How to Reinvent the G.O.P.

In How to Reinvent the G.O.P., David Brooks asks "What Would Hamilton Do?" and presents "A New Conservative Platform" with more popular appeal than the anti-statist platform of the past:

By using government in limited but energetic ways, conservatives could establish credibility that would enable them to reduce the size of government where it is useless or worse — export subsidies, agricultural subsidies and the like. Then they could use that credibility to reduce the increases in entitlement spending — the giant set of programs that crowd out everything else.

Its pillars:

• The War on Islamic extremism
• Entitlement reform
• Social mobility
• Restore the integrity of our institutions
• The energy revolution
• National service

I'm not convinced.

Team America: World Police

Only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could come up with Team America: World Police, a movie done in the style of Jerry Bruckheimer (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys), but with Thunderbirds-style marionettes.

RNC: Giuliani's Speech

I didn't catch Giuliani's Speech last night, and I only heard a few snippets on NPR this morning, but I enjoyed reading this passage about the president meeting with "the people" after 9/11:

Now New York construction workers are very special people. I'm sure this is true all over but I know the ones here the best. They were real heroes along with many others that day, volunteering immediately. And they're big, real big. Their arms are bigger than my legs and their opinions are even bigger than their arms. Now each one of them would engage the President and I imagine like his cabinet give him advice. They were advising him in their own words on exactly what he should do with the terrorists. Of course I can't repeat their exact language. But one of them really went into great detail and upon conclusion of his remarks President Bush said in a rather loud voice, "I agree." At this point the guy just beamed and all his buddies turned toward him in amazement. The guy just lost it. So he reached over, embraced the President and began hugging him enthusiastically. A Secret Service agent standing next to me looked at the President and the guy and instead of extracting the President from this bear hug, he turned toward me and put his finger in my face and said, "If this guy hurts the President, Giuliani you're finished." Meekly, and this is the moral of the story, I responded, "but it would be out of love."

Computer Maker in an Alien World

If you want a cutting-edge PC — OK, if you want a cutting-edge game-playing machine — you go to the guys at Alienware. Computer Maker in an Alien World explains Alienware's entrepreneurial history:

Gonzalez and his business partner, Alex Aguila, launched Alienware seven years ago with an initial investment of $13,000 for office equipment and rent. The company was unable to establish credit lines with computer parts vendors, so each Alienware customer had to pay in advance for their system, which allowed the company to purchase the products to manufacture that system.

Gonzalez got the idea to custom build high-performance machines for gamers from his own experiments constructing computers that would allow him to run flight simulators on machines designed primarily to handle spreadsheets and word-processing software.

Once he figured out how to squeeze the most performance out of off-the-shelf parts, he began building machines for his friends. Shortly after, he figured he'd "just roll the dice" and start a business based on what he'd learned. He named it Alienware in tribute to his longtime fascination with both UFOs and computer hardware.

Gonzales also tried to make the building process a bit different from that of the competition.

"First we handpick each component that goes into the machines based on performance — we choose the best," he said. "Then we build a clean machine — there are no bird's nests of wires and cords, everything is neatly tie-wrapped. That makes for better airflow and the system components don't overheat."

"Then we tweak. We do all the things the obsessed overclocker geek would do with their own machine. We turn some services off; we accelerate some things. Sometimes we add our own custom drivers or just twiddle component settings. People who know how to tweak a machine like Alienware � because it doesn't take them a few days to set up their system; it's all been done for them. People who don't really know computers just like the way the machines run."

Wired 12.09: The Giants of Anime are Coming

Excellent. From The Giants of Anime are Coming:

In coming months, anime's three most prominent directors will release major films in the US. Oshii's Innocence will hit theaters in September. Soon afterward, Katsuhiro Otomo will debut Steamboy, an Indiana Jones-style adventure that takes place in an alternative Victorian age where turbo unicycles and pressure-powered jetpacks battle for supremacy. Then Hayao Miyazaki will deliver Howl's Moving Castle, about a teenage girl who flees a curse by hiding in a gigantic mechanical castle that prowls about on insectlike legs. In addition, Disney will issue three older Miyazaki films on DVD early next year, two of which have never before been released in the US.

A bit of anime history:

Anime is both radically new and the latest variant on an ancient tradition. Japanese hobbyists made animated shorts as far back as 1917, and the industry grew steadily from there. For the most part, its films were warmed-over Disney, based on homegrown folk tales. By the 1960s, the studio Toei Animation was producing feature films for an increasingly receptive domestic audience.

But after decades of imitating American models, anime suddenly made a sharp turn in the late 1960s and embraced a totally different influence: manga, Japan's wildly imaginative comic books. "The soul of anime is manga," Otomo has said, and it is an old soul indeed. Unlike US comics, which took off from the rakish spirit of vaudeville and minstrel shows, manga stem from the ancient practice of lavishly illustrating woodblock-printed books.
[...]
In the immediate aftermath of Astro Boy, anime was considered pabulum for kids. But something changed in the early 1970s. Like every nation in the developed world, Japan brought forth an impatient new generation of artists. Unlike other countries, though, Japan's music, theater, and film industries didn't welcome boat-rocking young people. Meanwhile, manga publishers were abandoning their previous self-censoring code of content. Suddenly, what had been subliterature began looking like an opportunity for creative newcomers.

"There was tremendous energy in Japan bubbling up then," says Masuzo Furukawa, founder of Mandarake, Japan's largest manga store. "In your country, someone like Martin Scorsese got to make Mean Streets. In our country, somebody like Otomo went into manga."

WSJ.com - Rooms for Rent: Maid Service, Hot Meals, No Men

I remember finding the premise of Bosum Buddies — the early 80's sitcom, where Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari play men dressing as women to live in a women-only apartment complex — preposterous, if only because I couldn't imagine a women-only apartment complex. As WSJ.com - Rooms for Rent: Maid Service, Hot Meals, No Men reports, one still exists in New York City:

Perhaps the most ancient stereotype about New York is that it is a metropolis of easy virtue. But just a block and a half from this week's Republican National Convention, the little-known Webster, a fortress-like apartment building with Doric columns and steel doors, defies the darker side of Gotham so often portrayed in movies, literature and popular music.

Men are received only in the first-floor drawing room, the library or in the doorless, floral-wallpapered 'beau parlors.' One exception: Fathers are allowed upstairs, but only with an escort.

There used to be a number of such residences in New York, most famously the Barbizon Hotel on the Upper East Side, a white-glove establishment for young women including Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath. Its denizens were often employed by women's magazines or nearby retailers before they got married and moved out.

'Aside from these residences, living on your own in New York was impossible to afford because even women who were college graduates were limited to low-paying jobs,' says Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at New York City's Barnard College. Women's residences provided a needed veil of respectability to the notion of an unmarried woman living independently of her family, she says.

By the end of the 1960s, those considerations had withered in importance. Today, apart from some college dorms and women's residences run by religious organizations, the Webster is one of the last of its breed. "The feminist and sexual revolutions killed them," says Prof. Rosenberg.

I owe it to the party

I owe it to the party looks at China's athletes and the Communist Party:

"I owe my Olympic gold medal to my parents, my coach and, above all, to the wise leadership of the Republican Party and President Bush." Can anybody imagine such a remark from an American athlete speaking to Fox News Network? Of course not. Not even the irreverent, wise-cracking talk show host Jay Leno has such a fertile imagination.

But when it comes to Chinese athletes, this extravagant tribute to the political leadership of a country is anything but fictional in the 28th Olympic Games now under way in Athens. The minute a young Chinese girl bagged the gold medal in the women's table-tennis singles final on Sunday, a Beijing TV network reporter stuck a microphone under the nose of her parents. The father, without batting an eye, told the audience that his good daughter was a good Communist Party member and her success was a tribute to the party organization. We can only imagine the hyperbolic tributes, straining credulity, when Beijing hosts the 2008 Summer Olympics.

For all intents and purposes, he is right: the government and the Communist Party own all the Chinese athletes. They are trained, funded, and sent to the Olympics in Greece and to other sporting events by the China Sports Bureau, a cabinet-level ministry in the government. [...] And the government treats its athletes well, too. Each gold medalist will receive 200,000 yuan (US$24,000) in reward money, or 23 years' worth of an average Beijinger's annual income, when he or she returns home, because such athletes have repaid the party's kindness by, as the grateful father put it, "bringing glory to the party and country".

beyond bullets: Signal to Noise

Signal to Noise explains the purpose of a headline — in a newspaper or a PowerPoint presentation:

Journalists have developed an art and craft of writing headlines that serve 3 very important functions — they quickly communicate the main ideas of the article, entice you to read more if you have the time, and allow you to skim the paper if you don't

Inform, entice and distill:

Re-write "The Market" to say "The Market Has Split into 2 New Segments". Edit "Product Benefits" to say "External Drives Reduce Risk by 10%". Each of these new headlines stakes out a specific conclusion, that you can then support with the visuals on your slide along with your spoken words.

Turn Hollywood Secrets into Blockbuster Sales

Turn Hollywood Secrets into Blockbuster Sales is a fairly lackluster article on using "Hollywood secrets" to improve your PowerPoint presentations — but it opens with a fairly insightful (if hokey) revelation: you, in the audience, are the star, as far as Hollywood is concerned:

One Hollywood secret is that the ultimate goal of any movie is to make you feel like you're a star. To the degree that a film makes you feel like you're the one on screen, is the degree to which it is successful. That's because audience empathy translates into dollars. Audiences are willing to pay top dollar if they feel like they 'own' the characters, as if they had created them and lived their lives.

Cabinet Magazine Online - American Photographs: The Road

In 1935, writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov traveled to the United States from the Soviet Union on assignment as special correspondents for the Pravda. The Road is their installment explaining their road trip across America:

On the fifth day of a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, we saw the gigantic buildings of New York. Before us was America. But when we had been in New York for a week and, as it seemed to us, we began to understand America, we were quite unexpectedly told that New York is not at all America. They told us that New York is a bridge between Europe and America, and that we were still situated on the bridge. Then we went to Washington, being steadfastly convinced that the capital of the United States is indisputably America. We spent a day there, and by evening we managed to fall in love with this purely American city. However, on that very same evening we were told that Washington was under no circumstances America. They told us that this was a town of governmental bureaucrats and that America was something quite different. Perplexed, we traveled to Hartford, a city in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer Mark Twain spent his mature years. Much to our horror, the local residents told us in unison that Hartford was also not genuine America. They said that the genuine America was the southern states, while others affirmed that it was the western ones. Several didn't say anything but vaguely pointed a finger into space. We then decided to work according to a plan: to drive around the entire country in an automobile, to traverse it from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and to return along a different route, along the Gulf of Mexico, calculating that indeed somewhere we would be sure to find America. We returned to New York, purchased a Ford (transportation in one's own automobile is the least expensive means of travel in the United States), insured it and ourselves, and on a chilly November morning we left New York for America.

While visiting New York and Washington, I've definitely thought, if you were a foreign tourist, you'd think this was America — but it's not. Not by a long shot.

This picture (above) should be captioned as follows: "Here, this is America!"

And, indeed, when you close your eyes and try to rekindle memories of this country where you spent four months, you don't imagine yourself in Washington with its gardens, columns, and full collection of monuments, nor in New York with its skyscrapers and its poor and rich, nor in San Francisco with its steep streets and suspension bridges, nor in the mountains, factories, or canyons, but at such an intersection of two roads and a gasoline station against a ground of wires and advertising signs.

A lovely alternative

Michael Blowhard holds that "this review here of a new Lexus is some of the best — the most insightful, daring, and fun — new criticism of any kind I've read recently." It certainly transcends mere automobile review, asking "just what constitutes a 'chick car,' anyway?":

When I drive the Lexus SC430, I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and let's just leave it at that, hmmm?

The SC430 � as polished as a manor house banister, as smooth as Napoleon brandy strained through Naomi Wolf's silk stocking � is that mightily maligned thing: a chick car.
[...]
It's instructive to note that in Europe, the equivalent term for a chick car is a "hairdresser's car." Gay, in other words. A chick car is not only feminine in some ineffable way, but feminizing. It imputes femininity � or perhaps a kind of gender-preference valence � upon its owner/driver. Men don't like having their male credentials called into question; women resist the onus of femininity in the second-sex sense described by Simone de Beauvoir.

Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood

Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood describes recent efforts to build up Hungary's film industry — and gives a bit of Hungarian film history:

In Hollywood's early days, Hungarians helped build the movie business. Adolph Zukor founded Paramount, William Fox (born Wilhelm Fried) started 20th Century Fox, and director George Cukor blazed a trail from 'The Philadelphia Story' to 'My Fair Lady.' In Hollywood legend, a sign on one studio door once warned, 'It's not enough to be Hungarian, you have to have talent too.'
[...]
Hungarians were part of a wave of Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish, who found success in Hollywood beginning in the early 1900s. Kept out of other occupations by prejudice, they were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons.

