, dormant in Europe since antiquity, revived as Westerners began to share attitudes to nature formerly confined to China. Italian merchants, French craftsmen and Franciscan missionaries met in the depths of the Gobi.

It all might have happened anyway: trans-Eurasian trade had begun to grow in the previous century. Europe's "scientific renaissance" might have thrived on unaided stimulation from contacts with the Muslim world. But Genghis Khan's "Mongol Peace" made cultural cross-fertilisation possible on an unprecedented scale.

Pax Mongolia?

Islam's Interpreter

Islam's Interpreter interviews Bernard Lewis, touching on his From Babel to Dragomans, which examines the dragomans — or translators — who mediated between the rulers of Islam and the West:

In the late sixteenth century, not a single person in England knew any Turkish, and certainly not a single person in Turkey knew any English. They had to proceed by two-stage translation. The intermediate language was Italian, which was then the most important European language for international communication. So texts were prepared in Turkish, translated into Italian by an interpreter employed by the Turkish government, translated into English by a translator employed by the English government, and then the reply would go back by the same route. Seeing the three sets of documents side by side is quite a fascinating experience. It alerted me to some of the problems of diplomacy by translation and interpretation. What was quite clear is that there was a pattern of systematic and deliberate mistranslation. I looked into this problem in later periods and right into modern times, and it's still there.

His first prescription is better linguistic training:

I think the first thing is better linguistic training. For example, when I listen to the broadcasts from the media people who are in Iraq at the present time, they almost always mispronounce the names of Iraqi towns. One town which has been very much in the news is spelled in Latin letters N-a-j-a-f, and I hear one announcer or newsreader after another, even those who are calling from over there, say Na-jaf' (emphasis on the second syllable). Well it isn't Na-jaf', it's Na'jaf (emphasis on the first syllable). Anyone who's ever heard an Iraqi pronounce the name will know that. The fact that this sort of name is systematically mispronounced is really alarming. One wonders who they've been talking to.

He makes the surprising point that Westernization wasn't necessarily foisted on the Middle East by the West:

This process was not mainly imposed by Western imperial rulers, who tend to be very cautious and conservative, tampering as little as possible with the existing institutions. It was done by reformers in the independent Middle Eastern countries. Enthusiastic reformers who recognized the success and power of the Western world and wanted to get the same for their own people — a very natural and very laudable ambition. But often with the very best of intentions, they achieved appalling results.

Modernization centralized power:

In the old order, the traditional Islamic Middle Eastern society was certainly authoritarian, but it was not despotic or dictatorial. It was a limited autocracy in which the power of the ruler, the Sultan or the Shah or the Pasha, whoever he might be, was limited both in theory and in practice. It was limited in theory by the Holy Law — the Divine Law to which the ruler was subject no less than the meanest of his slaves. It was also limited in practice by the existence of strong entrenched interests in society. You had the merchants of the bazaar, powerful guilds. You had the country gentry. You have the bureaucratic establishment, the military establishment, and the religious establishment. Each of these groups produced their own leaders — leaders who were not appointed by the State, who were not paid by the State, and who were not answerable to the State. These, therefore, formed a very important constraint on the autocracy of government.

Then came the process of modernization or Westernization, which for practical purposes are the same thing. It enormously increased the power of the central government by placing at its disposal the whole modern apparatus of surveillance and control: first the telegraph, later the telephone; the possibility of moving troops quickly, first by train then by truck or by plane. So the central government was able to assert itself and enforce its will even in remote provinces in a way that was inconceivable in earlier times. The effect of this was to weaken or even eliminate those intermediate powers that limited the autocracy of government.

When people look at the kind of regime that was operated by Saddam Hussein and say, "Well, that's how they are, that's their way of doing things," it is simply not true. I mean, that kind of dictatorship has no roots in either the Arab or the Islamic past. It, unfortunately, is the consequence of Westernization or modernization in the Middle East.

