Nerd Pride

In Nerd Pride, Bryan Caplan explains that Dr. Seuss coined the word "nerd" back in 1950, but it didn't acquire its modern meaning until the 1970's. Then he explains his nerd pride:

In case you haven't guessed, yes, I consider myself a nerd. I'm such a nerd that I worry that my sons will fail to embrace their nerd heritage. The best game show in history, Beat the Geeks, began by asking each contestant "What's the geekiest thing about you?" I still wish I could have been a contestant just to give my response:

"I am the Dungeon Master for an all-economists' Dungeons and Dragons game."

Beat that, geeks!

Fast Company | Mobile " Nokia Moments"

Nokia Moments may replace "Kodak Moments":

Finnish phone giant Nokia wants to be a Kodak for the digital age, with the ubiquitous camera phone as its Brownie for the masses. And its scrapbook? That would be Lifeblog, a $30 piece of software set to debut at the end of June. Lifeblog gathers the mishmash of life — all the text messages, images, and video that can be captured on a cell phone — then organizes them into a digital diary.
[...]
With Lifeblog, the phone becomes a life recorder. And your life becomes searchable.

I'm intrigued.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | How Tolkien triumphed over the critics

How Tolkien triumphed over the critics goes back and looks at how reviewers treated Tolkien's now-beloved classic when it first came out:

The Spectator's Richard Hughes, writing in October 1954, opened his review praising the pleasures of reading Tolkien's The Hobbit — published 17 years earlier — to his children.

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' said the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, while American critic Edmund Wilson, dismissed the entire trilogy in 1956 as 'juvenile trash'.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

DNA Scientist Francis Crick Dies at 88

Crick, of Watson and Crick, is dead. From DNA Scientist Francis Crick Dies at 88:

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the spiral, 'double-helix' structure of DNA, paving the way for everything from DNA blood tests to genetically engineered tomatoes, has died. He was 88.

Interesting fellow:

Unlike many scientists, Crick did not spend his days toiling away in a lab or instructing students. Instead, he read and mused in his Salk Institute office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, putting in full days well beyond retirement age. He had come to Salk after resigning from the Cambridge faculty in 1977.

Crick was born in Britain in 1916 to a shoe factory owner and his wife. He studied physics at University College and then built underwater mines for the British government during World War II.

After the war, Crick became interested in "the division between the living and the non-living" and decided to teach himself biology and chemistry.

In later years, Crick wrote "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," which had as its central tenet that everything we see, feel, think and experience is controlled by brain chemistry, not some inner spirit or will.

Great Hackers

Paul Graham has written a "provocative'' and "controversial'' piece on Great Hackers. He starts by explaining that variation in wealth isn't a bad thing, because it points to a variation in productivity, something you only get (in large amounts) once you have complex tools to leverage:

If variation in productivity increases with technology, then the contribution of the most productive individuals will not only be disproportionately large, but will actually grow with time. When you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something (whether Viking raids, or central planning) drags their productivity down to the average.

Graham makes a number of disparate, but interesting, points. Here he slams the Java programming language in the process of making a greater point:

When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.

There are many disconnects between hackers and suits; here's one huge example:

After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.

The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something you work in, not something you work despite.

Generally, it's hard — that's an understatement — to manage hackers. There are some tricks though:

Like a parent saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a more interesting one. Steve Jobs seems to be particularly good at this, in part simply by having high standards. There were a lot of small, inexpensive computers before the Mac. He redefined the problem as: make one that's beautiful. And that probably drove the developers harder than any carrot or stick could.

I know the "death of a thousand cuts" — an not from watching Hong Kong wu xia movies:

It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.

(Incidentally, I think this is what people mean when they talk about the "meaning of life." On the face of it, this seems an odd idea. Life isn't an expression; how could it have meaning? But it can have a quality that feels a lot like meaning. In a project like a compiler, you have to solve a lot of problems, but the problems all fall into a pattern, as in a signal. Whereas when the problems you have to solve are random, they seem like noise.)

How do you become a great hacker — or, at the very least, how do you avoid spoiling your hacker potential if you have it?

The key to being a good hacker may be to work on what you like. When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to. I don't know if this is cause or effect; it may be both.

Great hackers are obviously smart, but there's more to it than that. They're also extremely curious about how things work. And they focus:

Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate-- their ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside their own heads.'' I've certainly noticed this. And I've heard several hackers say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at all. So maybe hacking does require some special ability to focus. Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it. John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor. Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. (I cheat by using a very dense language, which shrinks the court.)

This could explain the disconnect over cubicles. Maybe the people in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter, have no idea that working in a cubicle feels to a hacker like having one's brain in a blender. (Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well.)

Read the whole article.

Whittaker Chambers and the Idea Trap

In Whittaker Chambers and the Idea Trap, Bruce Caplan discusses his paper, "The Idea Trap":

I set up a simple political-economic model with three variables: growth, policy, and ideas. The model is governed by three 'laws of motion.' The first are near-tautologies:

1. Good policies cause good growth.
2. Good ideas cause good policies.

The third law is much less intuitive:

3. Good growth causes good ideas.

The inspiration for law #3 was my empirical finding that people with high income growth 'think more like economists.

The consequences?

These assumptions have an interesting implication: there exist "multiple equilibria" — one where growth, policy, and ideas are all good, and another where growth, policy, and ideas are all bad. I call the later "the idea trap," because bad ideas sustain bad policy, bad policy sustains bad growth, and bad growth reinforces bad ideas. Implausible? Think about any of the world's economic/political basket cases. How often do the people in those countries admit that their worldview is a failure, and humbly turn to their more successful neighbors? Not often. Or consider: When do crazy demagogues get the most serious hearings? In most cases, when a country is already going down the drain.

Amazon Prods Reviewers To Stop Hiding Behind Fake Names

Obviously not all of the reviews on Amazon are "real" reviews by impartial customers who happened to pick up the book. Amazon's now taking a small step toward fixing the problem, as Amazon Prods Reviewers To Stop Hiding Behind Fake Names explains:

After years of letting Internet users anonymously savage or salute everything from books to toasters in online reviews, Amazon.com Inc. is encouraging its customers to put their names where their opinions are.