Throughout the 1920s, Paramount's Mr. Zukor and his rivals made trips to Europe, scouting for talent, such as Hungarian Michael Curtiz, who directed "Casablanca." Hungary was among the European nations where a domestic film industry was already flourishing, partly through government support. Hungarian directors and writers benefited from training at formal film schools. Cinematography students were required to study painting, sculpture, classical literature and music.

Hungary's film industry continued to thrive under Communist rule, with plenty of state-funded work. Vilmos Zsigmond, who studied cinematography at the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film went on to shoot "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Deer Hunter."

But in the 1990s, the fall of communism and aging film studios sent the domestic industry into a tailspin.

Why is Hungary pushing film? Politics:

The European Union, which Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in May, tries to prevent its members from propping up industries with government aid that creates an uneven playing field. But films and television receive a "cultural exception" originally won by France to protect its heavily subsidized film industry. That has opened a rare door for government incentives and spurred a studio-building boom. EU nations now use the exception to compete for Hollywood action flicks as well as home-grown art films. Many countries also hope that movie exposure will boost their image, triggering tourist dollars.

Yahoo! News - 'Sorcerer' Kills 10, Sells Bodies for Cremation

When I saw the headline — Yahoo! News - 'Sorcerer' Kills 10, Sells Bodies for Cremation — I must admit that I assumed it was another story out of Africa. But I was wrong:

Chinese police have detained a 'sorcerer' who killed 10 people and sold their bodies to bereaved families to cremate in the place of loved ones who were secretly buried, police and a state-run newspaper reported Thursday.

The 34-year-old man, surnamed Lin, strangled or poisoned the 10 villagers at his home, next to a temple, in the southern province of Guangdong, the Beijing Morning Post said.

Chinese tradition, especially in rural villages, holds that burial brings peace to the dead and tombs are placed according to the laws of geomancy. But in a country of 1.3 billion people, the seemingly haphazard siting of graves wastes scarce farmland.

Since 1978, when China launched its reform drive, all levels of government have recommended cremation to save land.

'This region cremates its dead, but local people prefer to be buried in the ground. People bought the bodies to be cremated in place of their relatives,' a police official told Reuters Thursday.

Lin, whom the newspaper called a sorcerer locals consulted to communicate with spirits, sold the bodies for 1,000 to 8,000 yuan ($120 to $966) each, the newspaper quoted local police as saying.

If the common people are willing to have innocents murdered to get around government regulations, either (a) the common people are unusually depraved, or (b) the government regulations are a bit too restrictive. Or (c) a sorcerer's involved.

George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics

George Lakoff is a "progressive" UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, and he's upset at how conservatives have successfully defined their ideas, carefully chosen the language with which to present them, and built an infrastructure to communicate them — something "progressives" have completely failed to do. In George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics, he explains "framing":

Language always comes with what is called 'framing.' Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like 'revolt,' that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" � something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Here's another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's acceptance speech, he said, "When the people win, politics as usual loses." What's that about? Well, he knows that he's going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual � in advance. The Democratic legislators won't know what hit them. They're automatically framed as enemies of the people.

Another example of successful conservative framing:

The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

"Tax relief" has even been picked up by the Democrats. I was asked by the Democratic Caucus in their tax meetings to talk to them, and I told them about the problems of using tax relief. The candidates were on the road. Soon after, Joe Lieberman still used the phrase tax relief in a press conference. You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

It's not an accident that conversatives have built a communications infrastructure and "progressives" haven't:

There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

Meanwhile, liberals' conceptual system of the "nurturant parent" has as its highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.' So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better.

More on the strict father versus nurturant parent:

Well, the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline � physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones � those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant � and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.

Notice how both the strict father and nurturant parent treat citizens as children.

Why Teachers Love Depressing Books

I guess I was fortunate enough to dodge the "problem novel" phenomenon — until high school, at least. From Why Teachers Love Depressing Books:

An avid reader growing up, I decided that there were two types of children's books: call it ''Little Women'' versus ''Phantom Tollbooth.'' The first type was usually foisted on you by nostalgic grown-ups. These were books populated by snivelers and goody-two-shoes, the most saintly of whom were sure to die in some tediously drawn-out scene. When the characters weren't dying or performing acts of charity or thawing the hearts of mean old gentlemen, they mostly just hung around the house, thinking about how they felt about their relatives.

The people in the other kind of book, however, were entirely different. They had adventures.

Miller is reviewing Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up:

Feinberg, who runs an arts program for kids, was provoked to write this unusual hybrid of memoir and polemic by the trials of her 12-year-old son, Alex. She had seen him steel himself, again and again, for the joyless task of completing the assigned reading for his ''language arts'' class, and she decided to investigate how those books could so oppress a boy who otherwise happily gobbled up Harry Potter novels and anything by or about his idol, Mel Brooks.

Her curiosity plunges Feinberg into the contemporary genre of young adult (Y.A.) ''problem novels,'' the bane of her son's existence. These books describe, with spare realism, child and teenage protagonists weathering abuse, addiction, parental abandonment or fecklessness, mental illness, pregnancy, suicide, violence, prostitution or self-mutilation — and often a combination of the above. ''Teachers love them,'' the local librarian explains as Feinberg scans a shelf of such titles. ''They win all the awards.''

Most of the books chosen by the English committee at Alex's school are problem novels, and the curriculum proves inflexible. ''We can't ever say we don't like the books,'' Alex tells his mother, because, according to his teacher, ''if you're not liking the books, you're not reading them closely enough.'' The books are so depressing — '' 'Everybody dies in them,' he told me wearily'' — Alex insists on reading with his bedroom door open.

I can distincting recall asking a girl classmate in sixth grade about the book she was reading, Flowers in the Attic. I was pretty much horrified by her synopsis; here's how Ingram, the book distributor, summarizes it:

Upon their father's tragic death, Cathy and her three siblings are ensconced in the attic of their hateful grandparent's mansion, unaware that their deceitful mother is planning to keep their existence secret forever.

"Ensconced" doesn't sound as bad as "locked up," and the Ingram summary doesn't mention incest.

Anyway, this is what an 11-year-old girl was reading for fun.

Yahoo! News - GM Pulls 'Jack Flash' Corvette Ad

Some people don't "get" the latest 'vette ad. From Yahoo! News - GM Pulls 'Jack Flash' Corvette Ad:

Protests from seven safety groups prompted General Motors Corp. to pull a television ad that shows a young boy driving a Corvette sports car so recklessly that it goes airborne, officials of the automaker said on Wednesday.

The ad, featuring the Rolling Stones song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," has aired repeatedly during the Olympics. The groups, including Consumers Union and the Center for Auto Safety, complained that it was "the most dangerous" spot they have seen in recent years.

Directed by singer Madonna's husband Guy Ritchie, the spot shows a boy's daydream of racing the Corvette through downtown streets and through a construction pipe. The safety groups said in a letter to GM released on Wednesday that the spot could encourage children to take their parents' cars for a drive.

My hat's off to Mr. Ritchie.

newsobserver.com | The Bridge | A Young SEAL

The Bridge cites an anecdote explaining how Scott Helvenston was destined to become a SEAL:

When he was about 4, his mother said, some college football players taunted him at the neighborhood pool, saying he was too little, the pool was for grownups. Scott dashed angrily to the diving board, tore off his flotation vest and, before she could stop him, dove in and swam the length of the pool.

Underwater.

The Bridge

The Bridge examines the famous killing and mutilation of four contractors in Iraq — and, in the process, explains the origins of Blackwater USA, their employer:

Set on more than 6,000 acres in the state's northeast corner, Blackwater was known as one of the best of the private military contractors. Its close ties to the elite Navy SEALs grew from its owner, Erik Prince.

Prince, 35, had been a White House intern and was a billionaire's son, yet he volunteered as a firefighter and for the Navy.

Prince, a widower and father of four, was a former member of the SEAL commandos. He maintained the unit's characteristic secrecy while positioning himself at the intersection of free enterprise, activist Christianity, conservative politics and military contracting. He made his first political contribution at 19 — $15,000 to the Republican Party.
[...]
His father, Edgar Prince, started his own company in 1965. He hit it big by making sun visors with lighted mirrors. Business grew, and his factories churned out parts seen in most cars today: overhead consoles, map lamps, headliners for roofs.
[...]
Erik Prince molded himself after his father: a devout Christian, astute businessman and family man who shunned the limelight.

After Holland Christian School, Prince attended Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school that champions free markets and individual freedom. Erik Prince fit in at what Gary Wolfram, a professor of political economy who taught him, called a "Mecca of market economy."
[...]
He was one of the first interns at the Family Research Council in Washington. He worked as a defense analyst on the staff of U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from Orange County, Calif. And he interned in the White House of President George H.W. Bush, father of current President George W. Bush. In 1992, he campaigned for Patrick Buchanan.

"I interned with the Bush administration for six months," Prince told The Grand Rapids Press in early 1992. "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with — homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns."

Back at school, Prince volunteered on a more humble scale: He was the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. He'd be sitting in class when his radio crackled. As amused classmates looked on, he'd dash out.

"When you've been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd's gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink," said Kevin Pauken, one of the squad's full-timers. "Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik."

In 1992, Prince enlisted in the Navy, was commissioned as an officer, and the next year joined the SEALs, who get their acronym from the attack routes of sea, air and land. He spent four years with Seal Team 8 in Norfolk, Va.

"Prince was a first-class SEAL, he was the real deal," said Messing, the retired Special Forces officer.

Prince left the SEALs in 1996. His father had died the previous year, and Erik took over the family business. About this time, his wife, Joan, was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2003 at 36). Also in 1996, the Prince family sold its automotive business to S.C. Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. Prince headed the Prince Group, which held several nonautomotive factories and the company that developed downtown Holland.
[...]
Prince has been equally secretive about his biggest venture since the SEALs: At 27, he founded Blackwater USA, buying an expanse of farmland in Camden and Currituck counties. He saw an opportunity as the shrinking military closed some of its own training centers, and he wanted to build the SEALs a good one just a short drive from the unit's East Coast base at Little Creek, Va.

Former Navy SEALs form the backbone of Blackwater, which advertises its Moyock compound — now more than 6,000 acres — as "the most comprehensive private tactical training facility in the United States."

It puts many military ranges to shame. One range is two-thirds of a mile long and perfect for sniper training. There are computerized target systems and an entire mock town for urban tactical training, and a track for tactical driving techniques. Soldiers can shoot from boats or hovering helicopters into junk cars, trucks and buses. Blackwater boasts that it can custom-design any sort of training a soldier wants.

An Army Surgeon Says New Helmet Doesn't Fit Iraq

An Army Surgeon Says New Helmet Doesn't Fit Iraq:

The Army had begun issuing a new helmet, dubbed the Advanced Combat Helmet. Made of a new type of Kevlar, the helmet is stronger and lighter than its predecessor. But the new helmet has a critical flaw, Col. Poffenbarger contends: It is about 8% smaller than the old helmet, offering less protection on the back and side of the head.

In past wars, this might not have been a big problem. In infantry-style combat, soldiers typically are struck in the front of the head as they charge toward the enemy. But in Iraq, where the deadliest threat is remote-detonated roadside bombs, many soldiers are getting blasted on the sides and back of the head, says Col. Poffenbarger. In other words, they are getting hit in areas where the new helmet offers less coverage.

Col. Poffenbarger bases his conclusions on what's he's seen at the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad:

His research is based on about 160 head-trauma patients who have passed through the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, where he works. Because the hospital houses the only American neurosurgeons in Iraq, virtually every serious head-trauma patient is treated by him or his partner. "If you get shot in the head in Iraq, I see you," he says.

He has gone through the records of all the hospital's head-trauma patients, documenting the exact entry point at which the shrapnel or bullet entered the brain and the type of helmet the soldier or Marine was wearing. Extrapolating from this, Col. Poffenbarger estimates the new helmet might result in a 30% increase in serious head traumas if distributed throughout the entire force in Iraq.

When in doubt, follow the Marines' example:

The Marines have developed their own new helmet, made of the same stronger Kevlar as the Army's. The Marines decided not to alter the shape, so their new helmet will continue to cover portions of the side and back of the head.

The Marines say their helmet provides protection against mortars, remote-detonated roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades — three of the biggest killers of U.S. troops in Iraq. "We felt like the extra coverage was needed to protect against those indirect fire threats," says Lt. Col. Gabe Patricio, the Marine Corps' project manager for infantry equipment.

Why did the army make the helmet smaller in the first place? They had a good reason:

There's a good reason that the new helmet is slightly smaller, Col. Norwood says. For years, soldiers have complained that when they are lying on their stomachs firing rifles, their body armor rides up — tipping their helmet over their eyes. The new helmet was designed to address that problem. "We think it is a good trade-off or we wouldn't be fielding it," he says.

The new helmets — which cost $300 each, compared with about $100 for the old ones — are made to the Army's specifications by MSA Corp., based in Pittsburgh; Specialty Defense Systems of Dunmore, Pa.; and Gentex Corp., of Carbondale, Pa. Like the Army, the manufacturers say the new helmet allows soldiers to see and hear better than its predecessor. A spokesman for MSA says soldiers are likely to wear the new helmet longer because it is more comfortable.

