Sneakiest primates have biggest brains

Sneakiest primates have biggest brains reports more evidence for the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory:

Of all the terrestrial mammals, primates have by far the largest brains relative to their body size, with humans having the largest of all. The enlargement is almost exclusively in the neocortex, which makes up more than 80% of the mass of the human brain.

Large brains, despite being energetically costly, benefited primates because they conferred complex cognitive skills. But which skills were the priority — was it clever food-finding strategies that were most valuable, for example, or complex social skills?
[...]
Now Byrne and Corp have studied a catalogue of observations of deceptive behaviours in wild primates from many researchers over several years up till 1990. They found that the frequency of deception in a species is directly proportional to the average volume of the animal's neocortex.

Bush babies and lemurs, which have a relatively small neocortex, were among the least sneaky. The most tactically deceptive primates included macaques and the great apes — gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans — which also have the largest neocortex.

Some examples of deception:

Deception amongst primates is well documented. Sometimes a female gorilla will mate with a male surreptitiously to avoid a beating from a more dominant male. Or monkeys might feign disinterest in tasty food so that others do not come and steal it.

Byrne has himself observed a young baboon dodging a reprimand from its mother by suddenly standing to attention and scanning the horizon, conning the entire troop into panicking about a possible rival group nearby. "We were rather shocked that baboons could do anything quite as subtle as that," he says.

It's not just about deception though:

"I'm sure if we could have measured cooperative skill, we'd have found a similar result," says Byrne. "Cooperation and outwitting are not opposed — they're both about being socially subtle."

Sex and Propaganda

Sex and Propaganda explains the failed attempts to demoralize the enemy in WWII — through pornography:

Both the Axis and the Allies printed aerial propaganda leaflets using sexual themes in an attempt to demoralize enemy soldiers at the front. Did these leaflets work? Did the finders become emotionally crippled and unable to carry on their duties and responsibilities? Just the opposite occurred. The 'pin-up' pictures became collectors items sought after by the troops who greedily collected and swapped them. If anything, the leaflets raised morale. There is no doubt that they were the most heartily appreciated propaganda leaflets used in World War 2. We can probably state that they were the most widely read and circulated enemy documents of any war.

It Didn't Succeed, So Iwate Prefecture Decided to Give Up

It Didn't Succeed, So Iwate Prefecture Decided to Give Up tells the peculiar tale of a Japanese governor and his prefecture:

Nothing was going right for the residents of northern Iwate prefecture. Try as they might, the people of Iwate seemed stuck in a poor backwater, with factories closing, shaky state finances and few prospects.

So, three years ago, Gov. Hiroya Masuda sent out a bold new message: Just give up.

"We don't make an effort in Iwate," Mr. Masuda declared in a nationwide ad campaign that has run annually since 2001. Iwate should build traditional wooden houses rather than modern buildings, he said. Instead of striving like the big cities for economic growth, people should take pride in their forests.

"In Tokyo, people are chased by speed, and life consists of working, eating and sleeping," says the 52-year-old Mr. Masuda, who has local government employees print the we-don't make-an-effort slogan on their business cards. "Here, I want people to go home early in the evening, take a walk with their family, and talk to the neighbors."

The wacky ads have been a hit. They boosted Mr. Masuda's standing in Iwate, helping him get elected for a third time last year, with 88% of votes cast. They also struck a chord with Japanese nationwide.

Japanese culture may be changing:

Opposing effort in Japan is as bizarre as disparaging freedom in America. But since their economy slowed in the 1990s, many Japanese have started to question whether their hard work was really worth it.

In the past, even average Japanese workers who devoted their lives to a corporation could prosper. "If you graduated from college and worked solidly, you would reach an annual salary of �10 million," about $90,000, says economist Takuro Morinaga, author of a shelf of downshifting bestsellers with titles such as "It's Cool to Be Poor." But now that not everyone gets rich, "They think, why should they work themselves to death for their company?" he says.

As Threats to Oil Facilities Rise, U.S. Military Becomes Protector

As Threats to Oil Facilities Rise, U.S. Military Becomes Protector gives a short history of the Coast Guard:

The Coast Guard is serving as the oil police here [in the Persian Gulf]. It's a somewhat novel role for the service, which traces its roots to 1790, when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton cajoled a young and cash-strapped Congress to build a fleet of 10 cutters — called the Revenue Service — to collect tariffs. Coast Guard sailors pitched in during World War II and then patrolled Vietnam's shallow waters two decades later.

WSJ.com - Clock Watching Divides Workplaces, but Time Favors Neither Side

WSJ.com - Clock Watching Divides Workplaces, but Time Favors Neither Side addresses different perspectives on time in the workplace:

Time may be many things — money, an enemy, a healer, something either saved or wasted — but at work it's never on your side. Employees think it moves too slowly. Managers believe it goes too fast. In general, their different perspectives illustrate the great divide between bosses, who tend to think that presence equals productivity, and workers, who often feel forced to provide proof of their commitment.

Increasingly, people seem to feel that they don't have enough free time:

That's because even though everything takes less time today than in our horse-and-buggy past, no one seems to have enough. According to a survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute, a center for research on the changing work force, 67% of respondents said they don't have enough time for their children, while 63% have shorted their spouse or partner, up from 50% 11 years ago.

What's Your Workout?

What's Your Workout? is a new column looking "at the lifestyle and fitness routines of busy businesspeople" — starting with Jim Sud, executive vice president of growth and business development for Whole Foods Market Inc. in Austin, Texas:

Mr. Sud leaves his house at 6:30 a.m. and drives about 10 minutes to his health club, Mecca, located across the street from his office in downtown Austin. From there, he runs various loops around Town Lake, generally around 45-50 minutes. He ends up back at the gym, where he stretches and, twice a week, lifts weights. By 8:30 a.m., he's at the office.

Some people are born to run. At 6:30 a.m. I'm not.

Wired News: Speedy, Tiny and Troublesome

"Popular in European racing circles for years, pocket bikes have recently exploded on the scene in California," Wired News: Speedy, Tiny and Troublesome explains — and from my recent visit back to California, I can attest to this; the miniature motorcycles were being sold by the road in the desert.

Ionko tells customers the bikes aren't street-legal, and though he's heard those with lights could be, the DMV won't let riders register them. Many pocket bikes also lack the 17-digit VIN, or vehicle identification numbers, that motor vehicle manufacturers stamp on each product. Ionko and others believe this may be an obstacle to registering them.

Terri Johnson, a manager with the state's DMV, said the VINs have nothing to do with pocket bikes' illegality on streets — it's really about the bikes' failure to meet safety standards, she said.

"You can't modify it to make it street-legal, so that's just the bottom line," she said. "They're not street-legal, and we're not registering them."

Wired News: Apple Lets Cat out of the Bag

Wired News: Apple Lets Cat out of the Bag reports on Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, where Jobs announced OS X version 10.4, code-named Tiger. He also introduced a new display:

Jobs also introduced Apple's largest display yet: a 30-inch flat-panel display in a sleek, trim aluminum housing.

Complementing the company's new 23-inch and 20-inch flat-panel screens, also in aluminum housing, the giant display will be available in the fall for $3,300.

Unlike its smaller siblings, the new screen will work only with Power Macs equipped with a new $600 GeForce video card from nVidia that features dual DVI outputs — one for each half of the 2,560 by 1,600, 4.1 million-pixel screen.

The geek in me actually got excited when I read that it required two DVI connections. Sick, I know.

Al Safa - Hand Slaughtered by a Muslim

Al Safa operates under the slogan, Hand Slaughtered by a Muslim, and their website features their "slaughtermen", Ahmed Omur & Osman Salih. Granted, they're referring to halal chickens, but, really, that slogan's a bit much.

The Inquisition

Thomas F. Madden provides a different perspective on the Inquisition than the one you're used to:

The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. Yes, you read that correctly. Heresy was a crime against the state. Roman law in the Code of Justinian made it a capital offense. Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. When someone was accused of heresy in the early Middle Ages, they were brought to the local lord for judgment, just as if they had stolen a pig or damaged shrubbery (really, it was a serious crime in England). Yet in contrast to those crimes, it was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training � something most medieval lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent assessment of the validity of the charge.

The Catholic Church's response to this problem was the Inquisition, first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184. It was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges. From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and the king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep who had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring them back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.

As this new report confirms, most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

Formal inquisitions actually kept hysteria in check:

During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe, it was those areas with the best-developed inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches' sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.

Protestants embraced the printing press and won the propaganda war against the Catholics:

By the mid 16th century, Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe. Europe's Protestant areas, including the Netherlands, northern Germany, and England, may not have been as militarily mighty, but they did have a potent new weapon: the printing press. Although the Spanish defeated Protestants on the battlefield, they would lose the propaganda war. These were the years when the famous "Black Legend" of Spain was forged. Innumerable books and pamphlets poured from northern presses accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World. Opulent Spain was cast as a place of darkness, ignorance, and evil.

(Hat tip to Cronaca.)

No Atheists in Foxholes?

Are there really no atheists in foxholes?:

The old adage that there are "no atheists in foxholes" does not appear to apply as much as it used to. It turns out that the active duty troops in the American armed forces are somewhat less religious than the population as a whole.

Americans over all are 78 percent Christian, 1.3 percent Jewish, .5 percent Moslem, .4 percent Hindu, 13 percent unknown or none and the rest various other sects and faiths. But the troops are 55 percent Christian, .3 percent Moslem, .27 percent Jewish, .04 percent Hindu, .24 percent Buddhist and 34 percent unknown or no preference. Part of this may be a generational thing, as the troops are younger than the population as a whole. People become more religious as they get older. Another factor is probably education, as the high education standards for recruits means those in uniform have several years more formal education than their civilian peers. More literate too, as people in uniform read at a level a full year ahead of civilians. As people become more educated, they tend to be less religious.

While most religions are underrepresented in the military, there are some exceptions. The Mormons (Latter Day Saints), represent 1.3 percent of the American population, and 1.1 percent of the troops. Catholics, which are 25 percent of the population, are 22 percent of the troops. The Mormons are recruited energetically by the military. Mormon families emphasize education and clean living for their kids, which makes them ideal candidates for enlisted or officer slots. Because nearly all Mormon men spend two years as missionaries, and many do this in foreign countries (after learning the local language at Mormon schools), Mormons are particularly sought after for intelligence, translation and Special Forces jobs. The largest concentration of reserve Military Intelligence units is located in Utah, a state with a majority Mormon population. If Mormons cannot be enticed into active duty, the armed forces makes it easier for the well educated and multi-lingual Mormons to join these reserve units.

Even so, when American troops work with those from other countries, the foreign soldiers are surprised at how �religious� the U.S. troops are. That�s because the United States has the highest rate of religious participation in the industrialized nations.