Earlier this month, the Web retailer quietly launched a new system, dubbed Real Names, that encourages users to append to their product reviews the name that appears on the credit card they have registered with Amazon. A logo saying "Real Name" appears beside such customer comments.

Amazon still allows reviewers to sign their comments with pen names, effectively concealing their identity from other Amazon users. But even these reviewers need to supply a credit card or purchase history. Previously, users could easily open multiple Amazon accounts from which they could post multiple reviews of the same product. The new system is intended to block that practice.

I guess I never thought about it, but I didn't realize that you could open an Amazon account (or two, or a dozen) without providing a credit card, and that you could then post reviews. That looks like the loop hole.

Dynamist Blog: Defining the Democrats

In Defining the Democrats, Virginia Postrel notes how well Bill Clinton's DNC speech captures how mainstream Democrats "understand themselves and their opposition" — as this excerpt from the speech demonstrates:

We think the role of government is to give people the tools and conditions to make the most of their lives. Republicans believe in an America run by the right people, their people, in a world in which we act unilaterally when we can, and cooperate when we have to.

Her comments:

That's an interesting anti-elitist message, one that directly contradicts the Republicans' view of themselves and their opponents. Both parties, in other words, think the other guys "believe in an America run by the right people." Technocracy is certainly dead as a governing ideal, though not as a practice.

Clinton's statement can be read many different ways, depending on your point of view. "The role of government is to give people the tools and conditions to make the most of their lives" can describe anything from a classical liberalism that emphasizes the importance of underlying institutions — if I didn't know the source, I might endorse it myself — to a Swedish-style welfare state.

Double Jeopardy Disaster

Double Jeopardy Disaster helps explain why drugs and medical devices are unnecessarily expensive:

Getting a new drug or medical device approved by the FDA is a long and expensive process. The FDA is risk-averse and pays much more attention to the risks of approving a bad drug than to the risks of failing to approve a good drug. As a result, every economist who has ever written a serious analysis of the FDA has come to the conclusion that less regulation would mean more new drugs and more saved lives. (See FDAReview.org for more information. Gary Becker offers a recent statement.).

Approval, however, does not end a firm's problems because even then it faces the risk of a debilitating lawsuit. Consider how bizarre this is: A team of statisticians, physicians and medical researchers pours over years of clinical data to pronounce a product safe (always noting that this means safe relative to the product's expected benefits) and then a jury of 12 randomly selected Joes and Janes second guesses them, awards plaintiffs billions of dollars and drives the firm into bankruptcy. This has happened more than once.

Yeah, I feel much safer now

From Yeah, I feel much safer now:

The USA Patriot Act has so far been used to fine PayPal $10 million dollars in an effort to crack down on internet gambling, it's been used to intimidate a New York artist's collective, and most recently to shut down a Stargate fan site.

Norway Looks for Ways to Keep Its Workers on the Job

Norway Looks for Ways to Keep Its Workers on the Job describes how Norway has gone from a poor, largely isolated nation of self-reliant workers to a wealthy, post-oil-boom nation of whiners:

On an average day, about 25 percent of Norway's workers are absent from work, either because they have called in sick, are undergoing rehabilitation or are on long-term disability. The rate is especially high among government employees, who account for half the work force.

The average amount of time people were absent from work in Norway in 2002, not including vacations, was 4.8 weeks. Sweden, its closest competitor, totaled 4.2 weeks, while Italy came in at 1.8 weeks and Portugal at 1.5 weeks, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Throw in vacation time (five weeks for most people), national paid holidays (11 per year) and weekends, and Norwegians take off nearly half the calendar year, about 170 days, a figure that does not include time off for disability and rehabilitation, according to Bergens Tidende, the newspaper that made the calculations. Long-term disability leave, up 20 percent since 1990, is growing at an even faster rate than sick leave.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Slow medicine

Slow medicine cites "another death of common sense story":

Would-be California medical students with learning disabilities filed a discrimination suit Monday saying their prospects of becoming doctors are being thwarted because they aren't given enough time on the medical school entrance exam.

Alex Tabarrok's response:

Even more shocking than the lawsuit is the response of the American Association of Medical Colleges. Instead of making the obviously correct argument that time is a legitimate testing hurdle for a physician they argue that the students involved are not disabled enough! If only they had failed more of their undergraduate classes then the AAMC would give them special accomodation. Really, I'm not making this up.

Extra-high cannabis theory goes up in smoke

Extra-high cannabis theory goes up in smoke explains how marijuana is no more potent than it used to be:

The US drugs 'tsar' John Walters and toxicologist John Henry of St Mary's hospital in Paddington, west London, are among those who have warned that the cannabis available now bears little resemblance to that on the market 30 years ago, with serious health dangers for regular users.

The EU study says that the strength of the active ingredient - THC - has remained unchanged at about 6% for most of the cannabis smoked in Britain. It says the amount of cannabis put in the typical British joint has also remained constant for 20 years at about 200mg for marijuana and 150mg for resin.

The results are based on analysis by the Forensic Science Service of cannabis seized by the police between 1995 and 2002.

Aloe May Save Lives on Battlefield

Aloe May Save Lives on Battlefield:

The aloe vera plant could provide a fluid to help keep alive trauma victims such as battlefield casualties until they can get a blood transfusion, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Tests on rats show that the sticky fluid found inside the leaves of aloe vera can help preserve organ function after massive blood loss, the team at the University of Pittsburgh said.

Writing in the journal Shock, they said just small injections of the substance helped counteract the more immediate deadly effects of blood loss.

"We hope this fluid will offer a viable solution to a significant problem, both on and off the battlefield," Dr. Mitchell Fink, a professor of critical care medicine who led the study, said in a statement.

"Soldiers wounded in combat often lose significant amounts of blood, and there is no practical way to replace the necessary amount of blood fast enough on the front lines. When this happens, there is inadequate perfusion of the organs which quickly leads to a cascade of life-threatening events," Fink added.