The Unpolitical Animal

As The Unpolitical Animal explains, political scientist Philip Converse examined beliefs and voting behavior forty years ago in an article called "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics":

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Some more stats:

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don�t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor.

Man on Quest for Knife-Proof Body Bleeds to Death

Oh, those zany African witch doctors! From Man on Quest for Knife-Proof Body Bleeds to Death:

A Tanzanian who went to a witch doctor in search of the power to resist bullets and knife attacks died when ritual cuts made on his body proved fatal.

He was one of four suspected robbers from a village in Kasulu district in western Tanzania who visited the witch doctor on a quest for magic, the African newspaper reported Tuesday.

The ritual included cutting their skin and rubbing in potions and powders.

The witch doctor fled after the man died Monday from profuse bleeding, the newspaper said, adding that the three survivors were arrested when they went to a hospital.

Forbidden Zone - Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes

Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes describes an insane fan-edit project: to re-cut the original Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone episode:

When I first started gathering information about POTA, I was surprised to learn that Rod Serling co-wrote the screenplay for Planet. Then suddenly it all made sense. 'Of course! Planet is a two-hour episode of The Twilight Zone!'

That idea stuck in the back of my head ever since. Then with the recent advances in digital filmmaking technology and especially after reading about fan edits (particularly the couple of Star Wars: Episode I edits that surfaced), another thought struck me: 'Wouldn't it be cool to take Planet and edit it down into a thirty minute episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with Rod Serling narration?' I knew the project would take a lot of patience to assemble the pieces, but once I got them together, it would be great fun to create the final product.

You can download the half-hour episode in QuickTime format.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Republicans Against Prohibition

If you look hard enough, you can find a few Republicans Against Prohibition:

The Drug Policy Alliance is running an ad in The New York Sun aimed at convincing Republican delegates that opposition to the war on drugs is a respectable position on the right. The ad quotes Milton Friedman, Bill Buckley, Grover Norquist, George Shultz, Gary Johnson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is by no means a full-fledged antiprohibitionist but has come out in favor of medical access to marijuana).

The Making of an X Box Warrior

The Making of an X Box Warrior opens with Clive Thompson's experience in a virtual Baghdad, leading virtual troops in a game of Full Spectrum Warrior:

My job, as squad leader, was to order my soldiers where to go and what to do. First, I sent half of my men into an alleyway, where they immediately came under fire from insurgents hiding nearby. Scrambling for safety, I ordered us to duck into a building, pausing to marvel at the detail of the architecture. I then led us back out onto the street, directing my team to crouch behind a car while we tried to locate the snipers. This was a bad idea. Despite what you see in action movies and other video games, cars do not provide good cover from bullets. The snipers cut loose, and my troops crumpled to the ground. It was surprisingly distressing. In barely three minutes, I had led every single one of my soldiers to his death.

What makes Full Spectrum Warrior different from other video games?

Full Spectrum Warrior was created by the Institute for Creative Technologies, with help from the Army, to teach soldiers realistic strategies for surviving what the armed forces call ''military operations in urban terrain.''

It sounds like they made an effort to get the little details right:

Cummings's job was to ensure that Full Spectrum Warrior conformed to military doctrine. He brought military manuals so that he could show the programmers the myriad details of how soldiers are really trained to act, down to the way they go into a room when they are entering and clearing a building. Particularly crucial, he said, was developing the ''nudge'' — the player's ability to physically grab a fellow soldier and point him in the desired direction. ''A squad leader is very physical,'' he said. ''He goes up, and he grabs people literally on the shoulder and says: 'Hey, knucklehead. Over here.' He drags people around.''

Mad Max Mods in Iraq

From Mad Max Mods in Iraq:

Since March, 2003, army mechanics in Iraq and Kuwait have installed 8,000 armor kits, 2,000 aid conditioners and 4,500 bulletproof windshields in trucks and hummers. The units that do this work are sometimes called �Mad Max Shops� (after the armored vehicles in the Mel Gibson movie of the same name.) The mechanics also do all sorts of modifications, many of them experimental (some work, some don�t). The Mad Max Shops work at night, as the metal becomes too hot to pick up and handle by day. The preferred material for armoring vehicles is a Swedish steel/nickel/chromium alloy called Hardox 400. It costs $1,200 a (40x120 inch) sheet, but is popular because the 10mm thick steel is really good at stopping bullets and bomb blast fragments. There are also commercial armoring kits, and bullet and blast resistant stick-on material. But the Hardox 400 armor is preferred. This corrosion and wear resistant metal was developed for industrial uses, and not only is tough, but looks and feels tough.

I wonder, do they do crossbows and shoulder pads too?

Victor Davis Hanson on Europe and Troop Withdrawal on National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson has long called for a withdrawal of American troops from Europe. In Welcome Back, Europe, he explains that it's not just that there aren't any conventional enemies left on Europe's borders:

Unwittingly, we had created an unhealthy passive-aggressiveness in Europe that clinicians might identify as a classic symptom of dependency. Europe — now larger and more populous than the United States — has reduced defense investment to subsidize a variety of social expenditures found nowhere in the world. So insular had its utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over.

Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse

A single human gene boosted running endurance in mice by 100 percent. From Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse:

'Marathon mice,' genetically engineered by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers, can run twice as far as their unaltered buddies. Previously, the only known way to increase endurance was through training.

With no previous running experience, most mice can run about 900 meters before exhaustion. But the genetically altered mice can run 1800 meters (more than a mile) before running out of steam, and keep it up for two and a half hours — an hour longer than unaltered mice can run.

"Records are broken on a fraction of a percent," said Ron Evans, the head researcher in the mouse experiment and a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory at The Salk Institute. "A few percentage points is like a minute or two in a race. This was a big change: 100 percent."

Humans have amazing endurance. Evidently this comes, in part, from their PPAR-delta gene:

To perform the genetic enhancement on the mice, researchers injected a human version of a protein called PPAR-delta attached to a short DNA sequence. The injection permanently incorporated enhanced PPAR-delta production into the mice' genomes. The change is transgenic, meaning the mice will pass down the trait to future generations.

The mice were also resistant to weight gain, even when fed a high-fat diet that caused obesity in other mice, according to research published online in the Aug. 24 issue of the Public Library of Science Biology.

You don't have to be a transgenic mouse to take advantage of this though:

It's too late for next week's Olympic marathon competitors in Athens to take advantage, but, coincidentally, GlaxoSmithKline is developing an oral drug that activates the same protein in humans (called PPAR-delta) that was stimulated in the marathon mice.

GlaxoSmithKline has completed the first phase of three human trials necessary for FDA approval to market the drug as a good cholesterol, or HDL, booster. (Increased HDL can help prevent heart attacks.) Evans said researchers at GlaxoSmithKline were surprised when told about the other benefits he and his colleagues had found were associated with increased levels of the protein.

Let's see how long it takes to crush existing marathon records.

Older Boys Really Are a Bad Influence

It's nice to have some science to back up common sense. From Older Boys Really Are a Bad Influence:

Parents who forbid their daughters to date older boys may be on the right track. A study published on Thursday finds that teenage girls who associate with older boys are more likely to smoke, drink and use drugs.

I was quite surprised to find correlation not confused with causation:

The survey of 1,000 teens found that friends do influence behavior, or at least reflect behavior, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University said.

Here are the stats:

The study found that 58 percent of girls who had boyfriends two years or more older drank alcohol, compared to 25 percent of the girls who dated boys their own age or not at all.

Fifty percent of the girls who went for older boys or men smoked marijuana, compared to 8 percent of the other girls, and 65 percent of these girls who preferred to date someone older than themselves smoked, compared to 14 percent girls who stuck to younger boys.

Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe

Gordon Marino, philosophy professor and boxing coach, opens Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe with quotes from Socrates and Tyler Durden:

'Know thyself' was the Socratic dictum, but Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the movie Fight Club, asks, 'How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?'

His comparison of boxing and philosophy could come straight out of a Conan story (where the civilized tend to be decadent and cruel):

For a decade, I have been teaching both boxing and philosophy. My academic colleagues have sometimes reacted to my involvement with the sweet science with intellectual jabs and condescension. A few years ago at a philosophy conference, I mentioned that I had to leave early to go back to the campus to work with three of my boxers from the Virginia Military Institute who were competing in the National Collegiate Boxing Association championships. Shocked to learn that there was such a college tournament, one professor scolded, "How can someone committed to developing minds be involved in a sport in which students beat one another's brains out?" I explained that the competitors wore protective headgear and used heavily padded 16-ounce gloves in competition as well as in practice, but she was having none of it. "Headgear or not," she replied, "your brain is still getting rattled. Worse yet, you're teaching violence."

I countered that if violence is defined as purposefully hurting another person, then I had seen enough of that in the philosophical arena to last a lifetime. At the university where I did my graduate studies, colloquia were nothing less than academic gunfights in which the goal was to fire off a question that would sink the lecturer low. I pointed out, "I've even seen philosophers have to restrain themselves from clapping at a comment that knocked a speaker off his pins and made him feel stupid."

I have to agree with Marino and Aristotle here:

According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between fearlessness and excessive fearfulness. The capacity to tolerate fear is essential to leading a moral life, but it is hard to learn how to keep your moral compass under pressure when you are cosseted from every fear. Boxing gives people practice in being afraid.

Adopt a Sniper

This is a charity organization I never thought I'd see — Adopt a Sniper:

In every war it seems that the military must re-learn the lessons of the past. The war on terror is ideally suited for the tactics of the sniper. With the convoy escorts and house to house fighting, the US military is using snipers in numbers not seen in modern history. It seems like a no-brainer but a man with a rifle that knows how to use it, is in much demand in a war. Soldiers and Marines that have not been to a formal sniper school but who shot 'Expert' on the range are being issued special rifles and basically doing the same job as the school trained snipers in some cases. Adoptasniper makes no distinction between these two types of operators and offers assistance equally. We currently support snipers on each end of the spectrum; from the very well trained and equipped who normally request smaller, specialized items to the marksman soldier with little to no support that needs 'everything' to do the job asked of him ... and every variant in between.

One shot, one kill

One shot, one kill cites a New York Times article that states that Marine snipers killed 62 people on Tuesday. As Phillip Carter explains, that's a lot of killing being done by a relatively small number of Marines:

So we're really talking about 20-30 Marines — only half of whom are actually shooters, due to the marksman/observer team concept — killing 62 Iraqis in one day.

High body counts don't indicate success, but they do indicate combat intensity and combat effectiveness:

One point that comes through again and again in stories of engagements in Iraq is that the Iraqi insurgents simply don't understand tactical fundamentals such as cover and concealment. I have seen Al-Jazeera tapes and U.S. military tapes of engagements where Iraqi insurgents, whooped up by their buddies into a frenzy of martyrdom, literally rush out into the middle of the street to launch an unaimed RPG at U.S. forces. In nearly all the videos, they are instantaneously cut down by a few short bursts of aimed rifle and machine gun fire. No trained soldier would ever do something so stupid. But the Iraqi grunts do it again and again, almost inviting death.

Still Groping in the Dark?

Cato's Still Groping in the Dark? summarizes last year's blackout:

In short, three 345-kilovolt transmission lines went down when heat caused them to sag and come into contact with trees. That created an imbalance between supply and demand along the lines feeding the Cleveland area, which led, in turn, to higher current flow and accompanying lower voltage on a large portion of the remaining Eastern interconnection as the power raced along other routes to get to Cleveland.

When devices known as 'relays' detected the unusual power flows around the Cleveland area, they automatically triggered circuit breakers that removed a number of lines from service (a preventative measure to ensure that billions of dollars of capital stock are not fried by unusual power flows). In the words of the report, the 'cascade became a race between the power surges and the relays.' The lines that tripped first were generally the longer lines that split the grid into those sections that blacked out and those that recovered without furthering the cascade. The upshot is that 'protective relay settings on transmission lines operated as they were designed and set to behave on August 14.'

The Big One

The Big One opens with the "clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons" of the two World Wars:

The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an "honor-bound" allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances trump common sense. The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men. The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully.

Going into the Great War, no one expected such unprecedented levels of carnage:

The scale and suddenness of the killing that began that summer still has the power to amaze us. The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead. The first battles were as bad as the last. A German lieutenant led his virgin division into battle in Lorraine that month and, coming under French fire for the first time, looked around after a minute �to see how many are still fit to fight. The bugler, who has remained by my side like a shadow, says to me sadly, "Herr Leutnant, there is nobody there any more!�" Almost the entire unit had been annihilated at first contact.

The means of annihilation are familiar. The machine gun, in particular, created a zone of death that would simply saw a soldier in two if he entered it. At Waterloo, an infantry soldier could fire twice a minute. The machine gun fired six hundred rounds a minute. Even the infantry rifle now could fire a dozen times a minute, and at a mile's range.

Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester

Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester looks at the man who transformed Harvard — and our entire university system — by introducing the SAT:

The son of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft, Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1905 to privilege, albeit the sort based more in erudition than wealth. Chauncey was also a gifted athlete, and his baseball exploits at Groton and Harvard attracted an offer to play professionally for the Boston Braves.

Chauncey instead accepted an offer after graduation as an assistant Harvard dean and temporary Harvard baseball coach. There, becoming more and more interested in why Harvard was churning out such lackluster graduates, Chauncey found his patron in Conant, a Harvard president who had already caused controversy among alumni by articulating his vision of a student body primarily comprising students with superior academic achievement, regardless of wealth or social status.

One of Conant's motivations was creating what Thomas Jefferson had coined a "natural aristocracy," a ruling elite self-selected by intelligence and ability, not lineage. Chauncey's observations of Harvard classes full of mundane underachievers and Conant's vision of a better America built by the nation's best thinkers perfectly coalesced. All they needed was the mechanism to bring their dream society about.

In his research on standardized tests, Chauncey chanced upon the SAT, an obscure mutation of an IQ test that had been developed at Princeton University. Chauncey retooled it to focus primarily on verbal and math skills, and in 1934 he presented it to Conant as their new tool to find the best students in America and bring them to Harvard. By 1941, Harvard required the SAT for all applicants.

World War II helped bring the test into the mainstream. Strapped for officer candidates and with no good way to identify and promote so many leaders so quickly, the Army and Navy contracted with Chauncey in 1943 to give a one-day SAT test to over 300,000 people across the country for help in officer selection. Chauncey's ability to pull off this logistical feat illustrated the potential for using the SAT to assess high school students nationwide.

Chauncey left Harvard in 1945 to create ETS, a company to manage the test and bring it to a national audience.

Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven

Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven explains how the founder of Honda was a driven individualist who hated the myth "that the industrial success of post-World War II Japan was rooted in the country's traditional values of consensus, sublimation of the individual, and worker harmony":

Honda left school at age 15 to seek work as an auto mechanic in Tokyo. His first job was hardly auspicious: For a year he cared for the infant baby of his boss's family. With the child in tow, he often wandered the garage, watching the mechanics and making suggestions. As Honda tinkered with engines in between diaper changes and bottle feedings, it became obvious that his strength wasn't in child care but rebuilding engines.

He was so good at it that he starting building engines for racing. He soon attempted a full-time stint as a professional race-car driver, but a crash suffered in a race nearly killed him and sent him back to work as a mechanic. A second crash soon after, in which he drove off a bridge with several geishas in the car (everyone survived), put a stop to a nightlife that, like his race-car driving, had veered out of control.

A newly focused and newly wedded Honda began working for a succession of mechanics in the mid-1930s, a period in which he focused largely on refining piston action to build a higher performance engine. When he formed his own company in 1937, Japanese militancy was at its height, and in 1938, Honda's company was forced to switch to building engines for the Imperial Navy's boats and planes. After Allied bombing leveled his factory near the end of the war, Honda showed that his mechanical genius extended to pursuits other than cars. For more than a year, he made a living brewing alcohol with a homemade still.

In 1948, he returned to his true love by starting a new company: Honda Motor Co. This time, he took on a partner, Takeo Fujisawa, to handle the back-office operations that Honda found so crushingly dull. They soon came up with the batabata, a motorized bicycle named after the sound the engine made.

Fascinating guy.

XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle

When a .50-caliber sniper rifle isn't enough, there's the new XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle:

For some long-range sniper missions, a .50 caliber (12.7mm) round just isn�t big enough. The Barrett company, which pioneered the development of the modern .50 caliber sniper rifle, has now built a 25mm sniper rifle (although shoulder cannon may be a more precise term), the XM109. Ten prototype weapons are being made available for testing this month. Designed to destroy light armor, the XM109 is a semi-automatic 25mm rifle that has a 17.6 inch long barrel and an overall length of 46 inches. It weighs in at 46 pounds and has a 5 round magazine. In comparison, the Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle in general use today has a 29 inch barrel, overall length of 57 inches, and weighs in at a mere 32 pounds, with a magazine capacity of 10 rounds.

Anyone up for dinosaur hunting?

Victor Davis Hanson on Bush Hatred on National Review Online

In Bush Hatred, Victor Davis Hanson tries to explain why the Left hates George W. Bush: southern conservatism, evangelical Christianity, a black-and-white worldview, and a wealthy man's disdain for elite culture. This is what caught my attention though:

Not long ago a Frenchman explained to me why he hates Bush, who "thinks linearly" and has no sense of the "problematique." Face it: We are now an information society, with a premium on talk, not action. To suggest that one need not be 100 percent certain — but perhaps only 60 percent certain — to act is deeply disturbing. And when you add lingo like "bring 'em on," the caricature that Bush belongs on the main street of Gunsmoke rather than in Sex in the City or The West Wing is only strengthened.

Is education good for growth?

In Marginal Revolution: Is education good for growth?, Tyler Cowen notes that "It has long been received wisdom that education spurs economic growth," then points to a skeptical take on the issue:

[T]here is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. [...] Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt's primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled — yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world's forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth. [...] The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn't accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

As he points out, "Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure." Anyone whose friends spent five years finishing their English Lit degrees knows that.

Judoka as Olympic Flag Carriers

I don't know why I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies last night, but I discovered something surprising — an amazing number of countries chose judoka for their flag carriers:

Georgia - Zurab ZVIADAURI (men's -90kg)
Gabon - Melanie ENGOANGUE (women's -78kg)
Indonesia - Krisna BAYU (men's -90kg)
Iraq - Hadir LAZAME (men's over 100kg)
Iran - Arash MIRESMAELI (men's -66kg) or/and Seyed Mahmoudreza MIRAN FASHANDI (men's over 100kg)
Spain - Isabel FERNANDEZ (women's -57kg)
Israel - Ariel ZEEVI (men's -100kg)
Kazakhstan - Askhat ZHITKEYEV (men's -100kg)
Canada - Nicolas GILL (men's -100kg)
Costa Rica - David FERNANDEZ (men's -60kg)
Great Britain - Kate HOWEY (women's -70kg)
Mongolia - Damdinsuren NYAMKHUU (men's -81kg)
Niger - Abdou ALASSANE DJI BO (men's -66kg)
Netherlands - Mark HUIZINGA (men's -90kg)
Hungary - Antal KOVACS (men's -100kg)
Uzbekistan - Abdullo TANGRIEV (over 100kg)
Portugal - Nuno DELGADO (men's -81kg)
Fiji - Naisiga RASOKISOKI (women's -78kg)

Steroids boost performance in just weeks

New Scientist recently produced a a study demonstrating that fairly low doses of anabolic steroids boost performance in just weeks:

The first rigorous study of the performance-enhancing effects of testosterone in young men was not carried out until 1996. Volunteers were given weekly injections of either 600 milligrams of testosterone enanthate or a placebo for 10 weeks (bodybuilders usually take much larger doses). Performance tests done at the end of this period showed the hormone had improved muscle size and strength in those doing strength training, and to a lesser extent in those who did not exercise.
[...]
In the latest study, Weatherby monitored the performance of 18 male amateur athletes over a six-week training regime. Nine were given weekly shots of testosterone enanthate at a dose of 3.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight for six weeks (equivalent to roughly half the dose of the 1996 trial), and nine were given a placebo.
[...]
The most unexpected finding was that the greatest increases in muscle size and power occurred just three weeks into the trial.

Net Publishing Made Profitable

Net Publishing Made Profitable explains "extreme publishing":

After 13 years of experimenting, veteran Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model — fast-turnaround e-books. [...] From the get-go, Engst has pioneered just about every revenue model on the Internet — ads, subscriptions, sponsorships and the now-ubiquitous tip jar — with mixed success. [...] But now Engst thinks he's finally cracked it. Since last fall, Engst has published a series of rapidly produced e-books using a system he calls "extreme publishing."

The nine books in the Take Control series range in topic from customizing Mac OS X to setting up a wireless network.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published "within moments of going to press" as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the books are timely. Print books, on the other hand, especially computer-oriented reference texts, are often out of date by the time they hit store shelves.

So far, Engst has sold about 20,000 copies in the Take Control series. The series' best seller, Upgrading to Panther by Joe Kissell, has sold about 6,300 copies, a respectable number for a niche publisher.

Someone needs to explain to Engst that "extreme" is extremely dated.

Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin

Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin reminds me how awful American Olympic coverage is:

Despite its contractual lock on Olympic footage, NBCOlympics.com is offering only highlights of selected events after they have been broadcast on one of the network's TV channels. U.S. customers of AT&T Wireless' mMode information service will also get video clips. By contrast, those online in the United Kingdom can watch live simulcast coverage from BBC TV's five video streams.

The Mystery of Fascism

David Ramsay Steele opens The Mystery of Fascism with these Cole Porter lyrics from 1934:

You're the top!
You're the Great Houdini!
You're the top!
You are Mussolini!

There was a time when everyone loved Mussolini:

Mussolini was showered with accolades from sundry quarters. Winston Churchill called him "the greatest living legislator." Cole Porter gave him a terrific plug in a hit song. Sigmund Freud sent him an autographed copy of one of his books, inscribed to "the Hero of Culture." The more taciturn Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his Fascist pageants.

Then he became the Mussolini we think of:

The rest of il Duce's career is now more familiar. He conquered Ethiopia, made a Pact of Steel with Germany, introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1938, came into the war as Hitler's very junior partner, tried to strike out on his own by invading the Balkans, had to be bailed out by Hitler, was driven back by the Allies, and then deposed by the Fascist Great Council, rescued from imprisonment by SS troops in one of the most brilliant commando operations of the war, installed as head of a new "Italian Social Republic," and killed by Communist partisans in April 1945.

Of course, Mussolini, famed right-wing fascist, started as a socialist agitator:

Soon after he arrived in Switzerland in 1902, 18 years old and looking for work, Benito Mussolini was starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx.

Following a spell of vagrancy, Mussolini found a job as a bricklayer and union organizer in the city of Lausanne. Quickly achieving fame as an agitator among the Italian migratory laborers, he was referred to by a local Italian-language newspaper as "the great duce [leader] of the Italian socialists."
[...]
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

With the arrival of the Great War, Mussolini switched to a pro-war position, enlisted, and was seriously wounded. After the war, he gathered former Marxists and ex-soldiers into his new Fascist movement, an effectively violent political group that marched on Rome to seize power — only to have the king "beg" them to take the reins.

Fascism is generally presented as evil, Communism as well-intentioned:

Intellectually, Fascists differed from Communists in that they had to a large extent thought out what they would do, and they then proceeded to do it, whereas Communists were like hypnotic subjects, doing one thing and rationalizing it in terms of a completely different and altogether impossible thing.

Fascists preached the accelerated development of a backward country. Communists continued to employ the Marxist rhetoric of world socialist revolution in the most advanced countries, but this was all a ritual incantation to consecrate their attempt to accelerate the development of a backward country. Fascists deliberately turned to nationalism as a potent myth. Communists defended Russian nationalism and imperialism while protesting that their sacred motherland was an internationalist workers' state. Fascists proclaimed the end of democracy. Communists abolished democracy and called their dictatorship democracy. Fascists argued that equality was impossible and hierarchy ineluctable. Communists imposed a new hierarchy, shot anyone who advocated actual equality, but never ceased to babble on about the equalitarian future they were "building". Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists evil-intentioned.

(Hat tip to Reason's Hit & Run.)

WSJ.com - Behind Aetna's Turnaround: Small Steps to Pare Cost of Care

WSJ.com - Behind Aetna's Turnaround: Small Steps to Pare Cost of Care:

When patients run up six-figure medical bills, health insurers shudder. A few years ago, Aetna Inc. was notorious for playing tough in such situations. It haggled with doctors and hospitals about discounts, while telling its clerks to see if some charges should be disallowed as medically unnecessary.

Aetna still keeps a close eye on costs, but it is trying to make allies out of former enemies. Aetna's chief medical officer, William Popik, cites a case last year when his department tracked down three hemophilia experts, seeking advice about treating a hemophiliac boy whose care was costing $500,000 a month. The three doctors spent hours reviewing the case. Then they recommended adjusting the boy's care so he wouldn't need such large doses of a blood factor meant to help clotting.

The boy's own physician embraced the changes. Within months, treatment costs dropped 75% and the child's health improved, Aetna says.

Such expert coaching on tough, costly cases is becoming an important part of Aetna's strategic plan. Health insurers have been berated in recent years for alleged interference by non-health professionals in treatment decisions. But Aetna officials believe that by turning to medical experts, they can save costs and improve care simultaneously. The company has impressed Wall Street analysts by recovering from a period of operating losses, while establishing one of the slowest rates of medical-cost increases in its industry.

Aetna owes a lot to its new information systems:

The insurer recently completed an overhaul of its computer systems, which had become snarled by a series of rapid-fire acquisitions in the 1990s, including the $8 billion purchase of U.S. Healthcare Inc. in 1996.