Sleep Habits Matter and Sniper Logistics

How to Make War reports on a interesting Navy sleep study:

U.S. Navy sleep studies have discovered another thing to look for when selecting sailors for different kinds of duty. The study found that �short sleepers� (those who typically slept for six hours or less a night), were more alert when they were awakened, but were much less alert after 36 hours without sleep. �Long sleepers� (those who require nine or more hours a night) took longer to become completely alert when they were awakened, but were much more alert after 36 hours or more of being awake. So if you have to wake up people for an emergency that requires concentration, pick a �short sleeper.� If you need people who might have to stay awake for long periods, and still be able to function, pick a �long sleeper.�

It also comments on the popularity of snipers:

One of the least mentioned reasons why snipers are increasingly popular in the U.S. Army and Marines, has to do with logistics. During the Vietnam war it was discovered that 200,000 rifle bullets were fired for each enemy soldier killed. But snipers fired 1.3 bullets for each enemy soldier killed. The 200,000 5.56mm and 7.62mm bullets weigh over four tons. But 1.3 7.62mm sniper bullets weighs a little over an ounce. OK, so snipers fire more bullets in training, but that's still going to end up with four tons being compared to a few pounds. You cannot have an army of snipers. There are many combat situations (like being ambushed), where a sniper getting off single, well aimed, shots would not be the most effective response. If you are ambushed, you want to put as many bullets on where you think the enemy is, as quickly as possible. But there are many combat situations where a few well placed shots will do a better job than hundreds of less well aimed bullets. Even for the regular troops, single shots are now favored over emptying a 30 round magazine with fully automatic fire. Every bullets counts, especially when you have to move them thousands of miles before you can use them.

(That sounds like an OR finding, doesn't it?)

WSJ.com - Middle Seat Mailbox

I do not like people going through my things, and I do not like checking bags while flying. This week's Middle Seat Mailbox presents an amusing anecdote ("The Riddle of the Extra Underwear") that, while amusing, isn't reassuring:

This could take some explaining. Peter K. Hochla came home from a trip to find a notice from the Transportation Security Administration that his suitcase had been opened for inspection. But TSA left more than a calling card: Dr. Hochla found a pair of woman's underwear in with his things.

'Fortunately, it was 'industrial strength' utilitarian type in a large size, or it might have been difficult to explain to my wife,' he writes. 'I could not get anyone at TSA to return my calls of complaint or to even acknowledge my complaint.'

Spider-Man gets Indian make-over

According to Spider-Man gets Indian make-over, the popular American character is getting reinvented for the Indian market:

The character will no longer be known as Peter Parker — but will become the young Pavitr Prabhakar.

He will also have a more modest costume, wearing a dhoti, the loincloth worn by men in India.

There will initially be four comic books produced, released to coincide with the Spider-Man 2 movie. The first film was a huge success in India.
[...]
When the first Spider-Man movie opened in India, it took 67m rupees (�940,000) in its first four days of release — and made more in its first weekend than any Hollywood movie yet released in India.

If the first Spiderman movie was a huge success, why are they "transcreating" the character?

"Unlike traditional translations of American comics, Spider-Man India will become the first-ever 'transcreation', where we reinvent the origin of a Western property."

Spider-Man would become an Indian boy in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges, he added.

Spider-Man India will interweave local customs, culture and mystery to make it more relevant to the readers, set against the backdrop of monuments including the Taj Mahal and the Gateway of India.

The Green Goblin villain will be replaced by Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon that has shape-shifting abilities.

If you're going to change the character's costume, setting, and enemies, why not create a new character?

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Yahoo! News - Vandal Smashes Saintly Venice Statues with Hammer

I don't know what to say, except that this makes me angry. From Yahoo! News - Vandal Smashes Saintly Venice Statues with Hammer:

On Sunday night, a man in his 30s attacked a column of the Doge's Palace on St Mark's Square with a hammer, battering the statue of Moses, witnesses said. He fled after a group of Italian tourists alerted the police. The night before, someone chipped off the hands from statues of St Mark and St Francis outside the 16th century Church of the Redeemer on the island of Giudecca.

This isn't the first time a lunatic has vandalized Italian works of art:

Geologist Laszlo Toth took a sledgehammer to Michelangelo's Pieta in the Vatican in 1972, shouting "I am Jesus Christ!" Two decades later, an Italian painter smashed one of the toes of Michelangelo's statue of David in Florence.

New Scientist - Silver cars are the safest on the road

A new study shows that silver cars are the safest on the road:

Silver cars are much less likely to be involved in a serious crash than cars of other colours, suggests a new study of over 1000 cars.

People driving in silver cars were 50 per cent less likely to suffer serious injury in a crash compared with drivers of white cars, the research in New Zealand found.

White, yellow, grey, red and blue cars carried about the same risk of injury. But those taking to the roads in black, brown or green cars were twice as likely to suffer a crash with serious injury.

The study doesn't explain why silver cars are safer, but it may be due to a combination of light color and high reflectivity.

New Scientist - Cactus extract offers hangover help

According to Cactus extract offers hangover help, an extract from the skin of the prickly pear fruit, called OFI, eases hangovers by soothing the inflammatory response to alcohol:

Hangovers, or veisalgia as the condition is called medically, carry huge economic and health consequences, say Wiese's team. But despite this, little is known about its mechanism.

It has been associated with a heightened inflammatory response by the body to alcohol impurities called congeners and some preservatives. Extract from the skin of prickly pear fruit, called OFI, had previously been shown to dampen inflammatory response.

So Wiese's team gave 55 adults aged between 21 and 35 years old either OFI or placebo five hours before they staged a party. The subjects were given a fast-food dinner and then allowed to choose their tipple for the evening from vodka, gin or rum, which are relatively low in impurities, or bourbon, scotch or tequila, which are relatively high.

I can't help but note that I prefer vodka, gin, and rum to bourbon, scotch, and tequila.

The morning after the parties, those given OFI were nursing less severe hangovers than those given placebo. In particular, it slashed the risk of a severe hangover by half.

The researchers also measured levels of a protein produced by the liver, called C-reactive protein, which is thought to be involved in the inflammation process.

The higher the levels, the worse the hangover, they found. This is the first study to show this, the team believes. Levels of this protein were also 40 per cent higher in the people who took placebo pills compared with those who took the OFI.

The researchers therefore believe that OFI eases hangovers by soothing the inflammatory response to alcohol.

So how does OFI compare to aspirin?

New Scientist - Sun block

I've long had a certain morbid curiosity about sunscreen — are the chemicals in sunscreen worse for you than the UV radiation they block? According to Sun block, they just might be:

Schlumpf and her colleagues tested six common UV screening chemicals used in sunscreens, lipsticks and other cosmetics. All five UVB screens — benzophenone-3, homosalate, 4-methyl-benzylidene camphor (4-MBC), octyl-methoxycinnamate and octyl-dimethyl-PABA — behaved like oestrogen in lab tests, making cancer cells grow more rapidly.

Three caused developmental effects in animals. Only one chemical — a UVA protector called butyl-methoxydibenzoylmethane (B-MDM) — showed no activity.

One of the most common sunscreen chemicals, 4-MBC, had a particularly strong effect. When the team mixed it with olive oil and applied it to rat skin, it doubled the rate of uterine growth well before puberty. 'That was scary, because we used concentrations that are in the range allowed in sunscreens,' Schlumpf says.

Nobody knows if doses are high enough to create problems for people, says Schlumpf.

New Scientist - Early puberty linked to shampoos

According to New Scientist - Early puberty linked to shampoos, some popular "black" hair products contain female hormones:

Unbeknown to many parents, a few hair products — especially some marketed to black people — contain small amounts of hormones that could cause premature sexual development in girls.
[...]
Throughout the West, girls are tending to reach puberty earlier. This has been blamed on everything from improved diet to environmental contaminants. But African-American girls are developing even earlier than their white counterparts. About half of black girls in the US begin developing breasts or pubic hair by age eight, compared with just 15 per cent of white girls, one study has found. In Africa, girls enter puberty much later, regardless of their socioeconomic status.
[...]
The products are sold as shampoos or treatments to deep-condition dry, brittle hair. The labels usually state that they contain placenta, hormones or "estrogen", although not all products that make such claims contain active hormones.

Television watching may hasten puberty

According to Television watching may hasten puberty, watching television may reduce melatonin levels — and low melatonin levels hasten maturation:

Scientists at the University of Florence in Italy found that when youngsters were deprived of their TV sets, computers and video games, their melatonin production increased by an average 30 per cent.

�Girls are reaching puberty much earlier than in the 1950s. One reason is due to their average increase in weight; but another may be due to reduced levels of melatonin,� suggests Roberto Salti, who led the study. �Animal studies have shown that low melatonin levels have an important role in promoting an early onset of puberty.�

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

Operation everything

Virginia Postrel's Operation everything describes Operations Research, a field that's finally delivering on old promises, now that we have the computing power and the data to take advantage of it:

"I've been explaining for 40 years what operations research is," says Eisner, who is associate director of the school of operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University. He defines O.R. as "the effective use of scarce resources under dynamic and uncertain conditions."

That may sound arcane, but it's pretty much the problem of living — and certainly the central problem of economic life. O.R. isn't economics, however, though most economists have some O.R. training. It's applied mathematics. Since its origins in World War II to its recent resurgence fueled by the explosion in raw computing power, O.R. has developed analytical models of the tradeoffs and uncertainties involved in problems ranging from inventory management to police deployment, from scheduling sports leagues to determining how many people to call for jury duty.
[...]
Magnanti calls O.R. "a liberal education in a technological world." Just as a classical education once prepared students for a wide range of endeavors, from theology and science to diplomacy and warfare, he argues, so the habits and tools of O.R. are widely applicable to contemporary problems.

I enjoyed this anecdote from the early days of OR, but I'm not sure how you systematize such thinking:

In World War II, scientists from a wide range of fields attacked military problems with a potent combination of empiricism and mathematical models. When airplanes came back riddled with holes from enemy attacks, for instance, the intuitive response was to reinforce the armor where the holes were. But, noted the scientists, those were the planes that made it back. They didn't need more armor where they were hit. The real challenge was to figure out the places that had been hit in the planes that went down.

Operations Research

Operations Research sounds like my kind of job:

One of the more revolutionary weapons developed in the last century is being widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is little known even within the military. It's called Operations Research (OR), and it's basically the application of mathematical and statistical tools to determine 'optimal resource allocation.' In other words, it's the use of math and common sense to solve seemingly unsolvable problems. During World War II, OR was first used to solve military problems, and it had a major impact. Developed mainly by British scientists in the 1920s and 30s, it?9s first major success was in developing the British air defense system used with great success during the Battle of Britain. OR was used to determine the most effective way to deploy the new radars, and where to put Britain?9s outnumbered fighter squadrons, and when to send them off to fight oncoming German bombers and fighters. OR was later used to figure out optimal ways to deploy anti-submarine forces in the Battle of the Atlantic, how to best defend formations of American heavy bombers over Germany, and much, much more.

It's not just military though:

There are some OR specialists in plain sight. These are the MBA crowd. Reviled as heartless bean counters, MBAs practice OR under a different name; �Management Science.� But the two disciplines are the same, and many business schools have one OR Department that teaches the tricks of the trade to the apprentice captains of industry.

At Pitt, Scientists Decode The Secret of Getting Grants

Working as a scientist is as much about getting grants as performing the actual science, and Pitt is actracting negative attention from scientists for its focus on getting grants. From At Pitt, Scientists Decode The Secret of Getting Grants:

To make sure Pittsburgh stays ahead of the pack, Dr. Kupfer runs an intensive "survival skills" course for young postdoctoral fellows in psychiatry to train them in the fine points of applying for their first grants, typically about $600,000 for five years. The biggest trick young scientists need to learn, he says, is to focus their proposals more narrowly. To Dr. Kupfer, it's almost like marketing or branding. "You need a T-shirt," he constantly exhorts his charges, by which he means a quick phrase that tells the world what the research stands for.

Football Rules

I found an excellent history of Football Rules, including these dates and rules changes:

1905

• No tackling out-of-bounds.


• No Hurdling or piling on after play called dead.


• No tackling below the knee.


• No stricking the ball carrier in the face.


• No locking of legs, except for the two players on either side of the center.