"Medics would need only to carry a small amount of this solution, which could feasibly be administered before the soldier is evacuated to a medical unit or facility," he added.

The researchers, who got funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, tested the mucilage from inside aloe leaves. It is rich in sugar compounds called polysaccharides that affect the qualities of fluid.

"It may provide better diffusion of oxygen molecules from red blood cells to tissues because of its ability to better mix in the plasma surrounding red blood cells," said Marina Kameneva, an artificial blood expert who worked on the study.

They tested rats, injecting them either with the aloe derivative or salt solution after draining them of some blood.

I was not expecting to read about aloe injections.

Yahoo! News - Gene Variants May Make Women See Red, and Burgundy

Yahoo! News - Gene Variants May Make Women See Red, and Burgundy reports on a recent study from the American Journal of Human Genetics:

A new gene study may help explain why she sees crimson, vermilion and tomato, but it's all just red to him.

In an analysis of the DNA of 236 men from around the globe, researchers found that the gene that allows people to see the color red comes in an unusually high number of variations. And that may be a boon to women's color perception in particular, study co-author Dr. Brian C. Verrelli told Reuters Health.

That's because the gene, known as OPN1LW, sits on the X sex chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, one from each parent, while men have one X and one Y chromosome. Because women have two different copies of the "red" gene, the fact that the gene can have so many variations means it may especially aid women's perception of the red-orange spectrum.
[...]
Among the 236 samples of DNA they studied, the researchers found 85 variations in the OPN1LW gene. That's about three times the number of variations one would see in any other "random gene" pulled from the human genome, Verrelli said.
[...]
He and Tishkoff speculate that the gene variations may have been useful in humankind's hunter-gatherer days, when sharp color perception may have helped women in their foraging work.

Sharp color perception may have helped women in their foraging work. Are they allowed to say that?

WSJ.com - As Cash Fades, America Becomes A Plastic Nation

WSJ.com - As Cash Fades, America Becomes A Plastic Nation announces that:

For the first time, Americans used cards — credit, debit and others — to buy retail goods and services more often than they used cash or check in 2003.

State troopers are accepting credit cards, on the spot, for fines.

Vending machines, subway systems and charities now accept cards. The government is handing out cards in lieu of food stamps and child-support disbursements. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons is marketing a service that lets people put their paychecks directly onto a Visa card, giving consumers without bank accounts access to plastic.

The Navy has switched to cards:

The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman went completely cashless earlier this year. The Navy issued MasterCards to all 5,000 sailors aboard. On payday, seamen insert cards into a machine that electronically loads money stored onto each card. They then use the cards for all onboard purchases.

(What kind of cards are they using that they have to insert the cards into a machine on payday?)

Cards have obvious logistical advantages:

The Navy estimates sailors on the Truman buy 250,000 soft drinks monthly. When it was a cash ship, somebody had to collect half a ton of quarters each month from all the Truman's vending machines. Those coins then had to be redistributed. Now it's all settled electronically.

U-Haul's doing something similar:

U-Haul International Inc., the truck-rental company, has begun issuing "payroll cards" to about 3,000 of its employees, or about 17% of its work force. They are mostly hourly workers who lack bank accounts. Workers can withdraw cash once a week from any automated teller machine without paying a fee, and they can use the cards wherever Visa is accepted. They can even get cash back after a purchase from the supermarket without any charge. The company, meanwhile, says it is saving about $500,000 a year in costs associated with issuing checks.

Naturally, people use credit cards for credit — and "normal" credit-card users subsidize those of us who don't carry a balance:

Roughly 60% of credit-card holders roll balances over each month, paying interest of as much as 22%. Because these cardholders are the most lucrative customers of the banks, critics say they effectively subsidize the remaining 40% of cardholders.

Incidentally, although credit-card companies make money off interest, they make more off of transaction fees:

Over the longer term, big earnings for the card industry could come from the commission merchants pay with each swipe, anywhere from 1% to 5% of each transaction. It amounts to a tax, of sorts, on the new currency of choice.

Help Wanted: Boys' Reading

Laura Sokal of the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada examines why boys don't read in Help Wanted: Boys' Reading. Some key points:

• Boys' reading performance lags behind girls' by approximately 1.5 years.
  
  
• The average child is read to for approximately 1,000 hours before beginning school.
  
  
• Boys view reading as feminine. Mothers read more often to children than do fathers, and early years educators tend to be females. When fathers take an active role in children's reading, children demonstrate an increased interest in reading.
  
  
• Girls like to read story books and boys like to read texts such as manuals in order to find out how to do something.
  
  
• Only one third of school libraries carry the types of books boys prefer — scary stories, cartoons, magazines and stories with themes such as war. Children who begin reading these types of "soft" literature branch out into reading other genres of literature.

Reason - The NEA's News from Nowhere

Americans are reading less. The NEA's News from Nowhere declares that "not so long ago, the death of reading would have been celebrated":

While the NEA deplores what it perceives as 'a culture at risk,' such news must have William Morris grinning in his grave. The 'unbooked' world that Morris dreamed about in his 1891 utopia, News from Nowhere, approaches, at least in this one notable detail.

Morris is one of the more intriguing figures of his era. A designer of great talent, he established the Arts & Crafts movement whose furniture is now worth its weight in gold. A writer of considerable creativity (if perhaps not much of a stylist), he invented the modern fantasy genre with such works as The Wood Beyond the World. A political thinker of great energy, he mounted a lifelong cultural critique of capitalist society. He thought true art was impossible under capitalism, and he much preferred the pre-industrial world (hence his interest in fantasy and enchantment, and in traditional craftsmanship). In News from Nowhere, he posits a post-capitalist world where labor provides the gratification assigned, in his lifetime, to art. In Morris' utopia, there's no longer any desire to read fiction because the "bourgeois individualism" it celebrated has been discarded.

