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-oper