• Referee called the end of the play.


• Offense had to have 6 players on line of scrimage.


• Only one player in motion before the snap.


• Any player moving from the line of scrimage had to be replaced prior to the snap of the ball.


• The length of the game shortened to 2 thirty minute halves.


• The number of yards need for a first down increased from 5 to 10.


• Neutral zone increase to length of the ball.


• Legalization of the forward pass.


• If the pass was incomplete, it was a turnover.


• A pass completed in the endzone was a touchback for the defending team (turnover)


• If the ball wasn't thrown within 5 yards, either side of the middle of the field, or hit an ineligble receiver, it was a turnover. Hash marks were added.

1908

• Seven players on the line of scrimage. End of mass-formation plays.


• No pushing or pulling the ball carrier.


• No interlocked interference.


• No crawling.


• Flying tackle banned.


• Score for forfeited game set at 1 point.

1910

• A player leaving the game could not return until the start of the next quarter.


• Forward passes limited to 20 yards in length or under.

1912

• Team had 4 downs to make a firstdown. (10 yards)


• Length of field reduced to 100 yards from 110 yards. 10 yard endzone created behind each goal.


• Value of a touchdown increased from 5 to 6 points.


• All distance restrictions for a forward pass were removed.


• A pass completed in the endzone was now a touchdown and no longer a turnover.


• An incompleted pass was a loss of down and no longer a turnover.

NFL History

Some of my favorite factoids from NFL History:

1869
Rutgers and Princeton played a college soccer football game, the first ever, November 6. The game used modified London Football Association rules. During the next seven years, rugby gained favor with the major eastern schools over soccer, and modern football began to develop from rugby.

1876
At the Massasoit convention, the first rules for American football were written. Walter Camp, who would become known as the father of American football, first became involved with the game.

1898
A touchdown was changed from four points to five.

1904
A field goal was changed from five points to four.

1906
The forward pass was legalized.

1909
A field goal dropped from four points to three.

1912
A touchdown was increased from five points to six.

Interestingly, the NFL History site doesn't mention what prompted the forward pass — it was an attempt to open up the game and reduce the number of injuries in the game, which still involved rugby-like scrums charging down field. Teddy Roosevelt himself demanded the changes. (They also changed the first-down distance to 10 yards, from five — in three downs.)

Touchrugby International

I've had a mild interest in rugby for some time, and touch rugby sounded like a fun variant — "similar to rugby but without the tackling, scrumming, rucking, mauling, lineouts and kicking."

In fact, it sounds quite a bit like (American) touch football, but with six touches instead of four downs, no forward passing or punting, and some different lingo. For instance, if you're touched, you have to return to where you were touched and "rollball" (more-or-less "hike" the ball) to a "dummy half" (quarterback) who can't get touched (I'd say "sacked") or your team loses possession (not just one of its six touches). Also, the dummy half can't score; he has to pass the ball along to another player.

Defenders have to back off five meters (yards) from the ball before the rollball — 10 meters (yards) on the first play of the game or after a touchdown — which, by the way, lives up to its name: you have to touch the ball down past the try (goal) line to score.

Gaelic Football

This weekend, I watched an Irish friend's team play Gaelic Football:

Gaelic Football can be described as a mixture of soccer and rugby, although it predates both of those games. It is a field game which has developed as a distinct game similar to the progression of Australian Rules. Indeed it is thought that Australian Rules evolved from Gaelic Football through the many thousands who were either deported or emigrated to Australia from the middle of the nineteenth century. Gaelic Football is played on a pitch approximately 137m long and 82m wide. The goalposts are the same shape as on a rugby pitch, with the crossbar lower than a rugby one and slightly higher than a soccer one.

The ball used in Gaelic Football is round, slightly smaller than a soccer ball. It can be carried in the hand for a distance of four steps and can be kicked or "hand-passed", a striking motion with the hand or fist. After every four steps the ball must be either bounced or "solo-ed", an action of dropping the ball onto the foot and kicking it back into the hand. You may not bounce the ball twice in a row. To score, you put the ball over the crossbar by foot or hand/fist for one point or under the crossbar and into the net by foot or the hand/fist in certain circumstances for a goal, the latter being the equivalent of three points.

There are so many variations of football (soccer, rugby union, rugby league, American football, Canadian football, Aussie rules, and Gaelic football), and they all struggle to come up with the right mix of rules. Gaelic rules seemed to provide good action, but I have to admit that the mandatory "solo-ing" seemed odd and arbitrary.

Spike TV Enlists for 'Ultimate Fighter'

I may finally have a reason to watch Spike TV. From Spike TV Enlists for 'Ultimate Fighter':

Spike TV is stepping into the ring with Ultimate Fighting Championship for a series about the martial arts sport. The male-oriented cable network has ordered 13 hour-long episodes of 'Ultimate Fighter' to begin airing in January.

Set to start shooting in September in Las Vegas, 'Fighter' will chronicle a competition among 20 athletes to earn a shot at a spot in the UFC league. Mixed martial arts involves fighters of different weight classes battling each other using techniques from karate, judo and kickboxing.

The Spike deal represents a turnabout for UFC, which cable operators dropped from pay-per-view during the late 1990s because of controversy over its violent action. Since coming under new ownership in 2001, the sport has remade itself in a bid for mainstream viewers.

UFC president Dana White believes that the Spike deal will expose the sport to new fans. 'This is huge for us,' he said. 'It will take UFC to the next level.'

Robert Riesenberg, one of the executive producers, said he expects to sign up advertisers from several categories — ranging from energy drinks to athletic shoes — that would help finance the series in exchange for product integration and off-air extensions of UFC in everything from radio and Internet advertising.

By the way, stepping into the ring? It's the octagon, people.

Californians, as a rule, are familiar with ju-jutsu...

As an aficionado of "physical culture" and "clever wrestling tricks", I quite enjoyed this passage from The Land That Time Forgot, where our hero has been tackled by multiple cavemen:

Three of the warriors were sitting upon me, trying to hold me down by main strength and awkwardness, and they were having their hands full in the doing, I can tell you. I don't like to appear conceited, but I may as well admit that I am proud of my strength and the science that I have acquired and developed in the directing of it — that and my horsemanship I always have been proud of. And now, that day, all the long hours that I had put into careful study, practice and training brought me in two or three minutes a full return upon my investment. Californians, as a rule, are familiar with ju-jutsu, and I especially had made a study of it for several years, both at school and in the gym of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, while recently I had had, in my employ, a Jap who was a wonder at the art.

Californians, as a rule, are familiar with ju-jutsu...

Merriam-Webster Online - myriad

I recently learned a friend-of-a-friend's peeve: using myriad as a noun. Naturally, I'd heard it used as a noun and as an adjective, and I wasn't sure which version was "correct" (or "more correct"). Merriam-Webster Online explains:

Main Entry: ¹myr^.i^.ad
Pronunciation: 'mir-E-&d
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek myriad-, myrias, from myrioi countless, ten thousand
1 : ten thousand
2 : a great number <a myriad of ideas>
usage Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

Overstocking in Afghanistan

A Salt Lake City-based Internet retailer — actually, the retailer's handmade-goods division — is Afghanistan's largest private employer. From Overstocking in Afghanistan:

These days, Worldstock employs more than 1,500 Afghan artisans among a worldwide network of craft workers. It's an accomplishment that Overstock's CEO, Patrick Byrne, attributes to both an upswing in online retail spending and reliable demand for inexpensive handmade rugs.

That confluence of factors culminated this week in a confirmation by the Afghan Ministry of Commerce that Overstock is currently the largest provider of private employment in Afghanistan. According to Mariam Nawabi, commercial attach� for the Afghan Embassy in the United States, Overstock is currently believed to provide employment, directly or indirectly, for about 1,700 people living in Afghanistan.

Prior to Overstock's arrival, Byrne was told that the country's largest employer was a brick factory in the Western city of Herat, which had about 400 workers.

You Always Get to be the Terrorist!

The Northeast Intelligence Network shares a creepy story:

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. A video located today on Sheik Abu Hamza's website, www.shareeah.org, features four children, doing what as children the world over do: pretending. But what is completely unnerving about this video is what they are pretending.

One young boy kneels in front of three other children, in the same manner of the condemned man; Three other children stand behind him in the same way that the terrorists stood over the men prior to their beheading. The three standing children are armed with pretend weapons. One of the three children is a girl. The tallest of the three standing children pretends he is Zarqawi, and reads a list of demands.

The film clip ends with the pretend beheading of the kneeling child.

Chilling.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

Badmash - The Singhsons

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish pointed me to Badmash's South Asian (Indian) version of The Simpsons — The Singhsons.

WSJ.com - An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests And Rising Hunger

WSJ.com - An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests And Rising Hunger describes how international agencies are (finally) embracing some fairly simple economic principles:

The world is producing more food than ever before as countries such as India, China and Brazil emerge as forces in global agriculture. But at the same time, the number of the world's hungry is on the rise — including in India — after falling for decades. Despite its overflowing granaries, India has more hungry people than any other country, as many as 214 million according to United Nations estimates, or one-fifth of its population.

The paradox is propelling a shift in strategy among the world's hunger fighters. International agencies that once encouraged countries to solve starvation crises by growing more food are now tackling the more fundamental problem of rural poverty as well. The old development mantra — produce more food, feed more people — is giving way to a new call: Create more jobs, provide income to buy food.

It looks like we've moved one step past "teach a man to fish" to "teach a man to drive a taxi so he can buy fish"...

WSJ.com - Jeans Makers Launch New Styles To Flatter the Male Figure

Manufacturers are producing "figure-enhancing" jeans for men now. From WSJ.com - Jeans Makers Launch New Styles To Flatter the Male Figure:

The new styles feature many of the same touches that designers have brought to women's jeans: low-rise cuts, stretchy fabrics, bleached-out colors — and, of course, higher price tags.

I can't be the first person to point out that men and women have different figures, so what enhances a female figure might not enhance a male figure. For example:

Chip and Pepper, a Los Angeles label, lowered the back pockets on one men's style by several inches — it's supposed to help the pear-shaped fellow — and left the zipper fly exposed on another. Seven for All Mankind put Lycra in some styles when it launched men's jeans in the fall last year, offering both stretch and relaxed-stretch styles for $256. Adriano Goldschmied, known as AG, also sells stretch jeans for men. "Men have fat days and skinny days too," says NPD's Mr. Cohen.

Last I checked, men don't have fat days and skinny days.

Here's how to guarantee that I won't buy your jeans:

To encourage men to try on the new styles, Diesel stores stock most of the jeans on high shelves behind the sales counter — so guys can't buy them without consulting a salesperson first.

I find this...amusing:

British designer Andrew Buckler, who founded his label in 2001 and gave his first runway show this spring, says his fledgling company is already profitable largely because of the success of jeans "designed, cut and styled specifically for men."

Jeans have always been "designed, cut and styled specifically for men" — that's why designer jeans for women were such a hit 25 years ago; no one had made jeans designed, cut and styled specifically for women before.

Gene Doping

Gene Doping explains the brave new world of ergogenics:

Treatments that regenerate muscle, increase its strength, and protect it from degradation will soon be entering human clinical trials for muscle-wasting disorders. Among these are therapies that give patients a synthetic gene, which can last for years, producing high amounts of naturally occurring muscle-building chemicals. [...] The chemicals are indistinguishable from their natural counterparts and are only generated locally in the muscle tissue. Nothing enters the bloodstream, so officials will have nothing to detect in a blood or urine test.