Morris, then, hated fiction-reading because it was in the way of the socialist revolution he so ardently desired. As it happens, not many of Morris' intellectual contemporaries cared for his particular kind of utopia: H.G. Wells, for one, lampooned Morris' vision in his 1895 novel, The Time Machine, where the decadent above-ground world of the Eloi is intended in part as a parody of Morris' idea of paradise.

I didn't didn't realize Wells' Eloi had such a clear origin. Anyway, Well's complaint about mass literacy is surprisingly familiar:

But Wells did agree with Morris about one thing: Mass literacy was a problem. If popular literature was an ultimately sociopolitical problem for Morris, it was an intellectual issue for Wells: The demand for reading material by great hordes of the lower classes was generating a tidal wave of bad literature and marginalizing fine culture.

Mass literacy turned "literature" into network television.

Yahoo! News - And the Tallest Nationality Is...

As Yahoo! News - And the Tallest Nationality Is... points out, the Dutch are the tallest nation on earth, with Dutch men averaging 6'1":

The market research organization GfK said Thursday that data collected over the last seven years showed increasing demand for larger clothing sizes in the Netherlands, where the average man is about 185 cm (6 foot 1 inch) tall.
[...]
The Dutch are nearly 10 cm (four inches) taller on average than the British and Americans, and almost 15 cm (six inches) taller than they were four decades ago.

For Many Iraqis, A New Daily Fear: Wave of Kidnapping

The generally lawlessness in Iraq has made kidnapping — popular in Latin America for years — a lucrative business. From For Many Iraqis, A New Daily Fear: Wave of Kidnapping:

Iraq's kidnapping epidemic, police say, began shortly after the country fell to the U.S. in April 2003. Gangs that had flourished by looting banks and businesses began abducting other criminals for ransom. The gangs soon realized it was easier, and more lucrative, to target civilians.

BBC NEWS | Health | Napoleon 'killed by his doctors'

According to Napoleon 'killed by his doctors', researchers from the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Department are claiming that overzealous medical treatment finished off the former emperor:

He was given regular doses of antimony potassium tartrate, or tartar emetic a poisonous colourless salt which was used to make him vomit. He was also given regular enemas.

The researchers, led by forensic pathologist Steven Karch, say this would have caused a serious potassium deficiency, which can lead to a potentially fatal heart condition called Torsades de Pointes in which rapid heartbeats disrupt blood flow to the brain.

They say the final straw is likely to have been a 600 milligram dose of mercuric chloride, given as a purge to clear the intestines two days before his death.

This was five times the normal dose, and would have depleted his potassium levels still further, they say.

Of course, Napoleon was probably already on his way out from stomach cancer. (Hat tip to Mercola's Health Blog.)

The man who invented the future

In The man who invented the future, Scott Thill interviews Alan Moore, "who reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our day." The interview, unfortunately, starts with a prolonged — and surprisingly simplistic — leftist diatribe on the war in Iraq, the Bush dynasty, etc. Eventually it moves on to Moore's take on literature and the literary establishment — which, while I may agree with it, certainly has a "sour grapes" taste to it:

Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they're about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn't a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.
[...]
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here — it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever — and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren't as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn't mention Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn't think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention "The History of Mr. Polly," which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore "The War of the Worlds," "The Time Machine," "The Invisible Man" and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let's just say that I'm not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon — and I'm immensely glad of that.

Yahoo! News - Protein Sports Drink May Boost Endurance

Yahoo! News - Protein Sports Drink May Boost Endurance reports on a study that compared Accelerade, a sports drink with whey protein, to Gatorade, which contains no protein, just carbs:

Saunders and his colleagues tested the sports drinks by having trained cyclists pedal a stationary bike to the point of exhaustion while replenishing with either the protein-added or carb-only drink every 15 minutes. The athletes performed a second, more demanding ride the next day. One to two weeks later, they went through the process again, this time with the other drink.

Saunders' team found that the men lasted 29 percent longer during the first test and 40 percent longer during the second test when they drank the protein-containing drink.

There were also signs of less exercise-induced muscle damage, according to the researchers. After the exercise tests, the cyclists' blood levels of creatine phosphokinase — an enzyme released from muscles under stress — were lower when they consumed protein during the workout.

WSJ.com - The Daily Fix

WSJ.com - The Daily Fix explains that Mark Welch of the Sydney Morning Herald has ridden Huez, the route through the Alps that Lance Armstrong is riding in the Tour de France, and "lived to tell about it — barely." Here's what he had to say about it:

'By the time I had reached the second of 21 hairpins, I felt as if Saverio Rocca was sitting on my chest and Anthony Rocca was on the handlebars.'

What other American newspaper would cite an Australian journalist's reference to two Aussie-rules footballers while describing a bicycle race?

Deadly Quests: Three Books Recount Perils of Exploration

Deadly Quests: Three Books Recount Perils of Exploration reviews Great Heart, Down the Great Unknown, and Cooper's Creek, three books where "the cost of expanding human horizons was death":

Short of traveling to another planet, no one alive today can truly comprehend what it meant to be an explorer a century ago.

As late as 1860, parts of every continent remained blank on the world's maps. Aside from widely scattered indigenous clans, most people avoided these harsh wildernesses like the plague: An accident, a misjudgment, the merest slip of a foot meant certain death.

To other men and women, however, uncharted territory was like a red cape to a bull. To plant the first non-native foot in terra incognita was considered a feat akin to winning a war. The difficult part was surviving to tell the tale.

You don't have to be that far from civilization for even a twisted ankle to mean starvation and death.

I love this description of Australia:

By the mid-19th century, the coastline of Australia had been charted from the sea, but the continent's interior was a "ghastly blank," writes Alan Moorehead in "Cooper's Creek." The vast terrain had rebuffed numerous attempts to traverse it. It was a geography of violent extremes, where temperatures could rise to 157 degrees in the sun, and neither shade nor shelter could be found for hundreds of miles. Yet its very inaccessibility persuaded people that it must harbor gold mines, fertile farmland or an inland sea.