His succinct Israeli history:

The conflict with Israel produced a great sense of failure in the Arab world. Remember that in 1948 there was no Israel, and the Jewish population of Palestine was a little more than half a million. The United Nations in '47 adopted a resolution for the partition of the former British mandate in Palestine into three: A Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone in Jerusalem. A couple of weeks later the Arab League met, formally denounced this resolution, and resolved to prevent it by any means including force of arms. The Arabs were confident it would be a simple matter; we know that from the literature of the time. After all, five Arab states with armies were attacking a community of just over half a million establishing a new state in the debris of the British mandate.They thought it would be a walkover. It turned out that it was quite the reverse. And that was a cause of terrible humiliation. They were only half successful. They prevented the establishment of the Arab state but not the establishment of the Jewish state, and this, of course, rankled terribly and continues to do so.

Islamic theocracy is actually a new development:

The word secular is a Western term. It has only recently been imported into the Middle East. The idea of Church and State as two distinct institutions which can be either joined or separated is a Western and more specifically a Christian idea. In the past, if you talked to Muslims about separation of Church and State the usual answer you'd get was, "Oh, this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease"�and therefore of no relevance to them. Now I think that they are beginning to realize that perhaps they have contracted the Christian disease and that it might be a good idea to try the Christian remedy. [What Christian disease?] The mixing of Church and State. That is, when the Church uses the State to enforce its doctrine, and the State interferes in the affairs of the Church. This is what brought on the great wars of religion in Europe. The idea of separation of Church and State was intended to protect both: to protect religion from State interference and to protect the State from religious interference.
[...]
For example, what they have now in Iran, for the first time, is a theocracy — a country which is actually run by the professional men of religion. This is totally unknown in the Islamic past. They now have the functional equivalent of a Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops, and above all, an inquisition that punishes heretics. One hopes that they may in due course have a reformation.

Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib explains how you need to win (or lose) a war to end it:

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today because the Second World War ended in 1945. And if by contrast Palestinians hand out sweets whenever a Jewish orphanage and Old Folk's home is bombed it may be because the UN refugee camps there celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1998. If the outrages at Abu Ghraib hasten the end of war it will not have been in vain, but if they lead, as the Left most earnestly desires, to a Vietnam-like stalemate, it will be not the last but the first of many sad mileposts.

The Scorpions Taste Kinda Fishy

The Scorpions Taste Kinda Fishy describes some of the cuisine at Adventures in the Global Kitchen, the first in a series of planned programs on global cuisine held at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History:

Crickets do not taste like chicken.

But sauté them with a little olive oil and some spices and they are surprisingly edible, with a nice crunch and a subtle nut flavor. Their little legs do tend to get stuck between your teeth, though.
[...]
Most didn't have much of a taste — deep-fried grubs are all crunch and no flavor, though they do literally melt in your mouth. Ants have a lemony snap, though some are sour and vinegary. But tarantulas are surprisingly tasty, rather similar to crab meat. Then again, spiders aren't insects — and neither are the bitter and vaguely fishy-tasting scorpions that topped the sushi rolls.

Mayan Queen's Tomb Found in Rain Forest

From Mayan Queen's Tomb Found in Rain Forest:

While excavating an ancient royal palace deep in the Guatemalan rain forest, archaeologists made a rare discovery — the 1,200-year-old tomb and skeleton of a Mayan queen.

Archaeologists announced the find Thursday, and said the woman appears to have been a powerful leader of a city that may have been home to tens of thousands of people at its peak. They found her bones on a raised platform, with evidence of riches scattered around her body.
[...]
The queen's skull and leg bones were missing, probably removed sometime after the body had decomposed to be used as relics. Other than that, the tomb — measuring 11 feet long by 4 feet wide by 6 feet high — was untouched.

The queen is thought to have been 30 to 45 when she died, but archaeologists have uncovered no clues as to her name, dynasty or cause of death.

Freidel, who leads the excavation team with archaeologist Hector Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, said the power the queen held is evident in the 1,600 artifacts found in the tomb — especially the remains of a plated helmet.

Twenty-two jade plaques, each about 2 inches square, appear to have been part of the helmet. Archeologists also found a 4-inch long jade carving depicting the dead of a deity in profile — a type of jewel worn by kings and queens, Freidel said.

Stingray spines found in the tomb were usually used as bloodletting implements — males pierced their genitals in ceremonies that offered their blood to the gods, while women generally placed the spines in their tongues. The ones found in the tomb were placed on the queen's pelvis, Freidel said.