Recently scientists matched up the harmless AAV virus with a synthetic gene that would produce IGF-I only in skeletal muscle:

After injecting this AAV-IGF-I combination into young mice, we saw that the muscles' overall size and the rate at which they grew were 15 to 30 percent greater than normal, even though the mice were sedentary. Further, when we injected the gene into the muscles of middle-aged mice and then allowed them to reach old age, their muscles did not get any weaker.

To further evaluate this approach and its safety, Rosenthal created mice genetically engineered to overproduce IGF-I throughout their skeletal muscle. Encouragingly, they developed normally except for having skeletal muscles that ranged from 20 to 50 percent larger than those of regular mice. As these transgenic mice aged, their muscles retained a regenerative capacity typical of younger animals. Equally important, their IGF-I levels were elevated only in the muscles, not in the bloodstream, an important distinction because high circulating levels of IGF-I can cause cardiac problems and increase cancer risk. Subsequent experiments showed that IGF-I overproduction hastens muscle repair, even in mice with a severe form of muscular dystrophy.

This allowed them to "break the close connection between muscle use and its size" — but it certainly seems to work fine with weight training too:

We injected AAV-IGF-I into the muscle in just one leg of each of our lab rats and then subjected the animals to an eight-week weight-training protocol. At the end of the training, the AAV-IGF-I-injected muscles had gained nearly twice as much strength as the uninjected legs in the same animals. After training stopped, the injected muscles lost strength much more slowly than the unenhanced muscle. Even in sedentary rats, AAV-IGF-I provided a 15 percent strength increase, similar to what we saw in the earlier mouse experiments.

And that's just IGF-1 he's discussing, not myostatin inhibition.

Myostatin, Belgian Blue, and Flex Wheeler

The German toddler is supposedly the first human known to have the myostatin mutation (or, rather, to have two copies of it), but Double muscling in cattle due to mutations in the myostatin gene reports "that the myostatin gene is highly conserved among vertebrate species and that two breeds of cattle that are characterized by increased muscle mass (double muscling), Belgian Blue and Piedmontese, have mutations in the myostatin coding sequence."

Muscle: The Myostatin Connection discusses the knock-out mice and at least one human case of the mutation:

The ultimate demonstration that myostatin regulates muscle size in humans is the work of a man named Victor Conte of BALCO laboratories. He has shown that champion bodybuilder Flex Wheeler actually possesses a mutation that has resulted in the deletion of his myostatin gene (much like that in Belgian Blue Cattle). This goes on to prove something else that has always been suspected...that champion bodybuilders possess some sort of genetic gift that allows them to become much more muscular than the average person. It seems that champion bodybuilders may owe much more to their genetics than they do to their training, supplement or drug use.

You may have heard of BALCO laboratories. Here's their statement regarding Flex Wheeler:

Flex was a participant in a study we recently conducted in collaboration with the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh involving 62 men who made unusually large gains in muscle mass in response to strength training (extreme responders). Flex was one of only nine extreme responders that had the very rare "myostatin mutation." Myostatin is the gene that "limits muscle growth." Specifically, Flex had the rarest form of myostatin mutation at the "exon 2" position on the gene. This simply means Flex has a much larger number of muscle fibers compared to the other subjects or the normal population. We believe that these are the very first myostatin mutation findings in humans and the results of this landmark study have already been submitted for publication. Flex was also found to have a very unusual type of the IGF-1 gene. In fact, Flex was the only participant in the study that did not have a "match." All of the other extreme responders had at least three other subjects with a matching IGF-1 gene. Based upon Flex's very unique genetic profile, we plan to expeditiously publish a scientific paper that reveals his complete genotype in specific detail. The publication of his remarkable genetic data should generate an enormous amount of media exposure.

(Addendum: Read more about Gene Doping and Fitness.)

A New Treatment To Prevent Asthma Is Only Skin-Deep

A New Treatment To Prevent Asthma Is Only Skin-Deep notes the connection between skin reactions and other allergic reactions:

In the long search for the cause of asthma — a fast-growing disease that affects some nine million American children under 18 — scientists have variously blamed pollution, exposure to irritants in food and even excessive hygiene. But a new theory focuses on the kind of rashes Ryan has had as a baby. It suggests that infant eczema is the trigger of an allergic chain reaction that can lead to a childhood full of wheezing.
[...]
The Elidel study represents another approach to asthma: trying to attack the immune system's overreaction at its origin. Elidel inhibits a molecule called calcineurin, which is a key early activator of the allergic response. Doctors hope this will keep in check the antibody IgE, which is found at high levels in 80% of kids with eczema. IgE is seen as a master switch that turns on inflammation-producing immune cells. According to the new theory, these cells at first cluster around the skin, producing eczema in infants, and later migrate to the lymph nodes and lungs, where they cause asthma. That could explain why asthmatics tend to have high IgE levels.

Evidence to support this theory came from some wheezing mice in the lab of Jonathan Spergel, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Spergel, who is a consultant to Novartis, induced eczema by smearing egg white protein — a common cause of allergies — onto the skin of young lab mice. The mice developed eczema. Next he gave these mice and healthy control animals a whiff of egg-white protein through their airways. Mice without eczema breathed normally. "But mice who had had pre-exposure to the skin would wheeze," he says. "The mouse work really showed things went from the skin to the lungs." Through skin irritation, he says, "we were inducing asthma."

When scientists tried other parts of the body instead of the skin, they couldn't induce asthma. "So the hypothesis is there's something special about the skin," says Thomas Hultsch, who heads dermatology research at Novartis. "The skin is the portal."

Form and Function: Disguising Security As Something Artful

While visiting DC recently, I couldn't help but notice the ubiquitous planters — concrete planters, heavy and solid enough to stop a suicide bomber in a truck. Disguising Security As Something Artful discusses other examples:

In Seattle, a new 20-story federal courthouse scheduled to open this summer comes with a thicket of cleverly hidden protection. A perimeter of sweet gum trees, concrete benches and stainless-steel bollards forms the first line of defense. Should a suicide car bomber smash through those, he would face two options: Try to ford a 'waterlily pond' that doubles as a security moat, or navigate through a grove of 80 trees carefully staggered to prevent a vehicle from getting a clear shot at the main entrance.

Then there's the sunken sculpture garden, designed both to please the eye and trap a vehicle in the soft grass. Even the building's sign is part of the security system: Twenty feet long and made of stone, it forms part of the western perimeter.

"If something does happen and they're able to break through all that, they have to figure out how to get up 18 feet of steps," says Rick Thomas, the building's project manager.

A good point:

The intertwining of security and architecture is a throwback to antiquity. From medieval English castles to the Great Wall of China, structures throughout history have been built with defense in mind. Only in relatively recent times have cities and buildings been constructed on the assumption that they were safe from attack.

Bomb blasts follow the inverse-cube law, so keeping them at a safe "standoff distance" pays off:

Many new building perimeters are designed to keep vehicles at what security types call a safe "standoff distance" — preventing the nightmare scenario of a truck bomb penetrating into a modern tower's vulnerable core, where an explosion could trigger a catastrophic collapse.

Curt Betts, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blast expert, says a large vehicle bomb produces just one-eighth as much blast force on a building from 50 feet away as it does from 25 feet. Moving to 100 feet cuts that to just 2%.

So, what's a bollard?

Commonly the strong posts on a pier or wharf for holding fast a ship's mooring line, the term bollard now also refers to the waist-high pillars that have become the barrier of choice around many buildings. Anchored as much as five feet into the ground, with a steel core, the toughest bollards meet U.S. government standards requiring them to halt a truck going 50 miles per hour.

Bollard makers now report a lot of demand for better-looking bollards. "Bollards can be beautiful," asserts the Web site of Delta Scientific Corp., a Valencia, Calif., manufacturer of security barriers. The company, which says business has grown three-fold since Sept. 11, has added a line of "designer bollards," including fluted ones that mimic ancient Greek columns, and others with a vaguely Victorian touch. Delta's bollard customers include the State Department and the National Archive building in Washington and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

A rival firm, SecureUSA Inc., in Atlanta, designed bollards shaped like giant golf balls for an 18-hole course at a military base. Then there's the gorilla bollard, a crouching fiberglass simian with four steel pillars hidden inside its arms and legs, installed at a theme park that the company declines to name. "To a kid, it just looks like a fun thing to climb on," says Bevan Clark, SecureUSA's president. "But it could stop a Ringling Brothers truck carrying a real gorilla going 30 miles an hour."

Bollards are the main perimeter security at the new Oklahoma City federal building, officially dedicated in May to replace the one bombed in 1995. Those by the front entrance are hidden inside much larger cylinders of perforated metal. At night, lights inside the devices make them glow like luminaria, the popular Mexican and Southwestern Christmas decoration of candle-lit paper bags weighted with sand.

Boche

While reading Edgar Rice Burrough's The Land that Time Forgot last night, I came across a term I'd never seen before: boche. From MSN Encarta - Dictionary - Boche:

Boche [ bosh, bawsh ] (plural Boches, Boche) or boche [ bosh, bawsh ] (plural boches, boche)

noun

U.K. an offensive term for Germans considered collectively, especially German soldiers of World War I (dated)

[Early 20th century. Shortening of French alboche, a blend of allemand "German" and caboche "cabbage, blockhead."]

Cream Made from Breast Milk Reduces Warts

I couldn't make this up. From Cream Made from Breast Milk Reduces Warts:

A cream made from human breast milk and nicknamed Hamlet can dramatically reduce, and often eliminate, stubborn common warts, Swedish doctors reported.

Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells, which the researchers refer to by the whimsical acronym HAMLET, is the active ingredient that forces the wart cell to self-destruct by accumulating in each cell's nucleus and interfering with its control process.

The results, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, may extend well beyond wart treatment because the same class of viruses that cause those growths are also responsible for cervical cancer, genital warts, and some types of skin cancer.

Mutation Found in 'Muscle Man' Toddler

Mutation Found in 'Muscle Man' Toddler reports on a recent NEJM paper:

Somewhere in Germany is a baby Superman, born in Berlin with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet 5, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat. DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth.
[...]
The boy's mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth. The news comes seven years after researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created buff "mighty mice" by "turning off" the gene that directs cells to produce myostatin.
[...]
Researchers would not disclose the German boy's identity but said he was born to a somewhat muscular mother, a 24-year-old former professional sprinter. Her brother and three other close male relatives all were unusually strong, with one of them a construction worker able to unload heavy curbstones by hand.

In the mother, one copy of the gene is mutated and the other is normal; the boy has two mutated copies. One almost definitely came from his father, but no information about him has been disclosed. The mutation is very rare in people.

Gorilla Runs Amok in Zoo

I was hoping for more story from Gorilla Runs Amok in Zoo:

A male gorilla escaped from his cage in the Berlin zoo and sent terrified visitors running for cover, the zoo said on Wednesday.

Eight-year-old Bokito, who weighs 286 pounds and stands more than six feet, six inches tall, climbed over the top of the glass wall surrounding his outside enclosure and roamed the zoo on Tuesday.

Berlin newspapers showed shaky photos of the gorilla taken by an 18-year-old visitor who recorded how Bokito was grabbed by two burly zookeepers and marched back to his enclosure.

'Suddenly hysterical children and grown-ups came running toward us. They were all running toward the exit. Behind them we saw the huge ape leaping toward us on all fours,' the visitor, Husam Shawabkeh, said.

So two "burly" zookeepers were able to grab 6'6", 286-lb gorilla and march him back to his enclosure? (By the way, I love the false precision of round numbers translated from the metric system. The gorilla is two meters tall and 130 kilos.)