Antibiotics gain strength with natural compound

Antibiotics gain strength with natural compound:

More and more common antibiotics are losing their effectiveness because they are used too often, allowing bacteria to develop resistance to the drugs. A University of Rhode Island researcher has found a solution to this problem with a natural compound that boosts antibiotic strength from 100 to 1,000 times. While conducting research on infection prevention, URI Microbiology Professor Paul Cohen stumbled upon a compound — lysophosphatidic acid — that is naturally produced in the human body in great quantities wherever there is inflammation.

According to Cohen, bacteria are divided into two groups — Gram-positive and Gram-negative — based on the structure of their cell walls. When lysophosphatidic acid is administered in small amounts (80 micromolars), it sensitizes the Gram-negative bacteria 100 to 1,000 times so only small quantities of antibiotics are needed to kill the bacteria. When administered to fight Gram-positive bacteria, the compound kills the bacteria without needing any antibiotics.

(Hat tip to Mercola's Health Blog.)

mercola.com: Coffee Impairs Short-Term Memory

Caffeine is a fascinating drug. From Coffee Impairs Short-Term Memory:

The study divided 32 college students into two groups. One group was given 200mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to two strong cups of coffee, and the other was given a dummy drug. The students were then asked to answer 100 general knowledge questions that had simple, one-word answers.

Caffeine aided word recall when the words were similar to the answer. But when the words were unrelated to the answer, the students who had taken caffeine had more trouble recalling the answer than those who had taken the placebo.

The New York Times > Health > I Beg to Differ: A Dermatologist Who's Not Afraid to Sit on the Beach

I Beg to Differ: A Dermatologist Who's Not Afraid to Sit on the Beach:

Other dermatologists may worry about getting melanoma from exposure to ultraviolet rays. But Dr. Ackerman, 67, a renowned expert in the field and the emeritus director of the Ackerman Academy of Dermatopathology in New York, said the link between melanoma and sun exposure was 'not proven.'
[...]
For example, it is commonly assumed that painful or blistering sunburns early in life set the stage for the skin cancer later on. But while some studies show a small association, Dr. Ackerman says, others show none.
[...]
Common wisdom also has it that sunscreens protect against melanoma. But Dr. Ackerman points to a recent editorial in the journal Archives of Dermatology concluding that there was no evidence to support that idea.

There is a link between sun exposure and skin damage — and even to other skin cancers (besides melanoma) though:

Stay out of the sun, Dr. Ackerman advises, but do it to avoid premature aging of the skin. If you are very fair, avoiding sunlight will also help prevent squamous cell carcinoma, a less dangerous cancer. But it would be a mistake, he says, to assume that avoiding sunlight or using sunscreens will offer protection from melanoma.

(Hat tip to Mercola's Health Blog.)

Do You Hear What Starbucks Hears?

Do You Hear What Starbucks Hears? examines Starbucks' next move — partnering with Hear Music — but it concludes with a summary of Starbucks' evolution:

From 1971-1986, Starbucks sold coffee by the pound; that's all we did. By the pound. The beverage did not really get merchandised and introduced until late 1987. Now the beverage, the core beverage, from 1987-90 or -91, was espresso-based beverages.

Then came Frappuccino. That transformed the company because we demonstrated a different daypart. If you look at the evolution of beverages at Starbucks and the percentage of sales from 1971-87, 80% of what we sold was coffee by the pound. That's less than 15% of our business today. Also, from 1971 until probably 1996, we did the majority of our business before 11 a.m. After Frappuccino, that completely changed.

We're now the 'Third Place.' The physical environment has become as important as anything we do, including the coffee. The environment and the experience is the brand. It's a very important distinction that people use our stores all over the world as an extension of their daily lives, and sometimes the coffee is subordinate to that. That's a big change.

Fast Company | The Anarchist's Cookbook

Fast Company's The Anarchist's Cookbook has little to do with the underground book of the same name; it's about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market:

Mackey is a persistently puzzling fellow: self-effacing, but with a hint that he senses his own legacy. During 2002, in the heart of the recession, he took four months off to hike the Appalachian Trail, fulfilling a longtime dream.

People who hike the whole trail end up with 'trail names,' a moniker that acknowledges that the Appalachian Trail is a universe unto itself, a place where the roles of the outside world are set aside. Mackey had been warned in advance to pick his own trail name, lest he be tagged with something derisive, as is the custom.

'My trail name is Strider,' he says. For someone tall, lanky, and energetic, it seems an innocuous enough choice. 'I'm a great admirer of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings ,' Mackey says. 'Before I was in high school, I had read it five times. And one of the characters I admired was Strider.'

But as with much about Mackey, that nickname is not quite what it seems. 'Strider isn't his real name; it's his nickname on the trail. He is really Aragorn, the king. But he wasn't a king on the trail. In 2002, when I was hiking, I was certainly the richest guy hiking the Appalachian Trail. I was a kind of secret king. But that wasn't my identity, or my role, on the trail.'

Fischer's Price

In Fischer's Price, Garry Kasparov addresses Bobby Fischer's recent detention in Japan:

The stunning news of Bobby Fischer's detention in Japan came at a moment in which the American former world chess champion was already very much on my mind. I am currently finishing the fourth of my six-volume series on the game's great players and it is precisely this volume of which Robert James Fischer, forever known as Bobby, is the star.

Clearly, Fischer changed the game:

Despite his short stay at the top there is little to debate about the chess of Bobby Fischer. He changed the game in a way that hadn't been seen since the late 19th century. The gap between Mr. Fischer and his contemporaries was the largest ever. He singlehandedly revitalized a game that had been stagnating under the control of the Communists of the Soviet sports hierarchy.

When Bobby Fischer rocketed to the top of the chess world in the early 1970s he was a fine wine in a flawed vessel. His contributions to the game, both at the board and from a commercial perspective, were nothing short of a revolution in the chess world. At the same time, his brittle and abusive character showed cracks that deepened with his every step toward the highest title.