"She's being represented as both male and female, in my view," Freidel said.

Research suggests that Waka' — called El Peru on present-day maps — was inhabited as early as 500 B.C., but reached its peak between A.D. 400 and A.D. 800. The city was abandoned in the late 800s to 900s.

It's only a matter of time until she wreaks her terrible vengeance on those who would desecrate her holy resting place. Right?

Study Suggests Garlic Oil As Repellent

Garlic — it's not just for vampires. From Study Suggests Garlic Oil As Repellent:

Garlic oil, the pungent flavoring commonly used in cooking, appears to ward off the European starling, raising hopes that farmers may one day have an environmentally safe repellent against the crop-damaging bird.

The Marginal Appeal of Aesthetics: Why Buy What You Don't Need?

Virginia Postrel's The Marginal Appeal of Aesthetics: Why Buy What You Don't Need? suggests that maybe our desires for impractical decoration and meaningless fashion don't come from Madison Avenue after all:

When Debbie Rodriguez went to Kabul with a group of doctors,nurses, dentists and social workers, the Michigan hairdresser intended to serve as an all-purpose assistant to the relief mission's professionals. Instead, she found her own services every bit as popular as the serious business of health and welfare. "When word got out that there was a hairdresser in the country, it just got crazy," she told The New York Times. "I was doing haircuts every 15 minutes."

Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important. A political commentator noted, "The right to shave may be found in no international treaty or covenant, but it has, in Afghanistan, become one of the first freedoms to which claim is being laid."

When Islam Breaks Down

Theodore Dalrymple opens When Islam Breaks Down with a bit of a travelog:

My first contact with Islam was in Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was in the days of the Shah�s White Revolution, which had given rights to women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention, without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics.

Afghanistan was different, quite clearly a pre-modern society. The vast, barren landscapes in the crystalline air were impossibly romantic, and the people (that is to say the men, for women were not much in evidence) had a wild dignity and nobility. Their mien was aristocratic. Even their hospitality was fierce. They carried more weapons in daily life than the average British commando in wartime. You knew that they would defend you to the death, if necessary — or cut your throat like a chicken�s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.

He describes performing Romeo and Juliet for the crown prince of Afghanistan, not realizing the lines "would so uncannily capture the predicament of some of my Muslim patients in Britain more than a third of a century after my visit to Afghanistan, and four centuries after they were written":

In fact the situation of Muslim girls in my city is even worse than Juliet�s. Every Muslim girl in my city has heard of the killing of such as she back in Pakistan, on refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her childhood. The girl is killed because she has impugned family honor by breaking her father�s word, and any halfhearted official inquiry into the death by the Pakistani authorities is easily and cheaply bought off. And even if she is not killed, she is expelled from the household — O sweet my mother, cast me not away! — and regarded by her �community� as virtually a prostitute, fair game for any man who wants her.

A creepy anecdote:

She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.

Muhammad's legacy intermingles temporal power with claims of religious purity:

Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet�s death, with some — today�s Sunnites — following his father-in-law, and some — today�s Shi�ites — his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad�s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-�-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam — in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church — has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

Can only the rich afford to be thin?

Can only the rich afford to be thin? makes the populist argument that dieting costs too much money:

'If you make a decent income and decide to lose some weight, you can eat grilled chicken, salads and fresh mango, and play a little tennis,' says Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington-Seattle. 'But a person in a lower-paying job or working two or three jobs is in no position to do that.

'To suggest to the lower middle class or poor that they eat a diet filled with foods like red snapper, radicchio, fresh tomatoes, baby lamb chops, olive oil and merlot wine is blatant economic elitism.'

It then supports this notion with statistics showing that the poor are much more likely to be obese:

About 60.5% of people who earn $15,000 to $75,000 are overweight or obese, compared with 56% of people who earn more than $75,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a large state-based telephone system in which 250,000 participants report their own weight and height. (When adults are actually weighed and measured, about 65% of people overall weigh too much.)

The disparity is even more obvious when it comes to obesity (30 or more pounds overweight), according to the National Health Interview Survey from 1999 to 2001. For people below the poverty level, which was then defined as anyone with an annual household income of less than about $17,000, about 26% were obese, compared with 18% of those with incomes of $67,000 or more.