RPG vs. M1

War Nerd (Gary Brecher), in RPG vs. M1, draws an analogy between tanks and knights:

Fact is, no tank in the world is totally invulnerable to RPGs, any more than any knight was totally invulnerable to arrows.

If you think of a tank as an internal-combustion knight, you get a better sense of how it's meant to work. The armor is concentrated up front, so the knight/tank can attack without having to hold back. The idea is that he has to be able to shrug off what they throw at him while he's spurring the warhorse full-speed over the battlefield — then hit hard.

If he's unhorsed — if the tank is forced to stop and deal with lots of dismounted enemy — then it's all over. It's as easy as knifing a turtle

Black Tea May Help Get Blood Circulating

I may have to learn to like tea. From Black Tea May Help Get Blood Circulating:

In an experiment with 10 healthy men, Japanese researchers found that blood-flow in the coronary arteries improved two hours after the men drank black tea. The same was not true of a caffeinated drink used for comparison.

Rise of the Machines

A part of me groks the intro to Rise of the Machines:

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma — a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov's short story "Nightfall" that derailed Proyas' academic career. "It's a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy," says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in "Nightfall" when all six of a planet's suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. "I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn't. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore." So Proyas quit school and took his education upon himself, reading the works of Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

When I was in junior high, my older brother bought me Asimov's I, Robot. It was my first dose of "real" science fiction — well, aside from The Twilight Zone. It was just "thinky" enough to enthrall me.

But I didn't drop out of school.

Nightfall also captured my attention. Unfortunately, the Nightfall movie was one of the most awful movies I've ever seen. It's the first movie I can remember debating walking out of.

Anyway, who's Proyas? You may or may not recognize the name.

It makes sense then that Proyas' career as a film director has been defined by fantasy. His 1994 movie The Crow, based on the James O'Barr comic book, immediately gained cult status after Brandon Lee (the only son of kung fu master Bruce Lee) was killed in a freakish accident on set. In 1998, he directed Dark City, a visually rich and haunting movie about the surreal wanderings of an amnesiac accused of murder.

I can heartily recommend both The Crow and Dark City.

This July, Proyas turns again to his favored genre with I, Robot, an adaptation of Asimov's nine-story collection of the same name. "This is the definitive movie about robots," says Proyas. "It's the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov's stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned."

Suddenly, I'm not expecting another Wild, Wild West. This could work!

Air-Dropped Fish Affecting Amphibians

I couldn't let a headline like Air-Dropped Fish Affecting Amphibians go by without reading the article:

Throughout the world, frogs are dying en masse, a phenomenon that concerns scientists because the extremely sensitive amphibians are among the first species to react to wider environmental problems. Global warming, increased solar radiation, windblown pesticides, pollution and diseases all are being explored as possible reasons why the populations are croaking.

Yet Vredenburg found a simpler explanation is one major cause: They're being eaten by trout air-dropped into pristine mountain lakes across the West and in areas as remote as the Andes in South America, on every continent except Antarctica.

It's not just air-dropped trout — or even just fish:

San Francisco epicureans introduced Eastern bullfrogs a century ago because they liked gourmet frog legs. The bullfrogs have since devastated the population of red-legged frogs thought to have inspired Mark Twain's Gold Rush-era short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

More recently, voracious northern pike dumped into the northern Sierra's Lake Davis a decade ago are eating the lake's trout and costing the state millions of dollars to eradicate.

Late in the 1800s, anglers and hatchery managers began hauling fish into high mountain lakes in modified milk cans lashed to mules. But in the 1950s, wildlife managers discovered they could drop the fingerlings from airplanes, easily seeding thousands of previously inaccessible lakes.

Now thousands of lakes across the West — many of them in designated wilderness areas — are regularly stocked with trout, accounting for about 95 percent of the larger, deeper lakes that once were prime frog habitat.

Sylvia's Break is Mir's Fortune

One of the first things you learn as a grappler is when to submit. Tim Sylvia missed that lesson. Sylvia's Break is Mir's Fortune describes their UFC bout from last Saturday night:

The closest man to the action saw what happened. Truth be told, he heard it too. With 253-pound Frank Mir applying as much pressure as he could to six-foot-eight Tim Sylvia's gangly right arm, it shouldn't have been such a surprise. Yet when referee Herb Dean jumped between Mir and Sylvia just 50 seconds after their UFC heavyweight championship contest commenced Saturday night, a cascade of boos showered down from the 10,000-plus fans inside the Mandalay Bay Events Center.

Moments later, when the six big screens throughout the arena simultaneously aired a Sylvia' forearm move in a way it wasn't designed to do, the 'boos' turned into 'oohs.' And with that, Dean was vindicated, Frank Mir (8-1-0) was the proud owner of a new belt, and Tim Sylvia (18-1-0) was on his way to a local Las Vegas hospital with two broken bones following the first loss of his career.

Sylvia had plenty of time to tap out, but he didn't, and he paid the price.

Frankly, I didn't know what happened when the ref jumped in. Sylvia's elbow was slipping out, so I thought he was safe. I guess he was safe — from having his elbow dislocated. In the replay, a spot in his forearm (an inch or two below the elbow) visible pops out. That's what the ref saw — and heard.

Tap early, tap often, kids.

The fact that Sylvia then acted unhurt makes me wonder, was he on drugs?

Cobra Kai Jiu Jitsu

I can't believe that somebody (Marc Laimon) already took the name I wanted to use if I ever opened a jiu-jitsu school: Cobra Kai Jiu Jitsu.

(In case you're not quite the martial-arts geek I am, Cobra Kai was the evil karate dojo in Karate Kid.)

Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Girls Just Want To Have Fun reviews Alexandra Robbins' Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities:

In one of the few scholarly articles ever written on white sororities, published in American Sociological Review in 1965, John Findley Scott argued that sororities served mainly to provide their members with high-status husbands. The striking thing about the early-'60s sororities that Scott described — with their status-consciousness, their public courtship rituals, and their obsession with sexual reputation — is how much they served the interests of their members' parents, who traditionally sought to control their daughters' sexual behavior in order to preserve their marriage value. In serving parental ends, sororities also served those of the colleges and universities charged with overseeing the moral and physical hygiene of their coeds.

But college women have considerably more control over their social status these days. [...] With the old marriage goals pushed aside, the rules about ladylike comportment and sexual chastity, designed to reassure future husbands, are increasingly irrelevant. Nonetheless, the old spouse-hunting rituals have been retained — the endless Greek mixers and formals. Add a general relaxing of sexual mores, and combine it with the expanding role of alcohol and drugs in post-1960s campus life, and the battery of courtship rituals designed to enhance the marriage value of sorority women by rationing their sexual availability becomes something rather different.

From one angle, then, sororities have become the problem that they used to be the solution to.

The Good Bad Boy

You probably think you know the story of Pinocchio. Not likely. From The Good Bad Boy:

Originally, Pinocchio was published as a serial in the newspaper Il giornale per i bambini ("The Paper for Children"). It appeared in eight parts between July and October of 1881, and then in eleven more installments from February 1882 to January 1883. The form of the story was that of a picaresque novel, in which, perhaps because of the pressures of time, some of the chapters are more original and better integrated into the whole. Some of these episodes — for example those in which Pinocchio meets a giant serpent, is caught in a trap and made to serve as a watchdog, rides on the back of a pigeon, and is mistaken for a fish by a monstrous green-haired fisherman — are often left out of the condensed English-language versions.

The Disney film omits even more of the story, and changes it drastically. Geppetto, Pinocchio's foster father, appears to be a prosperous toymaker, and the town where he lives looks Swiss or Bavarian: his workshop is full of music boxes and cuckoo clocks. In the original story, however, Geppetto is a desperately poor Italian woodcarver. When the film begins Pinocchio is a lifeless wooden toy; he comes to life only when a fairy grants Geppetto's wish for a child. In the book Pinocchio is alive from the start. Though he is only a nameless stick of firewood in the shop of the carpenter Master Anthony, he can already speak and move. When Master Anthony strikes the stick with his axe, it cries out "Ouch! You hurt me!" The carpenter is terrified, and offers the piece of wood to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make a marionette. It continues to act up, mocking Geppetto, and striking Master Anthony, provoking two fistfights between the old friends.

When Geppetto gets home he begins to carve the marionette. But as soon as Pinocchio's mouth is finished he laughs at Geppetto and sticks out his tongue, and once he has arms he snatches Geppetto's wig off his head. When his legs and feet are finished, he runs away.

From the start, Collodi's Pinocchio is not only more self-conscious but far less simple than the cute little toy boy of the cartoon. He is not only naive, but impulsive, rude, selfish, and violent. In theological terms, he begins life in a state of original sin; while from a psychologist's point of view, he represents the amoral, self-centered small child, all uncensored id.

The original Pinocchio kills the talking cricket who gives him advice. And he's not an idealized five- or six-year-old; he's a rebel, more like Twain's Tom Sawyer

Olympic Games

Olympic Games, a review of Miller's Ancient Greek Athletics, debunks a few cherished myths about the ancient games:

The idea that the ancient games were apolitical celebrations of amateurism, for instance, is an invention of the late Victorians, who projected their idealizations of the Greeks back onto a reality that was as obsessed with money and prestige as our own times. To be sure, athletes in the stephanitic ('crown') games like the Olympics received only a crown made of olive leaves or celery, but the prestige attending victory in these games often produced more practical benefits, such as free meals for life at public expense, gifts from the city, and exemptions from taxes and civic duties: rewards as profitable as today's endorsement contracts for Olympic victors.

Then there were the "money" games, numerous competitions besides those held every four years at Olympia, in which the value of prizes could reach as high as what today would be half a million dollars. Theagenes of Thasos, active in the early fifth century B.C., earned what translates as around $44 million from his fourteen-hundred athletic victories. The late-sixth-century trainer Demokedes earned the equivalent of a quarter-million dollars a year after rival city-states twice lured him away with better offers.

Such lucrative payouts encouraged a professionalization of training and competition that by the Roman period had turned athletes into full-blown professionals who earned their living solely from sports. (Pliny the Younger, for instance, records the complaints of athletes who felt their free room and board provided by the emperor during training wasn't generous enough.) And this professionalization was attended with the same evils — fixing, bribery, trade unions, and raiding athletes and trainers — that characterize the modern world with its greedy, peripatetic free agents.

No description of the ancient games would be complete without a rant about their brutality:

The frequent brutality of ancient sports reinforced this vision of life's hard limits. Important functionaries of the games were the rabdoi: judges armed with willow switches who punished fouls and false starts with a flogging. Even more indicative of the Greek acceptance of life's brutal limits were events like boxing and the pankration, a fierce combination of wrestling and boxing, with strangulation, finger-breaking, and eye-gouging (ostensibly forbidden) thrown in. Boxers fought with hard leather strips wrapped around their fists and pounded each other's heads until somebody gave up. Blood flowed freely, and fighters died, none more spectacularly than a certain Kreugas, who had his guts torn out by his sharp-nailed opponent.

Ostensibly forbidden? In soccer, kicking someone in the head is ostensibly forbidden too — but it happens. Boxers [...] pounded each other's head until somebody gave up? Is it better that we expect boxers to pound each other's heads until one of them falls unconscious?

Sins of the fathers

Sins of the fathers describes the rise and fall of the Piarists:

The Piarists began as a religious order dedicated to teaching poor children. A Spaniard, Jose Calasanz, founded the first Pious school in 1597, in Rome, at a time when free education barely existed. The order exists to this day, although now its schools are more exclusive. Past pupils include Mozart, Goya, Haydn, Victor Hugo — and Egon Ronay.