Today, it is hard to imagine the sensation of Mr. Fischer's success when he wrested the world championship away from Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. In the middle of the Cold War, the Brooklyn-raised iconoclast took the crown from the well-oiled Soviet machine that had dominated the chess world for decades. And this after he barely showed up for the match at all, and then lost the first game and forfeited the second!

Partially due to Mr. Fischer's outrageous behavior leading up to and during the "match of the century," the international media coverage was incredible. The games were shown live around the world. I was nine years old and already a strong club player when the Fischer-Spassky match took place, and I followed the games avidly. Fischer, who had crushed two other Soviet grandmasters on his march to the title match, nonetheless had many fans in the Soviet Union. They respected his chess, of course, but many quietly enjoyed his individuality and independence.

After the match ended in a convincing victory for the American, the world was at his feet. Chess was on the cusp of becoming a commercially successful sport for the first time. Mr. Fischer's play, nationality and natural charisma created a unique opportunity. He was a national hero whose popularity rivaled that of Muhammad Ali. (Would the secretary of state have called Ali before a fight the way Henry Kissinger called Mr. Fischer?) Sales of chess sets and books boomed, and tournament prize funds soared. With Bobby Fischer in the lead, chess was headed for the popularity of golf and tennis.

Then Fischer fell apart, gave up his championship, and began "espousing a virulent anti-Semitism — despite his own Jewish heritage."

WSJ.com - Despite U.S. Clamor, These Little Piggies Stay Home in Spain

I knew Americans were smuggling in unpasteurized European cheeses; I didn't know they were sneaking in Spanish ham. From WSJ.com - Despite U.S. Clamor, These Little Piggies Stay Home in Spain:

It's against the law to import jamon iberico because Spain doesn't have a single slaughterhouse certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Still, the ham ranks as a national treasure in its home country, on a par with Italy's truffles and Russia's caviar. Rows of ibericos — swaddled in yellow fat, crusted with a thin film of protective mold and sporting occasional strands of wiry black pig hair — dangle from restaurant ceilings nationwide, with hoofs still attached.

Yeah, sounds delicious...

The only Spanish meat products exported to the U.S. now are made from animals slaughtered at USDA-certified plants outside Spain. That includes jamon serrano, a less prestigious ham that is similar to Italian prosciutto.

That's when the USDA's zeal for regulation collided with the Spanish passion for tradition. Jamon iberico is produced in just one region of Spain, mostly by small producers who adhere strictly to time-tested methods. They use only one breed of swine, a black-hoofed Iberian pig indigenous to southwest Spain's Mediterranean forest ecosystem — where today they still range freely, fattening themselves up on grass, roots and mushrooms.

And acorns. The most desirable hams — about 15% of production — come from the pigs that eat as much as 2,000 pounds of acorns in the two or three months before their slaughter. After butchering, the hams are rubbed with salt and then hung to cure for one to three years.

Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance

Only an economist would write Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance:

I find strong evidence that religious giving and religious attendance are substitutes: larger subsidies to charitable giving lead to more religious giving, but less religious attendance, with an implied elasticity of attendance with respect to religious giving of -0.92. These results have important implications for the debate over charitable subsidies. They also serve to validate economic models of religious participation.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone

A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone explains how the order-taker at one Missouri McDonald's isn't even in Missouri:

The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Y. Davis, has linked it and 3 other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center, which is run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven T. Bigari. And he did it for the same reasons that other business owners have embraced call centers: lower costs, greater speed and fewer mistakes.

Cheap, quick and reliable telecommunications lines let the order takers in Colorado Springs converse with customers in Missouri, take an electronic snapshot of them, display their order on a screen to make sure it is right, then forward the order and the photo to the restaurant kitchen. The photo is destroyed as soon as the order is completed, Mr. Bigari said. People picking up their burgers never know that their order traverses two states and bounces back before they can even start driving to the pickup window.

The benefits:

In the fast-food business, time is truly money: shaving even five seconds off the processing time of an order is significant. Mr. Bigari said he had cut order time in his dual-lane drive-throughs by slightly more than 30 seconds, to about 1 minute, 5 seconds, on average. That's less than half the average of 2 minutes, 36 seconds, for all McDonald's, and among the fastest of any franchise in the country, according to QSRweb.com, which tracks such things. His drive-throughs now handle 260 cars an hour, Mr. Bigari said, 30 more than they did before he started the call center.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

The Chronicle: 7/2/2004: Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences

Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences explains a scientific discovery the art historians didn't want to hear about:

The controversy over Hockney and Falco grew out of Hockney's discovery of a sudden shift toward naturalism in the 1420s and '30s in Flanders. Hockney claimed that the shift was too abrupt to have occurred without the use of optical aids that allowed artists to project images of the 3-D world onto a canvas and trace them. With the entry of Falco, evidence took the place of opinion. Falco pointed out that concave mirrors can serve as lenses that project images and that such mirrors were available as early as the 13th century. He went on to analyze anomalies in certain paintings that were consistent with the use of a lens and — most important — difficult to explain otherwise.

Lorenzo Lotto's painting called "Husband and Wife," of 1523-24, depicts a carpet with a complex geometric design covering a table. The carpet recedes into space. Falco demonstrated that the lines on two of the borders of the design start off receding toward one vanishing point and then move slightly toward another vanishing point. It's strange that there are two vanishing points. It's even stranger that the vanishing points of both borders shift at approximately the same depth into the scene.

But Falco offered an intriguing (somewhat technical, very precise) explanation: Lotto's use of a lens led to systematic and predictable errors. Falco calculated that Lotto must have placed his lens 150 cm. from the carpet he was painting and 84 cm. from the canvas onto which he was projecting the image of the carpet. He also calculated the focal length (54 cm.) and diameter (2.5 cm.) that Lotto's lens had to be. Those calculations were all derived from one measurement: a comparison of the shoulder width of the woman in the painting with the average shoulder width of actual women today. The difference in size between the two widths showed how much the objects on canvas were reduced — in this case, by 56 percent.