This brings us to food deserts:

People who live in these "deserts" typically need to drive or take a bus for a half-hour or more to get to a major store; otherwise they need to rely on small grocery stores, convenience markets and "hybrid gas stations" where they choose from a smaller selection of food items at higher prices, Blanchard says. The stores may have hot dogs, fried chicken, doughnuts, deli meats, frozen pizza, pork rinds, candy and some canned foods, but they don't have many — if any — fresh fruits and vegetables.

Here's a snippet of what Theodore Dalrymple has to say on food deserts, in his The Starving Criminal:

Recently, at a lunch I attended, given by a left-wing magazine to which I sometimes contribute, the matter of food poverty and food deserts came up, and it was with some pride that I heard an area, not more than a mile from where I live, described as the very worst of these deserts, positively the Atacama of food.

As the only person present with personal knowledge — what Bertrand Russell used to call "knowledge by acquaintance" — of the area in question, I felt constrained to point out that I frequently shopped there, at a small Indian store in which one could buy, for example, 22-pound sacks of onions for about $3.40, and in which a huge variety of extremely fresh vegetables could be bought at prices less than half of those in the supermarket chains. Yet the only poor people who shopped there were Indian immigrants or their descendants — housewives who sifted through the produce looking carefully for the best. Practically no poor whites (or blacks) ever went there, though plenty of both live in the area. Only a few members of the white middle class from outside the area took advantage of the wide range and exceptionally low prices.

Moreover, unlike the people who spoke so fluently of the food deserts, I had, in the course of my medical duties, visited many homes in the area. The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short.
[...]
The owners of the shop only a mile from my door, serving poor Indian immigrants, are almost certainly millionaires: and the fact that their customers are poor has not prevented them from establishing a conspicuously flourishing business. If, however, you examined the convenience stores in predominantly white working-class areas (where the per-capita income is not lower), you would find a much reduced range of produce, very little of it fresh, and the great majority of it processed for ease of preparation. While the Indian store gives the impression of intense activity and hope, the convenience store in a white working-class area gives the impression of passivity and despair. If food deserts truly exist — and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive — the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon.

Horrors of War

Virginia Postrel's Horrors of War cites the Washington Post's The Lasting Wounds of War, an article on the terrible injuries soldiers now survive, due to rapid evacuation and high-tech surgery:

While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action — more than 100 so far in April — doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.

More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes — injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs — improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.

The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. "We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months," Poffenbarger said. "So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war."

Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month's injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.

About half the wounded troops have suffered injuries light enough that they were able to return to duty after treatment, according to the Pentagon. The others arrive on stretchers at the hospitals operated by the 31st CSH. "These injuries," said Lt. Col. Stephen M. Smith, executive officer of the Baghdad facility, "are horrific."
[...]
"We're saving more people than should be saved, probably," Lt. Col. Robert Carroll said. "We're saving severely injured people. Legs. Eyes. Part of the brain."

What should be on an "Economics and Philosophy" reading list?

Brad DeLong describes What should be on an "Economics and Philosophy" reading list?:

• Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages.


• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, selections.


• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government.


• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.


• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.


• Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation.


• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty.


• Hal Varian, Intermediate Microeconomics (chs. 29-35).


• Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty.


• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.


• James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.


• John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness."


• Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values.


• Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom.


• David Gauthier, "The Social Contract as Ideology", Philosophy and Public Affairs.


• Jon Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory", in Elster and Hylland, eds., Foundations of Social Choice Theory.


• Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality", Philosophy , Politics and Society 2nd Series.


• Amartya Sen, Equality of What?.


• Steven Shavell, Economic Analysis of Welfare Economics, Morality and the Law.


• Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy.


• William Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State.

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many discusses Asperger's syndrome and high-functioning autism:

They are what autism researchers call "mind blind." Lacking the ability to read cues like body language to intuit what other people are thinking, they have profound difficulty navigating basic social interactions. The diagnosis is reordering their lives. Some have become newly determined to learn how to compensate.

They are filling up scarce classes that teach skills like how close to stand next to someone at a party, or how to tell when people are angry even when they are smiling.

Many Aspies, as they call themselves, and their families find it reassuring to know that they have a condition — even though there's no cure.