In marked contrast to the Jesuits, Piarists taught in the vernacular, not Latin, and over philosophical mathematics they favoured "abbaco", or mercantile arithmetic. Children learned how to calculate the interest on loans, exchange rate mechanisms and geometry. Calasanz hoped that these skills would help them to find jobs "in banks, in warehouses, in counting houses and in other trades".

Not only were his teaching methods innovative, but Calasanz's staff included some of the great men of the time, including Ventura Sarafellini, the calligrapher who created the inscription "Tu Es Petrus" around the inner ring of the cupola of St Paul's. Calasanz also knew Pope Gregory's barber and doctor, and found them useful intermediaries.

Even Galileo became involved with the Piarists when a group of scientifically minded priests was sent to start a Pious school in Florence. Their espousal of his heliocentric theory, at a time when Galileo was falling foul of the Inquisition, was to prove very dangerous for the order.

Alongside their modern teaching methods, Piarist brothers practised an austere Christianity. They wore horse-hair habits and were expected to eat little and badly. Calasanz was so dedicated to discomfort that he ate his meals with one foot lifted in the air, "to suffer even while eating", or lay on the floor and made the other brothers trample him on their way to the refectory. Piarists were not allowed to swim, play the guitar or kiss their mothers. They were never supposed to be alone with a pupil.

Its austerity notwithstanding, the movement grew quickly, with schools opening across Italy (including one at the summit of Vesuvius, which was promptly swallowed up by the volcano). By the 1630s the expansion was so rapid that Calasanz wished he had another 10,000 teachers to meet the demand for new schools. Yet by 1646 the order was discredited, and banned by Pope Innocent X. What had happened, in one decade, to quash such a flourishing movement? (It was only restarted at the end of the 17th century.)

What did lead to the fall?

The reason given at the time was "internal dissent", but Karen Liebreich stumbled on what she felt to be the real answer while researching a doctorate on public education in a musty Florentine archive. Calasanz is the patron saint of Catholic schools, and Liebriech had been dutifully wading through his 4,869 letters - not a joke among them, she notes grimly - when she came across the telling euphemism: il vitio pessimo — "the worst sin".

Liebreich's Fallen Order: A History explains:

We learn about the sinister Father Gavotti, who wore gold-trimmed stockings under his habit, and whose paedophile tendencies, said a contemporary, caused "a terrible stench to everyone nearby". There is nasty Mario Sozzi, who shopped his enemies to the Inquisition, and was struck down by a kind of leprosy. His treatment involved being wrapped naked in the still pulsating body of a recently slaughtered ox. Sozzi died anyway - but his colleagues enjoyed eating the ox.

The real villain of the piece is Stefano Cherubini, headmaster of the Naples school, who threatened to destroy the order if allegations of his abuse of children were made public. Cherubini was the son and brother of powerful papal lawyers, so Calasanz pandered to him, promoting Cherubini away from the scene of his crime. "Your reverence's sole aim," he wrote to a colleague, "is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors."

The more things change...

Lollapalooza

I didn't realize that the Lollapalooza tour was still going — well, until today's announcement:

Even with what has been touted as the best line-up since its inception in 1991, with such eclectic and respected artists as Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, and The Flaming Lips, among others, and the most competitive ticket prices in the marketplace for a tour this size, it was not enough to counter the weak economic state of this years summer touring season. Therefore, it is with the utmost regret that due to poor ticket sales across the board, the Lollapalooza, 2004 tour has been cancelled. This morning, tour organizers and concert promoters faced with several million dollars of losses, made the very tough decision to pull the tour.

Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, and The Flaming Lips? Yeah, that's a great alt-rock line-up...for 1991.

Feeding the Minotaur

Victor Davis Hanson's Feeding the Minotaur opens with yet another à propos classical reference:

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos's monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion — as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn't show up to wreck the arrangement.

Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. [...] The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America's commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.

Interesting summary of the situation:

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.

I wouldn't expect Hanson to use "comedy" there...

Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves

Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves by bringing back family names:

For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.

Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name — a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning 'golden flower.'

Frankly, I'm surprised that most Mongolians forgot their ancestral names. Anyway, they're coming back:

By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives.

In 1997, a new law required everyone to have surnames. The law was largely ignored, but then a system of citizenship cards was introduced. Slowly the country of 2.5 million began to adopt surnames.

Today, however, there are still 10,000 people without surnames. So the government is trying to solve the problem with a mixture of incentives (a discount on the registration fee) and heavy-handed pressure (a threat of financial penalties on anyone who fails to get a citizenship card before the June 27 national election).

Of course, everyone now gets to choose a surname, and "Borjigin, the tribal name of Genghis Khan, has become the most popular name in the country. It means master of the blue wolf, a reference to Mongolia's creation myth."

Can you imagine literally have a name like "Skywalker"?:

Mongolia's Defence Minister, an earnest, bespectacled man with a "Hero of the Soviet Union" medal on his jacket, is the proud owner of probably the coolest name in the country.

The 58-year-old minister, Gurragchaa, is a former cosmonaut on a Soviet spaceship — the only cosmonaut from Mongolia. And so when he was unable to discover his ancestral surname, he chose Sansar, the Mongolian word for the cosmos. His children will use the same name.

Islamic Democracy? Mali Finds a Way To Make It Work

Islamic Democracy? Mali Finds a Way To Make It Work:

All over Mali last month, the boisterous pursuit of votes unfolded with hardly a hitch. Candidates focused on everyday issues like garbage removal and roads. Their lively campaigns showcased something highly unusual in the Muslim world: a thriving democracy.

Islam and democracy haven't had a good record together, especially where mixed with deep poverty such as that of this sprawling West African country. While much of the world has moved away from authoritarian rule, the New York think tank Freedom House ranks just two of the globe's 47 Muslim-majority nations fully "free." They are Mali, a democracy since 1992, and neighboring Senegal. Mali's rare success thus stands as both a hopeful sign and a measure of the task the U.S. faces in seeking to seed democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can't say I knew much about Mali:

Democracy might seem to face particularly long odds in Mali. The former French colony sits astride one of the world's most violent neighborhoods. To the north is Algeria, wracked by a lethal Islamist insurgency, and to the south the Ivory Coast, rent by ethnic civil war.

Mali — bigger than Texas and California combined, with 12 million people — is a hodgepodge of ethnic groups. Listening to Mr. Cissé campaign were black Songhay farmers in Muslim skullcaps, Arab traders with goatees, Peul cattlemen in conical leather hats, and olive-skinned Tuareg nomads whose full-face turbans left only sunglasses exposed. The diversity reflects Timbuktu's past as a caravan crossroads where the Sahara meets a bend in the muddy Niger River.

Mali's "intricate social fabric" includes taboos against violence among castes and ethnic groups:

That tradition is known to locals as "cousinage," and arose as a way to preserve peace as empire succeeded empire in medieval times. The descendants of winners and losers were usually made "cousins" in order to bury grievances. The tradition of loyalty to multiple cousin groups still defines social relationships in Mali, in contrast to the tribal allegiances that are the rule in much of the Arab world and tropical Africa further south.

WSJ.com - At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best

WSJ.com - At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best describes a surprisingly common scenario:

A book is a good place to stash personal, valuable, embarrassing stuff. Unless, forgetting all about the stuff, you sell the book to a used book store.

For instance, Richard Ryan, a former student protester, left his rap sheet in a book he sold to the Strand, New York's oldest and biggest independent used-book seller.

Some more examples:

Erin Thompson, who enters new buys into the Strand's computer, found a key in a book and wears it on a string around her neck. Ephemera drift up on her desk: the Louths' hand-drawn family tree. An ink sketch dated 1901 — hidden in a 1969 Christmas card — of a horse pulling a plow. A doctor's prescription pad with the following notations: "Wednesday -- mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday — rumba or tango. At work — angry. Really got angry. How to use?"

Imagine finding this:

Adam Davis, a 25-year-old from Oregon, took a job as a Strand clerk when he came to New York three years ago to write fiction. One day, he opened a copy of Barbara Tuchman's medieval history, "A Distant Mirror," and discovered a birth certificate. The baby's father was listed as "not known." An attached rider, dated years later, named the father.

Wrapped inside the certificate was a snapshot of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and one, in black-and-white, of what appeared to be the same woman as a child. There were some traveler's-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued.

Maybe I should take a job at a used-book store:

Used books often gain value from forgotten paper -- paper money, for example; the Strand's staff rakes in lots of that. They haven't yet found a "hell scene with fish monster," as Cristiana Romelli did two years ago at Sotheby's in London. The original Hieronymus Bosch sketch fell out of a client's old picture album and sold for $276,000. A few years earlier, her colleague Julien Stock found a Michelangelo stuck in a 19th-century scrap book. In 2001, that one brought its owner $12 million.

The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand's owner, once opened a book titled "The Bill of Rights" to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, "Boo! Abbie Hoffman." Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.

Unfalsifiable political theories

In Unfalsifiable political theories, Steven Den Beste compares the Cold War and War on Terror and notes how the "party line" always recommends negotiation over military build-up, whether the opponent is strong or weak:

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the "party line" in the west was that it was useless to try to compete with the USSR because the Soviet economy was strong and the Soviet military was formidable, and there was no way it was going to collapse, so we should negotiate and try to come to some sort of accommodation, instead of relying on competition and military build-up. After the USSR collapsed, the party line changed to this: The USSR had always been a basket case and its collapse was inevitable anyway. (We always said that, and it turned out we were right.) So there wasn't any need to rely on competition and military build-up; we should have negotiated and tried to come to some sort of accommodation while we waited for the inevitable collapse.

We have seen exactly the same thing happen in the "War on Terror". Prior to the Madrid bombing, the "party line" was that the threat of terrorism had been massively overblown and the American response was preposterously excessive and totally unjustified. Rather than try to rely on military might and confrontation, we should instead negotiate and try to come to a peaceful accommodation. (In a spectacular example of bad timing, the International Herald Tribune notoriously published an opinion piece which said exactly that on the day that Madrid was bombed.)

After Madrid, the party line turned on a dime, and became: It's apparent that the use of military power and confrontation to deal with the threat of terrorism is a failure. We should instead try to negotiate and come to some sort of accommodation.

You may have noticed a common theme in the party line.

German 'Samurai' on the Loose in Woods Near Berlin

From German 'Samurai' on the Loose in Woods Near Berlin:

A camouflage-clad German man wielding a samurai sword attacked at least seven hikers in forests west of Berlin, performing sword tricks before ordering them to leave the woods, police said Friday.

They suspect a 46-year-old local man who trained in martial arts and survival skills in camps in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam to be the attacker.

'He's dangerous and has been hard to find because he wears camouflage,' said Catrin Feistauer, spokeswoman for the Nauen police department. Police have used infrared cameras mounted on helicopters to try and track him down.

The man pushed two elderly people off their bikes and, flashing his sword, shouted at them to leave the forest. He later tried to drive a young couple out of the woods. No one was seriously hurt.

'It's frightening because the violence level has increased each time,' Feistauer said.

Where is Michael Dudikoff these days, anyway?

Hit & Run: Why do you think they call it Soylent Green?

Hit & Run: Why do you think they call it Soylent Green? cites an Interfax article, Media exposure forces government to respond to hair-into-soy sauce scandal, with a peculiar story to tell:

China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.
[...]
By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as 'blended' on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce.