A few years ago, Aetna's information systems were a messy patchwork of technologies. Aetna at times paid bills of people who were no longer customers or paid the same claim twice. Because Aetna had incomplete information about its medical costs, company officials say, it unwittingly underpriced its premiums, leading to losses and embarrassingly incorrect financial projections.

Aetna President Ronald Williams, who joined the company in 2001, ordered a $20 million revamp of data systems. What emerged was the "Executive Management Information System," which Joshua Raskin, a health-care analyst at Lehman Brothers, last year called "the single largest driver of the Aetna turnaround." That system, known as EMIS, helped Aetna identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts.

Frankly, insurance is all about data. You'd think all insurance companies would stay on top of their information systems.

Amid Chaos in Iraq, Tiny Security Firm Found Opportunity

Amid Chaos in Iraq, Tiny Security Firm Found Opportunity tells a story about making money admidst the chaos of war:

In July last year, Scott Custer and Michael Battles, two former Army Rangers in their mid-30s, found themselves in charge of a $16 million contract to guard Baghdad's airport. Barely funded with credit cards and money borrowed from a friend, their nine-month-old company had neither guns, accountants nor guards. It had to hire Nepalese Gurkhas to staff the project. Since then, the company has squabbled with corporate clients and Pentagon auditors. Four employees have been killed

Yes, their names are Custer and Battles, and they named their company Custer Battles:

The company that became Custer Battles could hardly have sprung from shallower roots. In late 2002, it was still in search of a name. Its co-founders considered Azimuth Partners, after the name of a compass point, but instead chose to name the company after themselves. Mr. Custer, 35, a distant relation of the ill-fated Gen. George Custer, concedes they draw giggles in Iraq, where it's often noted that Custer was defeated by the locals. "We don't really have a comeback," he says.

With the company's payroll on credit cards, Mr. Battles borrowed $10,000 for an exploratory trip to Iraq. Custer Battles won a contract to provide security for the Baghdad airport:

Custer Battles's bid was cheaper, but more important, it promised to have 138 guards on the ground within two weeks, faster than the others.

"We got that contract because we were young and dumb and didn't know better," says Mr. Custer, a former Army captain who studied at Oxford and Georgetown universities. "Anyone with experience would have said they'd be there in eight weeks."

Frank Hatfield, the senior U.S. airport official in Iraq at the time, says speed — not cost — was the deciding factor. All he wanted, he says, was an assurance Custer Battles could handle the contract.

Custer Battles lacked more than experience. No banks would lend it money. In the end, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority lent it $2 million in $100 bills that Mr. Battles stuffed into a duffel bag and personally deposited in a bank in Lebanon.

They had only two weeks to set up the project. In mid-July last year, new hires mustered in Jordan and had to be convoyed across the desert. The company had to buy all its equipment from the U.S. with only three full-time employees in its Virginia office to help.

It found half of the guards it needed in Nepal, a common source of private security guards, and the rest in the U.S., mostly ex-soldiers hired through word of mouth. Mr. Custer flew in an accountant from Deloitte & Touche LLP, who immediately bought a safe.

The airport facilities were littered with broken glass and human excrement. Expecting to stay indefinitely, Custer Battles rehabbed the offices with carpet and wallpaper, installed showers in the bathrooms and added a wireless Internet connection. A short distance away, the company built a trailer park to house employees, complete with swimming pool and pool table. This was done partly to demonstrate Custer Battles's seriousness to potential clients.

They got the men in place two days early but had to sacrifice basic logistics, such as payroll systems. Mr. Custer says the company didn't figure out how to pay people until well into the next month.

Less than 10 miles from the city center, Baghdad International Airport quickly emerged as perhaps the safest and best-placed real estate in Iraq. The company took full advantage. Custer Battles built kennels for 18 bomb-sniffing dogs beside the camp and has parlayed the animals into $16 million in Army contracts. It also used a terminal to house 40 Filipinos brought in to provide catering services.

Incidentally, "salaries can run as high as $20,000 a month for top ex-soldiers" in Iraq. "Most of the guards hired by Custer Battles came from a Kurdish subcontractor who paid its employees less than $200 a month."

WSJ.com - An Olympian Task: Teaching Humans To Swim Like Fish

WSJ.com - An Olympian Task: Teaching Humans To Swim Like Fish describes how supercomputers are being used to analyze swimming mechanics:

Mr. Mark donated the Rose and Krayzelburg scans, and a set of videos from USA Swimming's flume in Colorado Springs. One showed Ms. Coughlin dolphin-kicking. When he saw it, Prof. Mittal knew she was the swimmer he had to use.

"She swam straight, maintaining an even depth," he says. "All fish do this, passing a wave through their bodies from head to tail. This was it — the natural-selection stroke, the best way to swim."

Lacking a scan of Ms. Coughlin, Prof. Mittal assigned a student to superimpose her videoed body, frame by frame, onto the scan of Ms. Rose. He then asked James Hahn, director of GWU's Institute for Computer Graphics, to essentially insert a skeleton, enabling the scan to move. The output is a goggled, silver phantom, dolphining across a black screen, trailing a thin red line undulating across a graph — sort of like the markings on an electrocardiogram.

Three-dimensional, observable from all angles, this creature is Prof. Mittal's raw material. All he has to add next is water. Pushing the limits of his field-computational fluid dynamics, he plans to factor in every swirl and counterswirl produced by an ever-changing sequence of motions known as a single stroke. To account for every eddy within every eddy, he will break each stroke into 20,000 units and perform 200 million calculations on every one.

A Slice of Time and Space

Years ago, when digital video — or affordable digital video — was new, I thought it would be fun to turn live-action video into an animated cartoon. A Slice of Time and Space explains why that's not so easy:

Though others have turned a still image into a cartoon, turning a video into a cartoon is more challenging. 'Some people say it's easy,' said Cohen. 'They use the technique for still images and apply it frame-by-frame. The problem is, if you do this, the images jump all over the place. The background shakes around a lot, and each frame looks like a different drawing. We want to make the video look like a normal cartoon where the motion is smooth.'

Of course, this is why traditional animated characters don't have any shading; the shading would crawl around from frame to frame.

How does Cohen's technique work?

"We use a method called segmentation. We extend 2D segmentation to 3D. This creates shapes inside the video. It's as if you took a stack of photographs and then cut them with a knife as though they were a solid chunk of color," said Cohen.

Pixels in a video can be thought of as lying in six dimensional space - two image axes, time, and three color components. Pixels close to each other in this "space" form denser regions. The program clusters the pixels into a 3D shape, which can then be 'sliced' as though you were taking a slice of time and space.
[...]
To define more meaningful regions, the user outlines the shapes on keyframes in the video, such as the pants on the girl swinging. He does this on several keyframes. "We rely on the user to circle things like the girl's pants. There's different shading on the pants, and some stripes. We can't group them automatically," said Cohen.

The system can then interpolate between the keyframes, maintaining smooth trajectories along the time dimension, without jerky transitions or the need to draw on each frame.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

The View From Out There

The View From Out There reviews History Lessons, a book composed of excerpts on America from other countries' history textbooks:

According to Canadian texts (six are cited), the United States planned to conquer and annex Canada during the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and at various points in between. During the Cold War, the United States repeatedly bullied Canada into supporting its aggressive military policies. Canadian officials hoped that NATO would evolve into a North Atlantic community that would act as a counterweight to U.S. influence in Canada, but in vain: Canadian governments had to toe the U.S. line or suffer humiliation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, concerned that Kennedy's belligerence might lead to a nuclear war, waited three days before announcing that Canadian forces had gone on the alert. In the next election, the Americans used their influence to topple the truculent prime minister. Diefenbaker's successor, Lester Pearson, aligned Canada more closely with the United States, but in 1965 he annoyed Lyndon Johnson by calling for a bombing pause and a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. In a meeting after the speech, Johnson grabbed Pearson by the lapels and shouted, 'You pissed on my rug.'

Thus have Canadian texts immortalized the Johnson vernacular.

The Bush vision for term two

In the Bush vision for term two, Tyler Cowen has the following recommendations for bringing about an 'ownership society':

1. Eliminate all farm subsidies, tariffs, quotas and price supports.
2. Tell Western Europe it is paying for its own defense from now on.
3. Admit that the Medicare drug prescription bill was a mistake. Repeal it, and consider a revenue-neutral benefit that does not discriminate against prescription drugs. Introduce means-testing for Medicare to stop that program from bankrupting us. I would rather cut this benefit than repeal the tax cuts [tax shifts, correctly, though spending discipline could turn them into real tax cuts.] The long-run benefits of greater capital accumulation remain significant.
4. Negotiate bilateral free trade agreements as rapidly as possible. Start with Japan, the second largest economy in the world.
5. Strengthen America's commitment to science. This will have implications for educational policy, immigration policy, and regulatory policy. Don't restrict stem cell research. Hope that science comes up with affordable and politically sustainable solutions for global warming and clean energy independence. You might have libertarian objections to science subsidies, but the realistic alternative today is more government intervention.
6. Strengthen early warning systems against infectious diseases. Increase research into cures, vaccines, immunity, and the like. We don't want the world to lose fifty million people to avian flu or some other malady.
7. Take in more immigrants, but demand higher levels of skills and education. At the very least, take in any revenue-positive immigrant.
8. Abolish the Department of Education.
9. Abolish the Department of Energy.
10. Repeal all corporate welfare.
11. Repeal the corporate income tax. Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. Admittedly these are "ifs," depending on fiscal considerations.
12. Get on TV and tell the nation that a free economy is a critical source of our strength. Tell them you mean it, and then mean it. Economic growth is the greatest long-run gift we can give to the world.

WSJ.com - In Unorthodox Rift, Exiled Church Splits On Rejoining Russia

WSJ.com - In Unorthodox Rift, Exiled Church Splits On Rejoining Russia explains how the Russian Orthodox church has split into two churches that may remerge:

It all goes back to 1054, when Orthodoxy and Catholicism split, creating separate power centers in Constantinople and Rome. The sacking of Constantinople, from which Greek Orthodoxy eventually sprang, in 1453 led Moscow to assert itself as the 'Third Rome.' Over time, the Russian church and state grew closer, especially after the Romanovs, the royal family, consolidated their power in the 1600s.

When the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in 1917, they stripped the Moscow Patriarchate of its property, dynamited its churches and slaughtered the royal family. The leader of the Moscow Patriarchate died in jail. His successor, Metropolitan Sergius, won his freedom in 1927 by pledging allegiance to the Soviets.

Surviving Russian aristocrats and clergy formed the Church Abroad in what was then Yugoslavia to preserve the religion of the czars until Russians were free to worship at home again. A southern regiment in the czar's army entrusted to the exiled church the banners, which feature a two-headed imperial eagle, the likeness of Saint George the dragon-slayer and an "N" for Czar Nicholas I. The Church Abroad, which claims about 100,000 members world-wide and has parishes in many parts of the U.S., moved its headquarters to New York in 1950. (A separate offshoot of Russian Orthodoxy, known as the Orthodox Church in America, cut its ties with Moscow in the 1970s. Its 750,000 members conduct services in English and stress their American identity. Reunification isn't an issue for them, having long ago made peace with the Moscow Patriarchate.)

For generations, adherents of the Church Abroad tried to recreate the glorious days of the Romanovs. They used their royal titles, raised their children to read Pushkin in the original Russian and threw formal balls at ritzy New York hotels. Their church holds services mostly in Old Church Slavonic, an older form of Russian. Feast-day ceremonies last upward of five hours. Only a few members of the church ever talked about reuniting with Moscow.

Last year, Mr. Putin intervened, hoping to bring back together the two branches of Russian Orthodoxy in an effort to restore a national identity to a country ripped apart by the Soviet Union's collapse.

Interrogation Special Focus Team

The Interrogation Special Focus Team questionaire asks military interrogators a number of questions as "part of an inquiry convened by the Secretary of Defense for the purpose of identifying all interrogation techniques employed in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Joint Special Operations in USCENTCOM area of responsibility, Iraq Survey Group operations, and Guantanamo Bay detention operations." It asks interrogators if they used any of the following techniques:

Direct
Incentive/Removal of Incentive
Emotional Love
Emotional Hate
Fear Up Harsh
Fear Up Mild
Fear Down
Pride and Ego Up
Pride and Ego Down
Futility
We Know All
Establish Your Identity
Repetition
File and Dossier
Mutt And Jeff
Rapid Fire
Silence
Change of Scene Up
Change of Scene Down
Dietary Manipulation
Environmental Manipulation
Sleep Adjustment
False Flag
Isolation
Presence of Military Working
Dog
Sleep Management
Yelling, Loud Music, and Light
Control
Deception
Stress Positions
20-hour interrogations
Use of Hood or Blackout
Goggles
Removal of Comfort Items
Forced Grooming
Mild Physical Contact
Opposite Sex Interrogators

How many of those would make good band names?