TANSTAAFL

Wordorigins.org: Letter F describes the origin of free lunch (according to the Oxford English Dictionary):

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Despite the claims of rabid science fiction fans, this bit of folk wisdom has been with us since the late 1940s. And the term free lunch is even older.

The term free lunch first appeared in print on 23 November 1854, in Wide West published in San Francisco. It is a reference to the practice of saloons giving free meals to attract clientele. Of course the savings is illusory as the price of the drinks subsidizes the food.

The exact phrase, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, is also first used in the city by the bay in the 1 June 1949 edition of the San Francisco News (although this is claimed to be a reprint of a 1938 editorial so it may be even older, but the original has not been found).

The science fiction fans come into the picture in 1966 with the publication of Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He did much to popularize the phrase, but as we have seen did not coin it. Some claim that he coined the acronym TANSTAAFL. But alas for those science fiction fans, even this is not true. TANSTAAFL is found as far back as October 1949, only a few months after the earliest appearance of the phrase.

(Hat tip to Mahalanobis via Marginal Revolution.)

Bunker Holds a Mountain of Movies

Bunker Holds a Mountain of Movies:

A Cold War emergency bunker nestled in the side of a mountain will soon house one of the largest movie and music collections in the world.

The Federal Reserve's hidden facility in Mount Pony, near Culpeper, Virginia, was decommissioned by the government in the 1990s. But next year, it will be resurrected as the Library of Congress' new National Audiovisual Conservation Center.

The building's solid underground structure, complete with vaults, converts easily to media storage, said Gregory Lukow, chief of the motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division of the Library of Congress. And the facility has a unique history, to put it mildly.

The facility's unique history:

"It was built into a mountainside facing away from Washington, and it was a place where approximately $3 billion in coin and currency was stored for re-priming the American economy in case of a nuclear holocaust," Lukow said. And it was "a place where members of the Federal Reserve Bank and commission could flee in case of a nuclear attack."

"Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"

Seriously, who wants or needs paper fiat money after a nuclear attack?

Fraternity Hazing Gone Awry

Every year, some college fraternity somewhere takes things too far:

According to sealed charging papers that were provided to The Washington Post, fraternity brothers forced pledges to lie in 'a pyramid of naked pledges' and jumped on their prone bodies, while other pledges were ordered to strip and perform or simulate sex acts. In one case, a hooded pledge allegedly was made to stand on a box and told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off.

Sure, they took things too far, but what's the problem? The "fraternity brothers" were American prison guards, and the "pledges" were Iraqi detainees. From Allegations of Abuse Lead to Shakeup at Iraqi Prison (washingtonpost.com):

According to sealed charging papers that were provided to The Washington Post, soldiers forced prisoners to lie in 'a pyramid of naked detainees' and jumped on their prone bodies, while other detainees were ordered to strip and perform or simulate sex acts. In one case, a hooded man allegedly was made to stand on a box of MREs, or meals ready to eat, and told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off.

Abu Ghraib

Victor Davis Hanson addresses the recent crimes by American guards at Abu Ghraib:

The guards' alleged crimes are not only repugnant but stupid as well. At a time when it is critical to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a few renegade corrections officers have endangered the lives of thousands of their fellow soldiers in the field. Marines around Fallujah take enormous risks precisely because they do not employ the tactics of the fedayeen, who fire from minarets and use civilians as human shields.

Yet without minimizing the seriousness of these apparent transgressions, we need to take a breath, get a grip, and put the sordid incident in some perspective beyond its initial 24-hour news cycle.

His argument:

1. Investigation are not yet complete.
   
   
2. The self-correcting mechanisms of the U.S. government and the American free press are already in full throttle.
   
   
3. We must keep the allegations in historical context: "American soldiers are not ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Kuwait or executing Kurdish civilians, crimes that in the past went largely unnoticed in the Middle East."
   
   
4. There is an asymmetry about the coverage of the incident, an imbalance and double standard that have been predictable throughout this entire brutal war: "The Arab world — where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized — is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah."
   
   
5. We are now in an uncertain peace in Iraq. "War is hell, and those who do not endure it are not entirely aware of the demons that are unleashed, and thus should hold their moral outrage until the full account of the incident is investigated and adjudicated."