Eye of the Tiger

I just got a good chuckle out of the new Starbucks Doubleshot ad featuring Eye of the Tiger — or a variant thereof:

Embracing a "life's soundtrack" creative direction, a new DoubleShot Expresso TV ad from Starbucks features a 80s rock tune familiar to Rocky fans and workout music listeners everywhere. The "Glen" TV commercial opens with a man in his kitchen having a DoubleShot drink, only to have the band Survivor appear in his living room chanting "Glen! Glen Glen Glen!". The band continues to follow him throughout his morning, offering a personalized version of their Rocky III soundtrack anthem "Eye of the Tiger". New lyrics include: "Middle management is right in his grasp. It's a dream he will never let die." (Somewhat related 80s music note: The ad features actual members of the band Survivor, including lead singer Jimi Jamison. The band's original lead singer, Dave Bickler, is the singing voice behind Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" tv ads.)

I even found a Quicktime copy on-line. It's hard to beat these lyrics:

Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen's the man
Going to work
Got his tie
Got ambition
Middle management
Is right in his grasp
It's a dream
He will never let die
Glen's the man of the hour
He's the king of his cube
[...]
He knows one day
He just could become
Superviiiiissssor!

WSJ.com - Sept 11. Plotters Initially Planned Broader Attacks

According to WSJ.com - Sept 11. Plotters Initially Planned Broader Attacks, Osama bin Laden scaled back plans for September 11, afraid that coordinating too many simultaneous attacks would be too difficult:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's main operational planner and an architect of the Sept. 11 plot, originally envisioned as many as 10 hijacked jets hitting targets on both the East and West Coasts, the commission staff reported. He also has told questioners that before Sept. 11 he planned a 'second wave' of follow-up attacks in the U.S., according to summaries of the interrogations of Mr. Mohammed and other detainees reviewed by the Journal.

The terrorists did their research:

The commission said the hijackers also took a series of flights to gain intelligence for their attacks. Several successfully carried box cutters aboard flights, it said. And three each took flights from East Coast cities to California aboard the types of aircraft they intended to hijack. On these flights, "They determined that the best time to storm the cockpit would be about 10-15 minutes after takeoff, when they noticed that cockpit doors were typically opened for the first time," the commission said.

They also analyzed things strategically:

Mr. Mohammed told interrogators that the discussion of U.S. targets began in the early-to-mid-1990s between him and his nephew Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The two "would think about what drives the U.S. economy when brainstorming about potential targets," the summary states. Mr. Mohammed "listed Hollywood, automobiles and wheat as major contributors to the U.S. economy," the summary states.

Their motivations are pretty clear:

"Once they were made to suffer, the detainees reasoned, those people would demand that the government change its policies, and the government would have to change if" the U.S. was hurt economically, according to the documents.

Why would they think this?

Among other aid, al Qaeda sent scores of trainers to Somalia, who taught the use of rocket-propelled grenades, the weapons used to down the helicopters. The staff said al Qaeda officials congratulated themselves after the attack, and that Mr. bin Laden and aides touted the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia in March 1994 as "a demonstration that the Americans could be forced to retreat."

Boston.com / News / World / Raucous bar scene emerges in Baghdad's green zone

Beer bongs and keg stands in Baghdad? cites some drinking stories from Raucous bar scene emerges in Baghdad's green zone:

In a city where few people drink, Baghdad's sealed-off green zone counts at least seven bars, including a Thursday night disco, a sports bar, a British pub, a rooftop bar run by General Electric, and a bare-bones trailer-tavern operated by the contractor Bechtel.

Only employees of the occupation are welcome in most of them. U.S. troops ejected a reporter from the basement sports bar a few months ago, at the instance of Coalition Provisional Authority employees drinking inside.

The plushest tavern is the CIA's rattan furnished watering hole, known as the ''OGA bar.'' OGA stands for ''Other Government Agency,'' the CIA's low-key moniker.

The OGA bar has a dance floor with a revolving mirrored disco ball and a game room. It is open to outsiders by invitation only. Disgruntled CPA employees who haven't wangled invites complain that the CIA favors women guests.

An American government worker said the British residents are especially keen to drink. A joke running through the green zone says that British officials overseeing construction of their new embassy are giving highest priority to opening the embassy pub.

One of the more interesting hangouts is the Green Zone Cafe, a tent erected in the parking lot of a former gas station. The cafe brings together a raucous mix of occupation personalities and others like reporters who don't carry government IDs.

On a typical evening, one can see U.S. soldiers smoking from 4-foot-tall hookahs and security contractors guffawing over beer, their machine guns by their sides. The CPA's would-be strategists can sometimes be seen in their ubiquitous military desert boots and dress shirts and slacks, playing Risk, the board game of global domination.

Hookah, beer, and Risk. It's a good life.

A Matter of Degrees

A Matter of Degrees contrasts elite colleges and community colleges:

At Smith, as at most elite colleges, most of the students are young and single. They often believe that they are at these places because they deserve to be, because they 'got in.' And to an extent, of course, that's true, and some have overcome significant hardships to get there. Certainly, by no means are all of them from wealthy families; there are scholarships and loans and student work programs, and some families sacrifice greatly.

Nevertheless, if you were to put it the opposite way and ask me why one goes to community college, the answer might be educational for many of my daughter's classmates. You go to community college because you are an ambitious kid whose parents don't have professional jobs. Because you are a girl in a family whose culture for thousands of years has valued education only for boys. Because you come from a family that never really thought about college for anyone, never saved for it or steered you toward it. You go to community college because you had a significant trauma during your adolescence: Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent, lost a sibling, lived in a household of chronic anger, suffered from depression or anorexia, did too many drugs. So you failed some of your high school courses, and the "good" colleges won't take you. You go to community college because you were born in another country and came to America too late to pick up English very easily. Because you landed a good job or gave birth to a beautiful baby right out of high school, and didn't look back for 10 or 15 years, when, suddenly, you thought about college. You go to community college because you have a learning disability, undiagnosed or untreated, that pushed you to the sidelines in school. Because you started at a four-year school and discovered that you weren't ready to leave home. And you go to community college because you believe that America is a society where intelligence is rewarded, and since you're such a fine, intelligent person, it's unnecessary for you to actually do any homework in high school, and suddenly you have a C average and your SATs are pretty good but, frankly, so are a lot of other people's, and the best offer you got from four-year colleges was their wait list.

sacbee.com - Invisible beam tops list of nonlethal weapons

This isn't your father's stun gun. From Invisible beam tops list of nonlethal weapons:

Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds.

People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.

Sounds great. Really, what could go wrong?

Karcher and other military officials are trying to alleviate fears that the device might be misused to harm civilians or converted into a torture machine that leaves no marks.

At least it's practical, right?

Eleven years in the making at a cost of more than $50 million, the Active Denial System is still years from deployment. It weighs about 4 tons and consists largely of a big dish and antenna that are mounted on a Humvee multipurpose vehicle.

Some facts:

Once an operator has aimed the antenna using a scope, the press of a button sends out a column of millimeter-wave, electromagnetic energy at the speed of light. Pentagon officials say that the weapon's exact reach and its column size are classified, but that it can extend beyond the 550-meter effective range of bullets. Its intensity is the same at any distance.
[...]
When the beam hits an individual, it penetrates 1/64th of an inch beneath the skin and heats water molecules to 130 degrees in less than a second.

"It tricks the pain sensors into thinking they're on fire," said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.

I foresee a few safety-switch "malfunctions":

Susan Levine, the Pentagon's project manager for the energy beam, said years of tests on humans and animals enabled researchers to establish a margin of safety. After several seconds, the device automatically shuts off to avoid burning its target, she said.

The Adams Plan

I had never heard of The Adams Plan:

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a dental surgeon from Pennsylvania named Lytle S. Adams came up with an idea that the US military thought might have some merit: dropping napalm armed bats on Japan.

Yes, really. They spent 2 million on it.

The plan was to put the bats into hibernation, fit each bat with a payload of napalm and a small parachute, and airdrop them over Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt apparently approved this. With the help of chiroptologist Donald Griffin, the National Defence Research Committee, the NDRC, the Army's Chemical Warfare Service, and the Navy (submarines could release bats too), the plan finally reached the testing phase. On May 15, 1943, at a remote airfield in California, the first bat-drop was executed.

The bats did not come out of their refrigerator induced hibernation on cue. The parachutes weren't big enough. Most of the bats hit the ground. A few bats had better luck; they woke up before they could splatter against the ground, and, as was hoped, they flew towards the nearest buildings. If this had been in Japan, that would have been great. But as it was, the napalm set fire to the airport hangars and a general's car.

Thereafter the plan was dropped.

David Quammen's Natural Acts : A Sidelong View of Science and Nature tells the story.

Censorship's Trial Balloons - What happens when wartime news gets censored?

A recent Slashdot article, Japanese Balloon Battle, cites Slate's Censorship's Trial Balloons - What happens when wartime news gets censored?, by Liam Callanan:

You've likely heard nothing about it. And that, of course, is the problem.

What have we likely heard nothing about? The Japanese Balloon Bombs of WWII. Except that I've heard plenty about the Japanese Balloon Bombs of WWII:

One of the best kept secrets of the war involved the Japanese balloon bomb offensive, prompted by the Doolittle raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942 as a means of direct reprisal against the U.S. mainland. Some 9,000 balloons made of paper or rubberized silk and carrying anti-personnel and incendiary bombs were launched from Japan during a five-month period, to be carried by high altitude winds more than 6,000 miles eastward across the Pacific to North America. Perhaps a thousand of these reached this continent, but there were only about 285 reported incidents. Most were reported in the northwest U.S., but some balloons traveled as far east as Michigan.

The first operational launches took place on Nov. 3, 1944 and two days later a U.S. Navy patrol boat spotted a balloon floating on the water 66 miles southwest of San Pedro, California. As more sightings occurred, the government, with the cooperation of the news media, adopted a policy of silence to reduce the chance of panic among U.S. residents and to deny the Japanese any information on the success of the launches. Discouraged by the apparent failure of their effort, the Japanese halted their balloon attacks in April 1945.

The government changed its stance when a family of picknickers found a balloon bomb:

On May 5, 1945, six picnickers were killed in Oregon when a balloon bomb they dragged from the woods exploded. The U.S. Government quickly publicized the balloon bombs, warning people not to tamper with them. These were the only known fatalities occurring within the U.S. during WWII as a direct result of enemy action.

Fighters intercepted some of the balloons. Since they were 32 feet in diameter and held 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, I doubt they were hard to shoot down.

As some of the comments on Slashdot point out, what's really fascinating about this is that the Japanese sent these balloons along the newly discovered Jet Stream. US experts traced the bombs back to Japan via the sand in the attached sandbags. It turned out to be unique to a particular beach in Japan — which US scientists knew by comparing the sand to samples from pre-war mineralogical surveys.

Dogs Understand Human Language

I may need a border collie. From Dogs Understand Human Language:

A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday.
[...]
"(Rico) lives as a pet with his owners and was reported by them to know the labels of more than 200 items, mostly children's toys and balls, which he correctly retrieved upon request," Julia Fischer of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and colleagues wrote.

His owners say "Rico, wo ist der (where is the) Banane (banana)," or "BigMac" or "Panda," and the dog searches, out of sight of the owner, until he finds the object.
[...]
"Rico's 'vocabulary size' is comparable to that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea lions and parrots."

When they put a new object into a room filled with old objects, Rico was able to fetch it 7 out of 10 times, evidently figuring out that the new word must refer to the new object.