Yahoo! News - Allergy Vaccine Could Hit Market Soon -Researcher

From Yahoo! News - Allergy Vaccine Could Hit Market Soon -Researcher:

Professor Paul Van Cauwenberge, who coordinates a European allergy and asthma research project, said researchers at the Medical University of Vienna have been able to protect a trial group of 124 people against the effects of birch pollen allergy.

They were injected with a genetically modified version of the pollen.
[...]
"They are using a technique which allows mass production. If these results are confirmed on a larger scale ... a vaccine could hit the market relatively soon, within about two years," Van Cauwenberghe said.

The Onion

I haven't been keeping up with The Onion lately. Anyway, I swung by, and I really enjoyed Goth Kid Builds
Scary-Ass Birdhouse. I also enjoyed the idea behind CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog. Is it wrong to nervously laugh at their 1976 headline: Cambodia to Switch to Skull-Based Economy?

Girl Meets Boy, at 60 Miles an Hour (washingtonpost.com)

Girl Meets Boy, at 60 Miles an Hour explains how "Young women are crashing cars — and dying in cars — at significantly higher rates than a decade ago":

They're driving, in other words, like guys.

Federal highway officials are so alarmed by this that they put it near the top of a recent press release, citing among 15- to- 20-year-olds a 42 percent increase in young female driver fatalities from 1992 to 2002 (the rate for young males rose 15 percent). State Farm Insurance, a leading auto insurer, has monitored the trend and adjusted its rates for girls accordingly: from 61 percent less than boys' rates in 1985, to 40 percent less today.
[...]
Wright says the agency is going to have to expand its research because although teenage boys still crash more often than girls, the gap is narrowing. Sixteen-year-old female drivers, for example, were involved nationally in 175 car crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers in 2000, up from 160 crashes in 1990. Boys' involvement declined over the same period, from 216 to 210. There are about as many female as male licensed drivers under 21: 6 million.

Read the whole article for some accounts of brazen, unapologetic stupidity.

Buyer's Remorse

In Buyer's Remorse, Daniel Akst examines Americans' mixed feelings about wealth:

There are two things at which Americans have always excelled: One is generating almost unimaginable material wealth, and the other is feeling bad about it.

Some stats:

When Princeton University researchers asked working Americans about these matters a decade ago, 89 percent of those surveyed agreed that �our society is much too materialistic,� and 74 percent said that materialism is a serious social problem.

I remember trying to read an actual Horatio Alger "rags to riches" story, where the protagonist rises through his own pluck, luck, and integrity. It was awful. Anyway, there's a lot I didn't know about Alger:

When accusations of �unnatural� acts with teenage boys — acts he did not deny — forced him from his pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, the erstwhile Unitarian minister decamped for New York City, where he became a professional writer. It was in venal New York that he made his name with the kind of stories we associate with him to this day: tales of unschooled but goodhearted lads whose spunk, industry, and yes, good looks, win them material success, with the help of a little luck and their older male mentors. Alger�s hackneyed parables are tales of the American dream, itself an accumulation of hopes that has always had a strongly materialistic component. The books themselves are now ignored, but their central fable has become part of our heritage. �Alger is to America,� wrote the novelist Nathanael West, �what Homer was to the Greeks.�

How To Be Idle

How To Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson, examines "the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible":

I wonder if that hard-working American rationalist and agent of industry Benjamin Franklin knew how much misery he would cause in the world when, back in 1757, high on puritanical zeal, he popularised and promoted the trite and patently untrue aphorism 'early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise'?

A bit of history:

The English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid-18th century, work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did "jobs", but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown.

Take the weavers. Before the invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: "So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased," he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition Of The Working Class In England. "They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed."

Thompson writes: "The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness." A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did "sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening". Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging. Thompson adds as an aside: "The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] —today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a 'natural' human work-rhythm."

One Giant Lift for Mankind

In One Giant Lift for Mankind, Josh Levin describes "the race for the 1,000-pound bench press":

For years, the bench press world record crept up slowly and steadily. In the 1950s, Canadian Doug Hepburn became the first man to bench 400, 450, and 500 pounds. In 1957, Hepburn told Muscle Power magazine that a 600-pound bench press was possible, but it wasn't until 1967 that Pat Casey cracked that barrier. Ted Arcidi broke 700 in 1985, and it took another 17 years until Ryan Kennelly benched 800 pounds in 2002. Now, just two years later, 10 men have benched 800, and a couple are closing in on 1,000. So, why have records that stood up to the strongest men in the world for 50 years crumbled in the last two?

A super-shirt, mostly. In 1983, a college student and powerlifter named John Inzer started making shirts that supported benchers' shoulders and deltoids. Word spread that the bench shirt not only prevented injuries but actually helped bounce the weight off your chest. The terminology on Inzer's web site reeks of pseudoscience — the top-of-the-line Inzer Phenom shirt "features the EVS (Escape Velocity System) built inside" — but the shirt's effect is undeniable. As the record for the shirted bench press shot up to 965 pounds, the unshirted or "raw" mark has stayed at an earthly 713 pounds. (Scot Mendelson has that record.) Nowadays, every top bench-presser uses the shirt for safety and power. "The whole raw thing, you're just asking for trouble if you're going to be dealing with any kind of weight," says Ryan Kennelly. "If you rip your pec, you rip your rotator cuff, you're out of there. Thank God for bench shirts."

The bench shirt — which comes in denim or polyester — has arms that jut out zombielike, perpendicular to the chest. The position is so awkward and the fit so tight that lifters typically need help swaddling themselves. As the bar starts to press the weightlifter's arms down, a percentage of the load goes to deforming the shirt. High-end shirts are so taut that for the bar to even reach a bencher's chest, the fabric has to be compressed with incredible force. (At one meet, Rychlak had to abandon an 890-pound lift because it wasn't heavy enough to force the weight down to his pecs.) When the bencher starts to push the bar back up, the shirt acts like a spring. As the material snaps back to its original, zombie-arm orientation, the lifter's elbows get a bit of extra help moving the weight back into the air.

Inzer says the bench shirt "brings out the deeper strength of a lifter." Powerlifting traditionalists and scientists think the opposite.

As the record for the shirted bench press shot up to 965 pounds, the unshirted or "raw" mark has stayed at an earthly 713 pounds. I feel so very, very weak.

Olympic Wrestling Timeline

TheMat.com's Olympic Wrestling Timeline offers some interesting trivia:

1896 - Athens, Greece
The first modern Olympics was held in Athens, Greece, home of the ancient Olympics. Wrestling, one of the featured sports of the ancient Games, was included in the program of the first modern Olympics. The style was Greco-Roman, and just one weight class was contested, heavyweight. Karl Schumann of Germany became the first Olympic wrestling gold medalist. No U.S. wrestlers participated in the Athens Games.

1900 - Paris, France
Wrestling was not included in the program at the 1900 Olympics, the only time during the modern Games that wrestling was not a featured sport.

1904 - St. Louis, Mo.
The first of the modern Olympic Games held in the United States featured freestyle wrestling, a style that was popular in the United States. The U.S. was the only nation entered in wrestling and scored a clean sweep of all the wrestling medals, with seven golds, seven silvers and seven bronzes.

1906 - Athens, Greece
Athens became the first city to host more than one modern Olympic Games. Greco-Roman wrestling, more popular than freestyle in Europe, was the featured style, and freestyle was not included. Three Greco-Roman champions were crowned, and the United States did not participate in wrestling event.

1908 - London, England
The London Olympics featured both of the international wrestling styles for the first time, freestyle and Greco-Roman. The United States dominated the freestyle light weights, with George Mehnert claiming the 119-pound title and George Dole capturing the 132.5-pound event. For Mehnert, it was a second career Olympic title. It would be another 84 years before an American wrestler would win a second Olympic gold medal, when John Smith and Bruce Baumgartner claimed second titles in Barcelona. Mehnert was a club wrestler from Newark, New Jersey, while Dole, who competed at Yale, helped establish the tradition of college wrestlers moving on to Olympic glory.

Greco-Roman was dominated by European nations, and the United States did not participate.

1912 - Stockholm, Sweden
Greco-Roman, the favored style of the Scandinavian nations, was the only wrestling event in Stockholm, and the gold medals went to athletes from either Finland or Sweden. The United States entered athletes, but did not medal.

Flag Relay (washingtonpost.com)

Flag Relay describes how globalism has spread to athletics:

Consider the case of Alistair Cragg. The 5,000-meter runner was born in South Africa. He ran track at the University of Arkansas. So which nation will he represent at the Olympics in Athens beginning Aug. 13? South Africa? No. The United States? No. Cragg will be running for...Ireland.

Or consider boxer Andre Berto. Born in Florida, Berto hoped to fight for the United States in the 2004 Olympics, but he was disqualified from the U.S. team for fouling an opponent in a key bout. Now he's fighting for Haiti.

Then there's Malachi Davis. Born in Sacramento, he ran the 400 meters for UCLA. In Athens, he'll be representing Britain, a nation he had never set foot in until this summer.

This country-jumping is possible because Olympic rules permit each nation to decide who is eligible for its team. Thus, Ireland could rule that Cragg qualifies for dual citizenship because his grandparents were born in Ireland. Haiti embraced Berto because his parents were Haitian. And Britain issued Davis a passport because his mother was born in London. Needless to say, the sluggish bureaucracy of citizenship is frequently streamlined for Olympians.

Meanwhile, Greece has granted summary dual citizenship to the 22 foreign baseball players of Greek heritage while simultaneously exempting them from Greek military service. Greece also recruited a softball team composed almost entirely of Americans of Greek heritage.

Wired - Lighter-Than-Air Force

Lighter-Than-Air Force describes how the Department of Defense plans to transport its 1,800-person "units of action" in the near future:

The scheme, code-named Walrus, is just getting off the ground. But the agency is clear about what it wants: a prototype 'tri-phibian' (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008. 'The program will not repackage 1930s technology or upscale the more limited commercial dirigibles of today,' Darpa promised in its proposal. The Walrus will rely on new technologies, like static ion propulsion, says Preston Carter, the program manager.

Olympics: Pankration

Olympics: Pankration opens with these ancient words:

The pankratiasts, my boy, practice a dangerous brand of wrestling. They have to endure black eyes ... and learn holds by which one who has fallen can still win, and they must be skillful in various ways of strangulation. They bend ankles and twist arms and throw punches and jump on their opponents.
- Philostratos, On Gymnastics, second to third century A.D.

I love the ancient legends:

Among the most famous pankratiasts was Polydamas, victor in the 93rd Olympiad in 408 B.C. Little is known about his Olympic victory, his family, his background or his physical appearance, other than his statue was notably tall. But he was renowned for his feats.

Polydamas once killed a lion with his bare hands. He once strode into a herd of cattle and, according to author Pausanias, "seized the biggest and fiercest bull by one of its hind feet, holding fast the hoof in spite of the bull's leaps and struggles, until at last it put forth all its strength and escaped, leaving the hoof in the grasp of Polydamas." He also reportedly stopped antiquity's version of a speeding locomotive, a fast-moving chariot, merely by reaching out to grab it.

Ultimately, Polydamas' strength contributed to his demise. One summer, he and friends were relaxing in a cave when the roof began to crumble. Believing he could use his strength to support the cave, he held his hands up to the ceiling. His friends ran to safety, but Polydamas was killed.

The Victorian-era strongman, Eugen Sandow, has a similar feat-of-strength story for how he died: his family and friends claimed he'd burst a blood vessel lifting a motor-car out of a ditch in the rain. More likely, he died of complications from syphilis.

Company Says It Clones Copy Cats

You see, they're copy cats. Get it? From Company Says It Clones Copy Cats:

Genetic Savings & Clone promises to clone anyone's pet — for $50,000 or so — and started with chief executive officer Lou Hawthorne's own pet cat.

The two kittens, Tabouli and Baba Ganoush, were born to separate surrogate mothers in June, the company said.
[...]
The company used a new method called chromatin transfer, which had been perfected by cloning expert James Robl and colleagues at Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Hematech LLC. Hematech is using the method to clone cattle that produce human antibodies in their milk.

The traditional nuclear transfer method of cloning involves taking the nucleus from a cell of the animal to be cloned, putting it into an egg cell with its own nucleus removed, and then triggering this egg into growing as if it had been fertilized.

It is not efficient — most eggs die — and many animals are born deformed.

Chromatin transfer aims to produce a cloned embryo that more closely resembles a normal embryo.

It involves dissolving the outside of the nucleus of the cell to be cloned and removing certain regulatory proteins from the chromosomes, which carry the genes, and the proteins around the chromosomes.

This entire cell with its permeable nucleus is fused to an egg cell to create the clone.

Genetic Savings & Clone said it has tried the method to duplicate Tahini, a 1-year-old female Bengal cat belonging to Hawthrone. Bengals are specially bred crosses of Asian Leopard Cats and domestic cats.