When a lens is used to project an image, the less that image is reduced in size, the lower the depth of field that the lens can project. Because Lotto was projecting images reduced in size by only 56 percent, he had a problem — he could project only part of the image onto the canvas. Once that part was traced, he would have had to move the lens just a tiny bit to focus farther back. Hence a slightly different vanishing point and a slightly different magnification — both subtle errors. Falco calculated exactly how much the two vanishing points would diverge and the magnification would decrease, and his calculations agreed to within 1 percent with measurements he made from the painting. Falco tested his lens hypothesis against many paintings, and found other instances in which the errors were mathematically predicted by the use of a lens. His hypothesis did not rely only on such predictions; he also found that sometimes highly complex, three-dimensional, nongeometrical objects were rendered so precisely that use of a lens was highly probable. But the litmus test of the lens hypothesis was Falco's ability to so precisely predict nonrandom errors.

Eyes on the Road

Eyes on the Road notes that entry-level luxury cars now face a lot of competition — it's not just the BMW 3-series versus the Audi A4:

Think back to four or five years ago. The universe of cars that could compete credibly with the BMW 3-series was relatively small. Cadillac was pushing a rebadged Opel called the Catera without remarkable success. Nissan Motor Corp.'s Infiniti brand was barely on the radar. Mercedes had its C-Class, of course, and Audi did good business with the A4. But other European brands like Volvo and Jaguar were barely in the picture in that segment.

Today, the entry luxury consumer's biggest challenge is narrowing down the choices. Infiniti's G35 sedan is outselling the Audi A4. June sales of the G35 sedan and coupe together outpaced sales of all Infiniti brand cars in June 2000. Sales of the new Mercedes C-Class line are up 74% since June 2000. Jaguar's X-type isn't a smashing success, but it beats nothing, which is what Jag had to compete with the 3-series four years ago. Cadillac, of course, has established itself as a credible contender with the CTS sedan.

But the real shocker is that Chrysler has come out of nowhere to make its new 300 C sedan the automotive sales equivalent of Spider-Man 2. In June, the Chrysler 300 C, which benefits from engineering expertise borrowed by Chrysler from sister DaimlerChrysler AG unit Mercedes-Benz, outsold all Cadillac brand cars, excluding SUVs, by a margin of 11,300 to 10,584. The 300 C also outsold all Lexus brand sedans and coupes in June, albeit by 168 cars. And the 300 C outsold all BMW 3-series models, combined, by a margin of 1,713 cars, according to figures compiled by Autodata Corp.

I've been quite impressed by Chrysler's external styling these past few years, but I'm not sure I'd want to own one. That said, the new 300 C has a 5.7L HEMI� V8 Engine. Wow.

WSJ.com - As Industry Pushes Headsets In Cars, U.S. Agency Sees Danger

I now have to check which state I'm in before phoning home — or I have to finally get a hands-free headset. From WSJ.com - As Industry Pushes Headsets In Cars, U.S. Agency Sees Danger:

Earlier this month, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., joined New York in requiring drivers to use headsets or other so-called hands-free devices when they talk on cellphones.

Pushing hands-free headsets may not make phones safer though:

A sizable body of research concludes that headsets and speaker-phones don't improve safety because it's the mental distraction of talking on the phone, not holding it, that causes the danger while driving. And recent research suggests the devices could actually increase risk by encouraging people to spend more time on their cellphones and drive faster while doing so.

What's more, according to a new study by NHTSA that has been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, people spent more time on the distracting task of dialing when they use headsets and voice-activated dialing systems. The new voice-activated dialing method took nearly twice as long as punching the buttons on the phone the old-fashioned way, according to the study.

What voice-activated dialing method are they talking about? My phone has a convenient key on the side. I press it, it beeps, and I say "home" in a stentorian voice — then it phones home for me. Granted, it may take two or three times — particularly if anyone's around — but it's much less distracting than looking at the phone's display.

Some of these studies mix cause and effect:

In 2001, a Norwegian study of about 9,000 drivers found that hands-free users made more calls than callers who held their phones to their ears, potentially putting drivers more at risk. Meanwhile, the Swedish National Road Administration installed cameras in 40 cars and found that drivers wearing headsets drove faster than drivers holding their phones.

Maybe people who make a lot of phone calls buy a headset? And maybe people who find it harder to drive with phone in hand drive more slowly than people with a hands-free headset.

This looks like a meaningful finding though:

Braking time slowed by as much 45% for cellphone users, with no improvement for those wearing headsets.

An interesting study:

Most recently, three Utah psychology professors — Frank Drews, Monisha Pasupathi and Dr. Strayer — put 48 adults behind the wheel of a driving simulator. They found drivers talking on the phone with headsets missed four times as many exits as drivers talking to another passenger. The study notes that a fellow passenger "collaborates in the task of driving safely by referring to traffic and conversing about it ... something that a person on the other end of a cellphone cannot do."

Stevenson At Play

While I knew that H.G. Wells published the first commercial wargame rules (Little Wars, 1913), I didn't know that Robert Louis Stevenson also designed and played a wargame. Stevenson At Play, from Scribner's Magazine, December 1898, describes it:

This game of tin soldiers, an intricate "kriegspiel," involving rules innumerable, prolonged arithmetical calculations, constant measuring with foot-rules, and the throwing of dice, sprang from the humblest beginnings — a row of soldiers on either side and a deadly marble. From such a start it grew in size and complexity until it became mimic war indeed, modelled closely upon real conditions and actual warfare, requiring, on Mr. Stevensons' part, the use of text-books and long conversations with military invalids; on mine, all the pocket-money derived from my publishing ventures as well as a considerable part of my printing stock in trade.

It ends with this clever poem:

For certain soldiers lately dead
Our reverent dirge shall here be said.
Them, when their martial leader called,
No dread preparative appalled;
But leaden-hearted, leaden-heeled,
I marked them steadfast in the field.
Death grimly sided with the foe,
And smote each leaden hero low.
Proudly they perished, one by one:
The dread Pea-cannon's work was done!
O not for them the tears we shed,
Consigned to their congenial lead;
But while unmoved their sleep they take,
We mourn for their dear Captain's sake,
For their dear Captain, who shall smart
Both in his pocket and his heart,
Who saw his heroes shed their gore
And lacked a shilling to buy more!