Four weeks later, he apparently remembered this new word about half the time. "This retrieval rate is comparable to the performance of 3-year-old toddlers," they wrote.
[...]
Psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University in Connecticut, an expert in how people learn the meaning of words, said not even chimpanzees have demonstrated such "fast-mapping" abilities.

Yahoo! News - Grapefruit-Sized Meteorite Smashes Through New Zealand Home

Yahoo! News - Grapefruit-Sized Meteorite Smashes Through New Zealand Home:

A grapefruit-sized meteorite smashed through the roof of a New Zealand house, hitting a couch and bouncing off the ceiling before coming to rest under a computer.

The 2.9 pound chunk of space debris dropped out of the sky and plummeted through the tiled roof of the Auckland home on Saturday.

How long until Auckland is menaced by super-powered criminals (and vigilantes)?

WSJ.com - Researchers Seek Roots off Morality in Biology, with Intriguing Results

WSJ.com - Researchers Seek Roots off Morality in Biology, with Intriguing Results opens with a pair of moral dilemmas:

You are the night watchman at a pediatric hospital. An accident in the ventilation system has caused deadly fumes to enter the air ducts, headed straight for a ward with five children. If you do nothing, the fumes will kill them. If you hit a switch, the fumes will be redirected toward a room with a single child. Should you hit the switch?

You're a doctor. You have five patients who will die without organ transplants, and one healthy patient who could provide those organs. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice him in order to save the other five?

Another pair of moral dilemmas:

In one, you are driving along a deserted highway when you see a man bleeding by the roadside. You stop to help, and he asks you to drive him to a hospital. If you do, his blood will ruin your new leather seats, for which you just paid $500. Is it morally acceptable to leave him bleeding on the road? If not, then is it morally OK to ignore a fund-raising letter asking you for a $500 donation, sufficient to save the lives of 50 children who otherwise will die of a treatable disease?

Scientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect brain activity when people pondered moral dilemmas:

In a sample of 60,000 people taking an online survey (at moral.wjh.harvard.edu), "people make very, very rapid judgments about moral dilemmas, and there is very little variation in what they consider permissible," says Marc Hauser of Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. The power of moral intuition "goes strikingly against the dominant view in philosophy that we consciously think these things through."

He suspects that these moral intuitions include the understanding that committing an inherently evil action, even as a means to a good end, is wrong. That would explain why most people view throwing passengers off an overfilled lifeboat (an inherently evil act) to save the others aboard as morally repugnant. But flipping a switch (morally neutral) to redirect an out-of-control trolley headed for five trapped workers, even if that will kill one worker, seems morally acceptable.

Biologists also are studying whether something in our past might explain our moral intuitions. An evolutionary approach suggests that behaviors that helped our ancestors survive are wired into us, too. People who helped kinsmen in the here and now, such as the man bleeding by the road, could count on help when they themselves were in need. Helping someone far off, to whom they had no connection, would have brought no dividends. According to this view, we inherited the first inclination but not the second.

There also seems to be an intuitive heuristic that says it is morally wrong to cause certain deaths even when you think, or hope, that doing so will prevent a death in the future. That might underlie our repugnance at throwing people off a sinking lifeboat, or at making Sophie's choice. "There are limits to what moral systems are biologically possible," Prof. Sinnott-Armstrong says.

Buick LeSabre 1951

The other day, I had the Discovery Channel on in the background — they were playing a string of car documentaries — and I learned something new: the 1951 Buick LeSabre was named after the F-86 Sabre fighter jet. In 1951, its "aerostyle" looks made the connection pretty clear — especially the oval "air intake" in the front (not really an air intake, by the way, but a place to hide the headlights), the jet-like rear, and the tail fins.

WSJ.com - Cubicle Culture

WSJ.com - Cubicle Culture discusses fluorescent lights — they're not as awful as they used to be:

Fluorescent lights are actually phosphor-coated glass tubes containing argon gas and small amounts of mercury. Electricity excites the gas, producing ultraviolet radiation that the phosphor converts to visible light. Early fluorescent lights flickered at a rate of 60 cycles a second. They also cast fewer colors than incandescent light, making everyone under them look jaundiced.

Researchers have linked all kinds of problems to the earlier generation of fluorescent lighting, including headaches, eyestrain, seasonal affective disorder and, according to one German study, stress. Workers under the lights were found to have higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenocorticotrophin in their blood.

Nowadays, better fluorescence technology that increases the cycle time, thereby eliminating flicker, alleviates many of the old problems. And new "full spectrum" fluorescent lights present a more natural balance of colors.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey

I just caught AMC's Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey, including "never-before-seen footage from his last and unfinished film Game of Death (1978), edited into its proper sequence according to Lee's original notes." That never-before-seen footage includes fight scenes with Dan Inosanto (Escrima), Ji Han Jae (Hapkido), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Bruce almost finishes Kareem with an arm-triangle choke. Later, he does finish him with a side-guillotine choke — after plenty of punching and kicking.

By the way, Bruce is 5'7" and Kareem is 7'2" — and the difference is far, far greater than even that sounds.

Yahoo! News - This Pen Really Is Mightier Than the Sword

From Yahoo! News - This Pen Really Is Mightier Than the Sword:

Spanish police have arrested a Russian woman carrying 38 'pen guns' capable of firing .22 caliber bullets, saying she was part of a Russian-Kosovan gun-smuggling ring.

The silver weapons — displayed by police Thursday — look like normal pens.

Ah, but is a .22 really mightier than a sword?

Beauty and the Brainy

Despite some pretty glaring counterexamples — both Jessica Simpson and Bill Gates jump to mind — beauty and brains tend to got together, as Beauty and the Brainy explains:

Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and his colleague, Jody L. Kovar, assert that beautiful people also tend to be smart people — and vice versa.

In the July issue of Intelligence, the sociologists offer a theory to explain the confluence of beauty and brains. Their argument, in a nutshell: Intelligent men achieve higher status and marry beautiful women, who pass their genes on to their disproportionately attractive and smart kids, who win mates who are good-looking or brainy, and so on. Or at least that's what they put forth in the journal article, "Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent."

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

United Press International: Commentary: Oscar observations

A couple years ago, Steve Sailer made some Oscar observations:

Halle Berry's gasping and sobbing Best Actress acceptance speech, which ran four times the recommended length of 45 seconds, may become as famous as Sally Field's 1985 'You like me' meltdown. Why are so many top actresses like that?

The great detective novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, himself nominated for his 1944 script for 'Double Indemnity,' explained in 'The Little Sister,' his novel about a troubled actress: 'If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard — well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid ...'

If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard — well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid ... I need to read more Chandler.

Anyway, Sailer pokes fun at Halle Berry's "blackness":

Berry's speech included such memorably messianic lines as, "This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened." Strikingly, though, ABC flashed a quick shot of the former beauty queen's mother, who happens to be very white.

Berry's speech distracted from Denzel Washington's much bigger breakthrough, playing the villain against white good guys:

Unfortunately, African-American actors have long been held back from getting these kind of juicy parts by what's known as Ben Stein's Law. The mordant law professor, economist, screenwriter and game show host made an in-depth study in 1979 that revealed in any Hollywood whodunit, the whitest, richest and most respectable character usually turns out to be the bad guy. In last summer's "Rush Hour 2," Chris Tucker updated Ben Stein's Law with his "Law of Criminal Investigation: Always follow the rich white man."

Junk Food One-Third of U.S. Diet

From Junk Food One-Third of U.S. Diet:

Writing in the June issue of the Journal of Food Chemistry and Analysis, Bock and colleagues said that sweets and desserts, soft drinks and alcoholic beverages account for nearly 25 percent of all calories consumed by Americans.

Salty snacks and fruit-flavored drinks add another five percent.

Fools for Communism: Still apologists after all these years

In Fools for Communism: Still apologists after all these years, Glenn Garvin explains how journalists, academics, and policy wonks "all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace":

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — the cream of American academia — in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn't Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you're sorry.

Scampering through rats' colorful history

Scampering through rats' colorful history shares a disturbing factoid:

Rats are the ultimate survivor. Their life expectancy in the city is one year. In that time, a female rat can produce up to 12 litters of 20 rats. One pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.

Rats versus baseball, baseball wins:

Rattus norvegicus, known as the Norway rat and the brown rat, arrived on ships around the time of the American Revolution. By the 19th century, rat fights were a popular form of entertainment. Dogs competed to kill the most rats. Having killed 100 rats in 5 minutes, 28 seconds, Jocko the Wonder Dog was said to hold the world's record. Henry Bergh, the founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, shut down the rat pits, though some historians credit the rising popularity of baseball — a cheap alternative at the time — for the demise of rat fights.

The strangest travel book ever written by John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire describes the strangest travel book ever written, An African in Greenland:

Kpomassie was raised in one of the deeply conservative tribal societies bordering the Gulf of Guinea. (His tribe, he tells us, was the Watyi.) In the late 1950s, when the story begins, these people were well acquainted with the modern world, but had embraced only its utilitarian aspects. Kpomassie�s father, for example, worked as an electrician, but had five wives. The family scorned Christianity, preferring the ancient animism of their region. After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult. This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain�s book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska. Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties — it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland — he eventually did so.

It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.

He finds the Eskimos boozin' it up and sleepin' around — and not living the traditional Eskimo lifestyle:

All these Eskimos were Danish citizens, and enjoyed the benefits of a typically generous Scandinavian welfare state. Nobody in southern Greenland seemed to do much work, and practically nobody was sober after mid-morning.

Derbyshire notes that he's "one of the last generation of Westerners to have experienced a culture with strong traditional values":

The things I was taught as a child — the hymns and songs and poems, the Latin and geometry and grammar, the street games and rhymes and customs, respect for the Crown, the Church, the Nation, the School, my elders — were much closer to the things my great-grandparents were taught than they are to anything an English child born twenty years after me would have learned.

This example really stood out:

In movie theaters in England in the 1950s, the National Anthem was always played at the end of the movie. Everybody stood up and stayed at attention out of respect to the Monarch until the anthem was over.

Things have changed.

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Being Brenda

Being Brenda tells the gruesome story of two twins:

The tragedy has its roots in what seemed like a routine trip to hospital in 1966 for Janet and Ron Reimer and their twin baby boys, Bruce and Brian. Doctors had recommended circumcision, a practice still routine in much of north America, but Bruce's operation went distressingly wrong. Like almost every detail of the story, what actually happened is still fiercely disputed but what is clear is that the electric cauterising machine being used by doctors caused burning to his penis so severe as to render the organ unrescuable.

And then a "progressive" theorist "solved" the problem:

Reconstructive genital surgery was still rudimentary, and medical experts could offer only pessimism. So when the despairing parents happened to catch a television show, some months later, on which John Money was propounding his radical new theories about gender formation, it seemed to offer a lifeline. "He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their gender," Janet Reimer later told John Colapinto, author of a book on the experiment entitled As Nature Made Him.

Both brother and "sister" ended up killing themselves. And the progressive professor?

John Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins. "He's not commenting on this story," his assistant told the Guardian yesterday. "There is no comment to make."

Dressman - the ironing robot

Dressman - the ironing robot:

The main objective of the Dressman robot is to dry and press shirts. On placing a damp shirt on the ironing figure, this dummy inflates with hot air in its interior, and thus puffs the shirt up, removing creases drying the garment (it has to be previously wet and undergone a spin-dry in a washing machine).

I wouldn't call the Dressman a robot — it's human-shaped so you can put a shirt on it, not so it can use your iron — but it's pretty cool nonetheless. (Hat tip to Slashdot.)