Eating Lots of Carbs May Raise Cancer Risk

Eating Lots of Carbs May Raise Cancer Risk reports on a recent Mexican study linking breast cancer to carb consumption:

Scientists think carbs may increase cancer risk by rapidly raising sugar in the blood, which prompts a surge of insulin to be secreted. This causes cells to divide and leads to higher levels of estrogen in the blood, both of which can encourage cancer.

A study earlier this year suggested that high-carb diets modestly raised the risk of colon cancer. Little research has been done on their effect on breast cancer, and results have been mixed. One study last year found greater risk among young women who ate a lot of sweets, especially sodas and desserts.

For this study, researchers enrolled 475 women newly diagnosed with breast cancer and a comparison group of 1,391 healthy women in Mexico City who were matched for age, weight, childbirth trends and other factors that affect the odds of getting the disease.

Women filled out a lengthy food questionnaire developed by Willett and widely used in nutrition studies, and were divided into four categories based on how much of their total calories came from carbohydrates.

Those in the top category — who got 62 percent or more of their calories from carbs — were 2.22 times more likely to have breast cancer than those in the lowest category, whose carb intake was 52 percent or less of their diet.

Transportation Futuristics

What is Transportation Futuristics?:

Many of us are familiar with covers from Popular Science that depict commuters buzzing around in tiny aircraft and landing on rooftops, or fanciful drawings of vehicles that run on roads, float on water and also take to the air. The basic problem many of us face each day — how to get from Point A to Point B in the least amount of time with the least amount of trouble — has inspired many to dream of marvelous ways to solve that problem.

(Hat tip to Defense Tech.)

Learning Japanese, Once About Resumes, Is Now About Cool

Learning Japanese, Once About Resumes, Is Now About Cool describes the "new" Japanese-language student (not so new in So Cal, by the way, where animé obsession goes back more than a decade):

When Yuki Sasaki began working in the Japanese-language program at the University of Georgia in 1995, most students were international business majors interested in studying things like polite Japanese expressions and the ins and outs of Japanese business-card exchange.

Nine years later, Ms. Sasaki says her students are a different sort. They ask for help in translating Japanese pop-song lyrics and talk excitedly about the Japanese cartoon character Card Captor Sakura. And they blurt out colloquial Japanese expressions, like baka! (stupid), that they have learned from comics.

'It's amazing how you can see the changes happening right before your eyes,' Ms. Sasaki says. Japanese pop culture, she says, 'is their passion.'

Where's the Shining Armor?

Where's the Shining Armor? explains how new technology aims to better protect soldiers and vehicles in Iraq:

'What's been highlighted in Iraq is how do you provide protection to people riding in wheeled vehicles,' says Bruce Fink, chief of the materials division of the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). 'Historically, we have not put a lot of effort into trying to protect people in wheeled vehicles because they weren't supposed to be in areas where they are under direct fire. But, unfortunately, that's the situation we're in — where we're getting a lot of direct fire at wheeled vehicles.'

The already well-armored Bradley fighting vehicle is getting reactive armor — explosives mounted on the outside of the vehicle to disrupt incoming shaped-charge explosions:

Indeed, the army lists both body armor and wheeled vehicle protection among its top 10 capability gaps. Helping to bridge that gap is a new type of add-on reactive armor jointly developed by Rafael Armament Development Authority in Israel and the General Dynamics' Armament and Technical Products unit in Burlington,Vt. Reactive armor is being added to tracked Bradley fighting vehicles as a counter to RPGs after its successful — and secret — use by Israeli defense forces for many years. According to a spokeperson for General Dynamics, reactive armor consists of 105 tiles that attach to the sides, turret and front of each Bradley. The tiles, which look like small boxes, contain a special explosive charge that detonates when hit by a missile or rocket with a shaped-charge warhead. The resulting explosion disrupts the incoming, armor-penetrating gas jet produced by a RPG, for example, so the Bradley remains unharmed. Upgrading Bradley fighting vehicles with reactive armor is a process that will continue for some time. Rafael and General Dynamics will produce 80 kits for the U.S. Army this fall in a deal worth $23.5 million and another 60 kits for $17 million by July of 2005.

For whatever reason, I find the idea of spray-on truck-bed liner as armor fascinating:

Humvees and Stryker vehicles, however, cannot support the added weight of reactive armor. Just adding steel plating to Humvees places added strain on suspension and drivetrain systems not designed with armor in mind, putting those vehicles out of service more frequently than expected. The solution may be spray-on polymer armor now being developed by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR). The spray-on armor is similar to a polymer commonly used as a spray-on truck bed liner. It's made from either polyurethane, polyurea or a mixture of the two. When applied to steel, the polymer spreads out the shock of an explosion and helps prevent impacted material from shattering. In tests, a 500-pound bomb detonated near two trailers obliterated the unarmored trailer but only buckled the walls of the trailer whose walls were coated with the rubbery polymer.

The spray-on polymer is easy to apply and only costs ~$10k per vehicle — but it's quite an insulator, and that could be a problem for a vehicle in the desert.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Polystyrene homes planned for Afghans

As Polystyrene homes planned for Afghans explains, the same material used in disposable coffee cups could make cheap, well-insulated, earthquake-resistant homes for Afghanis:

Polystyrene foam is a great insulator. It keeps cool things cool, and hot things hot. And it is also resistant to moisture, mould and mildew.

Mr Haddock uses the foam to make insulated building panels, which he says can endure extreme conditions.

We built our first house in 1984," he said. "It was a 2,000 square foot house in Alaska, where we have the highest wind loads, the most earthquakes, and the heaviest snow loads.

"That house, I stayed in it the last two weeks, with my daughter. It's performing perfectly, no problems with it, and we do have buildings all over the world, pretty much, and it sounds like we may be going to a lot of other places."

The Federation of American Scientists wants to export Mr Haddock's method to Afghanistan.

Of course, no one in Afghanistan currently produces polystyrene, but they do in nearby Pakistan.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Telegraph | News | Fathers 'are too competitive to be playmates'

I can see this happening. From Fathers 'are too competitive to be playmates':

Children rate their fathers as among their least popular playmates because they are too competitive, according to research among more than 1,000 youngsters.

They 'played to win', lacked imagination or were simply at a loss as to how to play games, said the Children's Play Council, which commissioned the survey with the Children's Society.

From my recollection, older brothers are ideal — when they're not in a tormenting mood.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Sorcerers Nabbed with 50 Bodies, 20 Skulls

Hey, who are we to judge another culture's religion? From Sorcerers Nabbed with 50 Bodies, 20 Skulls:

Nigerian police have arrested 30 witch-doctors in a raid on fetish shrines in southeast Anambra state where over 50 decomposing bodies and 20 human skulls were discovered, a police spokesman said Thursday.

The heads, genitals and other vital parts of some of the bodies, found in a teak forest in Okija village, had been severed, a sign they may have been killed for ritual.

"We saw more than 50 bodies in various coffins. There were several skulls, some of them really fresh," Anambra police spokesman Kolapo Shofoluwe told Reuters by telephone.

Ritual killing is common in some parts of Nigeria where many people believe they can become instant millionaires by using human organs to make potent charms. Many Nigerians mix traditional religions with Christianity or Islam.

Police said preliminary investigations showed that the people died after the sorcerers engaged them in an animist ritual.

As part of the ritual, the victims pledged their property, including bank accounts, to a deity upon their death, the officer said. Their relations were made to believe they would also die if they refused to give up the property.

"We are looking beyond the deity," Shofoluwe said, adding that at least 20 shrines were raided.

"The priests may have killed the people for ritual, or to obtain their property by false pretence or they may have been running a human parts market," he said.

Shofoluwe quoted a villager who had tipped police off, as saying the sorcerers ate the flesh of some of their victims.

Local media reported Thursday that the witch-doctors enjoyed the patronage of rich businessmen and influential politicians in eastern Nigeria.

"I am sure our investigation will reveal a lot of things in the next two or three weeks," said Shofoluwe, who said he did not know the identity of the sorcerers' patrons.

I'm sure this all goes back to Western Imperialism. Somehow.

Punk at a Moment's Notice

Punk at a Moment's Notice explains guerrilla gigging:

The lifeblood of a resurgent London music scene, guerrilla gigs came to prominence when one of the capital's hottest new acts, The Others, last month commandeered two London Underground carriages to perform an impromptu set for 200 fans.

While better-established bands might have needed several months and a costly marketing campaign to pull it off, The Others summoned the crowd in just a few hours, with a cryptic message to the band's Web forum members to meet at a local pub.

Once assembled, fans used SMS messages to tip off friends across town before moving to a nearby tube station to pack an eastbound train for a furious 30-minute set — belted out using a megaphone while onlookers crowd-surfed in transit.

The Others are proud that they know their fans:

"We actually know our fans," The Others vocalist Dominic Masters told BBC Radio 1 recently, after scrambling users of his message board to a riotous, unauthorized performance in the national broadcaster's reception area.

"On our website, we've built this affiliation where they've got my telephone number on every posting. I've got about 500 kids' names who I talk to, and there are about 1,000 with their e-mail addresses on the website."

I'm afraid though that The Others, like all rising punk bands, are about to find out that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. As it grows, it changes:

Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

As Clay Shirky points out, a psychologist named Bion long ago recognized three patterns in group interactions — and you see all three of these patterns in any musical subculture:

• The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." [...] You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well.


• The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.


• The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
  
  Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.

I only like old Others.

At-Home Workouts Move From TV to Computer

Fitness gurus are starting to provide interactive workout videos over the Net. From At-Home Workouts Move From TV to Computer:

Thanks to the proliferation of broadband and advances in Internet video technology, a number of companies are starting to offer online fitness classes with the aim of providing exercisers with instant variety — and, sometimes, an interactive experience.

The Yoga Learning Center, where Ms. Hitchcock takes her classes, offers about 50 online video and audio yoga practices and meditations, double the amount it launched with in October 2003. Customers pay $9.95 a month for unlimited access. The center is adding at least one new class each month and, by next year, plans to expand into Pilates.

Meanwhile, New York Yoga, which has offered live, online yoga classes from its New York studios since March 2001, expanded into prerecorded streaming-video classes in December. The site now offers 60 live classes throughout the week and 21 prerecorded sessions. Joining the online studio starts at $7.95 a month.

Beyond yoga, a new site called Daily Fitness is set to launch later this summer with six streaming video classes, including kickboxing, step aerobics and belly dancing. The site will also offer personal training and nutrition sessions, via video teleconference. A base membership is expected to cost about $14.95 a month and training sessions around $35 to $40 an hour.

The Real Olympics

I recently managed to stumble upon PBS's The Real Olympics:

No event in the ancient world can be compared to the Olympic Games, held every four years and without interruption for nearly 12 centuries. The games drew tens of thousands of people from Greek colonies along the length of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea when Greek culture and influence were at their height.
[...]
The games were almost 800 years old when Jesus Christ was born, and it took a special Christian edict to stop them, four centuries after his death. Abandoned and long forgotten, they would return in the modern age as the inspiration for the most prestigious sport event on earth.

The first episode — which I didn't catch in full — "reveals how the ancient games have been appropriated and reinvented in the modern era by ideologues of all stripes and persuasions, including the Victorian upper classes and the Nazis." The Victorians — or at least the Victorian aristocrats, like Pierre de Coubertin, who created the modern Olympics — wanted to believe that the ancient Olympics were a contest between wealthy aristocrats, amateurs who competed for the love of sport. Of course, the real ancient Olympics were win-at-all-costs competitions for prizes and glory, where athletes competed in the nude, with no signs of social rank.

Naturally, the Nazis, with their emphasis on physical fitness, invested a lot of national pride and money in the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and it's the Nazis who are largely responsible for much of the pomp and circumstance we now associate with the games. In fact, the Nazis created the Olympic torch relay. From Olympic Flame:

For the ancient Greeks, fire had divine connotations — it was thought to have been stolen from the gods by Prometheus. Therefore, fire was also present at many of the sanctuaries in Olympia. A fire permanently burned on the altar of Hestia in Olympia. During the Olympic Games, which honoured Zeus, additional fires were lit at his temple and that of his wife, Hera. The modern Olympic flame is ignited at the site where the temple of Hera used to stand.

Fire did not appear at the modern Olympics until 1928. Dutch architect Jan Wils had included a tower in his design for the Olympic stadium for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and came up with the idea of having a fire burn throughout. On July 28, 1928 an employee of the Amsterdam electricity board lit the first Olympic fire in this so-called Marathontower, known as the "KLM's ashtray" by the locals.

The idea of an Olympic Flame was met with enthusiasm, and was incorporated as a symbol of Olympism. German sports official and sports scientist Carl Diem conceived the idea of an Olympic torch relay for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. More than 3,000 runners carried the torch from Olympia to Berlin. German track and field athlete Fritz Schilgen was the last to carry the torch, igniting the flame in the stadium.