Wargame Developments Handbook: Black Game

The Wargame Developments Handbook defines a number of wargaming terms. I wasn't familiar with the "black game" — but I was intrigued:

Sometimes referred to as 'bad taste' wargaming. A game specifically designed to explore the unpleasant or uncomfortable aspects of conflict. Most of these deal with areas not usually considered 'suitable' for games, such as terrorist attacks, bombing of population centres, or the moral dilemmas arising from conflict. Most wargames, however, contain 'black' elements; after all, playing a game about war can be considered in poor taste in itself. A controversial area of WD activities, surrounded by much hypocrisy. Two very successful examples of 'Black Games' were 'Home Front 86' where the players believed they were running a 'refugee centre in Wales in WW3' but ended up running a Concentration Camp similar in operation to Bergen-Belsen (See Disguised Scenario) and an experimental 'Northern Ireland Workshop' (See Workshop) where every aspect of the 'troubles' were examined using improvised theatre, role-play, and traditional gaming techniques.

Little Wars

H.G. Wells is known for practically creating the science-fiction genre (along with Jules Verne), but he also published the first set of commercial wargame rules, Little Wars, a follow-up to his Floor Games, about all the indoor games he played his sons. Little Wars opens with this amusing, if politically incorrect, intro:

Little Wars is the game of kings — for players in an inferior social position. It can be played by boys of every age from twelve to one hundred and fifty — and even later if the limbs remain sufficiently supple, — by girls of the better sort, and by a few rare and gifted women.

Wells' wargame is really just a slightly formalized way of playing with toy soldiers. In fact, the rules depend on a particular toy artillery piece:

The beginning of the game of Little War, as we know it, became possible with the invention of the spring breechloader gun. This priceless gift to boyhood appeared somewhere towards the end of the last century, a gun capable of hitting a toy soldier nine times out of ten at a distance of nine yards. It has completely superseded all the spiral-spring and other makes of gun hitherto used in playroom warfare. These spring breechloaders are made in various sizes and patterns, but the one used in our game is that known in England as the four-point-seven gun. It fires a wooden cylinder about an inch long, and has a screw adjustment for elevation and depression. It is an altogether elegant weapon.

This origin story rings true:

It was with one of these guns that the beginning of our war game was made. It was at Sandgate — in England.

The present writer had been lunching with a friend — let me veil his identity under the initials J.K.J. — in a room littered with the irrepressible debris of a small boy's pleasures. On a table near our own stood four or five soldiers and one of these guns. Mr J.K.J., his more urgent needs satisfied and the coffee imminent, drew a chair to this little table, sat down, examined the gun discreetly, loaded it warily, aimed, and hit his man. Thereupon he boasted of the deed, and issued challenges that were accepted with avidity....

By the way, "little wars" is a clever double entendre — the "little wars" of Queen Victoria were fought against various native groups in the colonies.

Kriegspiel

Wargames have been around, in some form or another, for quite some time. Most modern wargames derive from the Kriegspiel (literally wargame) of 19th-century Prussia:

The nineteenth-century Prussian game started life with a rigid structure and copious formal rules. The two sides were each placed in a separate room with a model of the terrain or a map. The umpires moved from one room to another collecting orders from the players, and then retired to a third room to consult the rules and find the results of combat. A great deal of their time was consumed in leafing through voluminous sets of rules, consulting tables and giving rulings on fine legal points. By about 1870, however, this rigid system was starting to be thought rather clumsy and time-consuming. Quite apart from the many defects and loopholes in the rules themselves, it reduced the umpires, who were often very senior officers, to the role of mere clerks and office boys. clearly, such a state of affairs was intolerable.

Most "modern" games of the 1980s (e.g., Squad Leader, Third Reich) followed the "voluminous sets of rules" model, but the Prussians moved away from it 100 years earlier:

It was General von verdy du Vernois who finally broke with this system, and abolished the rule book altogether. His approach to the wargame was the free kriegspiel, in which the umpire had a totally free hand to decide the result of moves and combats. He did not do this according to any set of written rules, but just on his own military knowledge and experience. He would collect the players' moves in exactly the same way as before; but he would then simply give a considered professional opinion on the outcome. This speeded up the game a very great deal, and ensured that there was always a well thought-out reason for everything that happened. This was a great help in the debrief after the game, and it allowed players to learn by their mistakes very quickly.

A modern "free kriegspiel" often combines umpiring with a randomizer (e.g., a ten-sided die, or "nugget"):

The system for finding the results of combat in a free kriegspiel is classically simple. First of all the umpire looks at the position of each side: how many and what type of troops are involved; how their morale is bearing up; and what orders they have been given. He next considers the ground on which the action will be fought, and any special tactical problems which either side might encounter; whether there are any obstacles in the way of an attacker; whether a flank attack might be possible, and so on.

When the umpire has all relevant information at his disposal, he ought to be able to give an informed opinion on the probabilities of the result. He will not simply say something like 'The French infantry hassuccessfully stormed the hill', but will quote possibilities, such as: 'The French have a 50% chance of storming the hill successfully; a 30% chance of capturing half of it, while disputing the rest; and a 20% chance of being totally repulsed. High scores favour the French'. It is important that the umpire is as specific as possible with these figures, as this forces him to consider all the factors involved in the combat and to think through the full implications of his decision. He must also be clear whether a high dice roll will be good or bad for the attacker, i.e., whether the top 50% (a die roll of 5-9) or the bottom 50% (a roll of 0-4) will mean the hill has been carried. In this case he has stated that the high score will be good for the attacker.

Excel ate my DNA | The Register

When Microsoft finally researched how their customers used Excel, they learned that they rarely used it as a spreadsheet; they used it primarily as a database (of sorts). Geneticists have been using Excel to process the massive amounts of data coming out of microarrays — but Excel wasn't designed for that. From Excel ate my DNA:

Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.

The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)