War in the Pits: Marine-Futures Traders Wargame

A few years ago (back in 1996), the Marines brought in NYMEX traders to help them examine how a future combat operations center might work. From War in the Pits: Marine-Futures Traders Wargame:

Futures trading is an eponym for the American way of war at the close of the millennium. A Combat Operations Center (COC) — combining intelligence, operations and fire support coordination — will resemble the trading floor. Commodity markets, like battlefields, are zero-sum games where every winner has a loser. Futures traders fight economic wars daily; Marines fight about once a decade. Some of the best traders are former military. Military skills translate to the trading world; conversely, can traders sharpen military decisionmaking?

The GAMA Corporation proposed a digital-based command & control wargame, with units reporting hundreds of firing opportunities through an animated program. The idea was championed by General Richard D. Hearney, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Mr. Patrick Thompson, President of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). On December 4-5 in New York City, 22 Marines teamed one-on-one with 22 traders.

The first day the Marines went on the tumultuous trading floor and participated in a mock trading simulation. The simulation enabled the Marines to experience how quickly large-dollar decisions are made and how important an underlying strategy is when market tempo surges.

The next day the traders joined the Marines in the computer wargame. The nonlinear battlefield consisted of 300 square miles of mountainous terrain. Seventy small teams were deployed, relying upon stealth for survival and indirect systems for firepower. The intent was to bring constant pressure upon dispersed enemy units and break unit cohesion.

At the conclusion, each trader was asked: Can trading techniques assist combat decisionmaking when digital data and fire missions are rapidly received?

The traders and Marines drew a number of conclusions. I found this one interesting:

Both in simulations and social gatherings, the Marines and traders intermingled easily: They spoke each other's language. As the Chairman of the NYMEX, Daniel Rappaport, observed: "We play the same game of risk-reward analysis, only your stakes are much higher. We both confront chaotic information...and act quickly."

Traders, like fighter pilots, fight for six hours. Rarely do they leave a position open at the end of the trading day. In contrast, everyone in a COC puts in prodigious hours. If a trader cannot trust his instincts to make consistently sound decisions after six hours, COC duty hours in combat need to be reexamined.

Get a life

Get a life discusses massively multiplayer on-line roleplaying games (MMORPGs) and touches on how South Koreans have become obsessed with virtual worlds:

According to the Korean national police agency's Cyber Terror Response Centre, 70% of crimes committed by young people are related to virtual worlds, mostly attempts to steal virtual money and virtual items. In October 2002 a 24-year-old man, Kim Kyung-jae, died of a DVT-like illness after playing an online game, Mu, virtually nonstop for three and a half days. 'I told him not to spend so much time on the internet,' his mother told the BBC. 'He just said, 'Yes, Mum', but kept on playing.'

Yahoo! News - Trust in Mare's Milk

You may know the Kazakhs of Kazakhstan as Cossacks, the "free men" of the steppes. Like other steppe nomads, they have a history of eating horse meat and drinking mare's milk. Now, the Kazakh Olympic boxing team is shipping such energizing fare to Athens. From Yahoo! News - Trust in Mare's Milk:

Kazakhstan are pinning their hopes of Olympic boxing gold on traditional nomadic fare and will ship horse meat and mare's milk to Athens to boost their fighters' stamina.

Kazakh boxing team coach Yermakhan Ibraimov, who won gold as a light-middleweight in Sydney in 2000, confessed plain yet energizing nomadic food had been the key to his own success.

'Seeing me off to Sydney, my father gave me horse meat and kymyz,' Ibraimov told the popular Karavan weekly.

The slightly heady, centuries-old kymyz is fermented mare's milk, treasured by the Kazakhs as a fizzy cold drink in the summer heat.

Illusion of danger a radical way to cut speed

This just seems wrong. From Illusion of danger a radical way to cut speed:

Roads could be altered to appear more dangerous to drivers in a radical new attempt to slow down traffic without the need for speed bumps.

Streets would be remodelled to deliberately increase uncertainty in drivers' minds, as part of the novel psychological approach to cutting vehicle speeds.

Government-funded researchers believe the measures could have the same effect on motorists as road humps.

They include narrowing roads, blurring pavement edges and removing white lines from the middle of roads.

The researchers said the changes would prompt drivers to automatically slow down because they would fear straying on to the edge of the road or risk a head-on collision.

Trees could also be planted on the edges of roads to break up sightlines.

Experts at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) believe the measures could cost much less than speed humps, which are hated by many drivers and residents.

Does it work?

Elements of the technique have already been pioneered in parts of England.

These include the removal of central white lines on suburban roads in Wiltshire, which cut accidents by a third.

agreatnotion: Computers can now judge writing?

I need to learn more about the e-rater used to judge GMAT essays. From Computers can now judge writing?:

The e-rater was developed in the 1990s by subjecting essays to a 'natural language processing technology' that identifies grammar, sentence structure and strength of vocabulary. The computer also is programmed to scan for the elements present in a well-supported essay, said Richard Swartz, an executive with Educational Testing Service, which developed e-rater.
[...]
Much of the research used to refine the technology involved taking essays that had been graded by people and looking for signs the computer could use to come close to those human judgments. The GMAT Web site boasts that "e-rater and independent readers agree, on average, 87 percent to 94 percent of the time."

Swartz emphasized the modest goal of computerized scoring: to judge the structure and coherence of the writing, rather than the quality of the thoughts and originality of the prose. In college, he said, professors grade the development of ideas, while essay-rating computers "are better suited to judgment about more basic-level writing."

Yahoo! News - Study: Flu in Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia

From Yahoo! News - Study: Flu in Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia:

In a small 64-family sample, researchers found the risk of developing the major mental disorder in adult offspring rose seven-fold if the expectant mother had the flu during the first trimester.

What's the link?

The study suggested factors that could damage the fetal brain including the mother's antibodies crossing the placenta and reacting with the fetus' developing immune system, the presence of genetic material from the strain of influenza, and the mother's elevated body temperature.

Over-the-counter flu remedies also might cause central nervous system problems, it said.

The study's findings may raise questions about routine vaccinations of women because the antibodies generated could damage a fetus.

Daedalus - How not to buy happiness - The MIT Press

How not to buy happiness explores the paradox of money not buying happiness:

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods — such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job — then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer — and happier — lives.

Humans are remarkably adaptable, but we're not equally adaptable in all dimensions. Some things we think we adapt to just fine, but our body still reacts to negatively:

One strand in this literature focuses on the experience of urban bus drivers, whose exposure to the stresses of heavy traffic is higher than that of most commuters, but who have also had greater opportunity to adapt to those stresses. A disproportionate share of the absenteeism of urban bus drivers stems from stress-related illnesses such as gastrointestinal problems, headaches, and anxiety. Many studies have found sharply elevated rates of hypertension among bus drivers relative to those of a variety of control groups, including a control group of bus drivers pre-employment. Additional studies have found elevations of stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol in urban bus drivers. And one study found elevations of adrenaline and noradrenaline to be strongly positively correlated with the density of the traffic with which the bus drivers had to contend. More than half of all urban bus drivers retire prematurely with some form of medical disability.

Some forms of inconspicuous consumption have been rising; others have been declining:

There have been increases in the annual number of hours spent at work in the United States during the last two decades; traffic has grown considerably more congested; savings rates have fallen precipitously; personal bankruptcy filings are at an alltime high; and there is at least a widespread perception that employment security and autonomy have fallen sharply. Declines in these and other forms of inconspicuous consumption may well have offset the effects of increases in others.

Why do people decide to spend their money the way they do?

That many purchases become more attractive to us when others make them means that consumption spending has much in common with a military arms race. A family can choose how much of its own money to spend, but it cannot choose how much others spend. Buying a smaller-than-average vehicle means greater risk of dying in an accident. Spending less on an interview suit means a greater risk of not landing the best job. Yet when all spend more on heavier cars and more finely tailored suits, the results tend to be mutually offsetting, just as when all nations spend more on armaments. Spending less — on bombs or on personal consumption — frees up money for other pressing uses, but only if everyone does it.

Counting the Dead

Counting the Dead compares American casualty rates between Iraq, Vietnam, and World War II:

American casualties in Iraq are often compared to those suffered during the Vietnam war, or even World War II. This is a very misleading comparison. On an annual basis, American combat deaths per 1,000 troops in Iraq have been about 3.6. During the Vietnam war it varied from year to year, but the average was about five times higher than in Iraq. The casualty rate in World War II was even higher.

How did Scotland grow so quickly?

Tyler Cowen has been visiting Scotland. In How did Scotland grow so quickly?, he looks at Scotland's meteoric rise in the 18th century:

Scotland had been an economic backwater at the time of the 1707 union with England. By 1770 at least the Scottish cities were among the most developed and intellectually advanced parts of Europe. How could this happen?

Arthur Herman explains:

The new Parliament largely ignored Scotland; outbursts such as the malt riots and the threat of Jacobitism apart, the government in London paid little attention to what was happening north of the border. Scots ended up with the best of both worlds: peace and order from a strong administrative state, but freedom to develop and innovate without undue interference from those who controlled it.

Gratitude Journals and Loewenstein's Challenge

In Gratitude Journals and Loewenstein's Challenge, Bryan Caplan explains how redistributive rhetoric urges people to dwell on the negative:

Several interesting experiments (like this one) ask subjects to keep a 'gratitude journal.' Main idea: Every day, write down things you are grateful for. Depending on the experiment, control groups either do nothing, or keep an 'ingratitude' diary, or write down a random childhood memory. The main finding is that keeping a gratitude journal makes people happier than the other treatments.

So what? Almost all redistributive rhetoric urges people to dwell on the negative — you or other people aren't getting what is due. This in turn makes people want to 'do something' about the problem. And you can rest assured that no matter how much redistribution there is, egalitarians will never say 'OK, life's fair now. We're done complaining.' No, what they foster is literally a lifestyle of ingratitude — a recipe for unhappiness.

Is more Congressional oversight good?

In Is more Congressional oversight good?, Tyler Cowen argues against further oversight of the CIA:

The bipartisan committee on terrorism has argued that Congress did not exercise sufficient oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. [...] More oversight will make the intelligence agencies, however they are structured, more risk-averse. [...] Now you might think that risk-aversion in intelligence is a good thing. Should we not take all possible care to protect America against foreign threats? But bureaucratic risk-aversion is not the same as a secure national defense. It brings groupthink, excess formalism, protecting against yesterday's threat, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for mistakes.

His suggestion?

Rather than making intelligence agencies more accountable, how about making them more independent? Create some small, elite groups and staff them with the best people we can find. Pay them well. Give them arsm-length protection from political pressures. Treat them like the Federal Reserve, an independent agency renowned for the quality of its staff. Give them a culture of internal pride. Richard Clarke reminds us that: "It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department — a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers."

Sometimes the way to get what you want involves less control, not more control.

WSJ.com - Ticket Out of Obscurity

WSJ.com - Ticket Out of Obscurity explains how Fox's The OC has lifted underground rock bands from obscurity:

The makers of 'The O.C.' say they began including relatively obscure music for a simple reason: It's what they listen to. 'For the first seven episodes we didn't have a music supervisor, so we were taking music off my iPod,' says creator and executive producer Josh Schwartz. In fact, he says, he is often unable to write a scene until he finds the right song to accompany it.
[...]
In the first week after its appearance on "The O.C.," Rooney's sales almost tripled. With the imprimatur of a hip, young show, the band landed appearances on the "Tonight Show," the "Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn" and "Today," giving the album a second wind, and propelling it to respectable sales of over 333,000.

WSJ.com - GM's American Icon Adds European Touches

GM's American Icon Adds European Touches describes how the old C5 corvette design evolved into the new C6 design:

Designers and engineers on the C6 project went to Germany to drive the old car, the C5, and some of its European competition like the Porsche 911. They also spent time talking to groups of European sports car owners.

Porsche owners "were insulted to be asked about the Corvette," says Tom Peters, the new Corvette's chief designer. "It was graphic."

But Mr. Peters and his colleagues took the abuse, and concluded that some of the criticism was warranted.

The newer, "more discriminating" Corvette has a 400-hp "small block" V8; a cleaner, simpler interior, without "bubble buttons"; and smoother handling.

Although I've never seen a Corvette in Europe or Japan, this still seems wrong:

But GM sells about 1,000 Corvettes a year in Europe and another 300 to 400 a year in Japan, says Jim Campbell, Chevrolet director for car marketing. GM wants to increase those numbers.

Yahoo! News - Floods Cause Evacuations in Philadelphia

This weekend, parts of the Philadelphia area got hit by floods — flash floods. From Yahoo! News - Floods Cause Evacuations in Philadelphia:

Some of the worst flooding in Upper Darby struck Veronica Road, where residents said the flooding happened so quickly they had trouble believing their eyes.

'All of the sudden a manhole cover shoots up out of the ground in front of my home and water was just shooting out,' said Keith Dutton, a building maintenance worker who lives on the street. Almost immediately, the streets were flooded with three feet of water, he said.

'From that point on there was a good half a foot every 15 minutes,' Dutton said. A nearby supermarket was completely filled with water, he said.