Beyonce Tears Leg Muscle While Dancing

It would appear that Beyonce is not as hamstring-licious as she is booty-licious. From Beyonce Tears Leg Muscle While Dancing:

Beyonce tore a leg muscle rehearsing dance moves with Destiny's Child and her injury could delay some of the group's plan, a record company spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The singer tore her right hamstring, one of the muscles at the back of the knee, while practicing Tuesday in Los Angeles for an upcoming TV special.

What the Bubble Got Right

Paul Graham "had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble"; he worked at Yahoo. In What the Bubble Got Right, he explains how Yahoo was an unintentional pyramid scheme:

What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a pyramid scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter — stimulating another round of investments in startups.

But it wasn't all flash:

Even at the morning-after valuations of March and April 2001, the people at Yahoo had managed to create a company worth about $8 billion in just six years.

The first thing the Bubble got right: retail VC:

Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the public markets.

The second thing: the Internet:

Recognizing an important trend turns out to be easier than figuring out how to profit from it. The mistake investors always seem to make is to take the trend too literally. Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed that the more Internettish the company, the better. Hence such parodies as Pets.Com.

In fact most of the money to be made from big trends is made indirectly. It was not the railroads themselves that made the most money during the railroad boom, but the companies on either side, like Carnegie's steelworks, which made the rails, and Standard Oil, which used railroads to get oil to the East Coast, where it could be shipped to Europe.

The third: choices:

In the "old" economy, the high cost of presenting information to people meant they had only a narrow range of options to choose from. The tiny, expensive pipeline to consumers was tellingly named "the channel." Control the channel and you could feed them what you wanted, on your terms. And it was not just big corporations that depended on this principle. So, in their way, did labor unions, the traditional news media, and the art and literary establishments. Winning depended not on doing good work, but on gaining control of some bottleneck.
[...]
First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.

He makes seven more points.

The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road)

In The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road), John Tierney proclaims, "Americans still love their own cars, but they're sick of everyone else's." Then he lists off some prevailing myths about cars and their consequences:

Sprawl traps drivers in traffic hell. It's true that highways have gotten much more congested, but the worst traffic tends to be in densely populated urban areas that haven't been building new roads, like New York and Chicago — the kind of places hailed by smart-growth planners but now avoided by companies looking for convenient offices. During the 1990's, the number of suburban workers surpassed the number downtown. These commuters still encountered traffic jams, but by not driving downtown they could still get to work reasonably quickly. The length of the average commute, now about 25 minutes, rose just 40 seconds in the 1980's and about 2 minutes in the 1990's. Sprawl didn't trap drivers — it gave them an escape.

Suburban car culture traps women. Critics complain that mothers in the suburbs are sentenced to long hours chauffeuring children to malls and soccer games and piano lessons, which are tasks that do indeed require a car. But so do most of their jobs. In his book ''Edge City,'' the writer Joel Garreau traces the golden age of sprawl to the surge in women entering the work force in the 70's and 80's, when the number of cars in America doubled as developers rushed to build office parks and malls for women who didn't have time to take the bus downtown. The only way to juggle all their responsibilities was to buy a car and find a job close to the stores and schools and day-care centers near their homes.

Sprawl is scarring the American landscape. If by ''landscape'' you mean the pasture or forest near your home that has been paved, then sprawl does look like an abomination. Who wouldn't prefer to be surrounded by greenery, especially when you're not paying property taxes for it?

But if you look at the big picture, America is not paving paradise. More than 90 percent of the continental United States is still open space and farmland. The major change in land use in recent decades has been the gain of 70 million acres of wilderness — more than all the land currently occupied by cities, suburbs and exurbs, according to Peter Huber, author of ''Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists.'' Because agriculture has become so efficient, farmers have abandoned vast tracts of land that have reverted to nature, and rural areas have lost population as young people migrate to cities. You may not like the new homes being built for them at the edge of your town, but if preserving large ecosystems and wildlife habitat is your priority, better to concentrate people in the suburbs and exurbs rather than scatter them in the remote countryside.

Mass transit is the cure for highway congestion. Commuter trains and subways make sense in New York, Chicago and a few other cities, and there are other forms of transit, like express buses, that can make a difference elsewhere. (Vans offering door-to-door service are a boon to the elderly and people without cars.) But for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today's dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It's easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car.

Anthony Downs, an economist at the Brookings Institution who favors giving more aid to transit, says the subsidies have social benefits (like helping people without cars), but he warns it will make little difference in highway congestion. O'Toole and Wendell Cox, a transportation expert and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, estimate that even if Congress miraculously tripled the annual subsidy for transit, the average driver's commute would be reduced by a grand total of 22 seconds.

Drivers are getting a free ride. Yes, the government spends a lot more money on highways than transit, but most of that money comes out of the drivers' pockets. If you add up the costs of driving — the car owner's costs as well as the public cost of building and maintaining highways and local streets, the salaries of police patrolling the roads — it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents, according to Cox. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three-quarters of that cost.

Drivers do avoid paying some indirect costs of their cars, like the health consequences of the pollution from tailpipes. One of the most thorough attempts to measure these social costs was done by Mark Delucchi, a cost-benefit analyst at the University of California, Davis, who factored in everything from expenditures in the Persian Gulf to the cost of the real estate devoted to free parking lots. Autonomists complain that he overestimated the car's costs, but even so, his calculations show that when compared with the social costs of transit systems (like taxpayer subsidies and noise from buses), the car is at least twice as cheap per passenger mile as transit.

New highways just make things worse. Environmentalists and smart-growth planners say that more highways merely create more problems because of ''induced demand,'' also known as the if-you-build-it-they-will-come theory. They argue that any new stretch of highway will fill up quickly because drivers discover new uses for it. Adding new lanes or roads may ease traffic temporarily, they say, but ultimately you're doomed to become like Los Angeles.

A new freeway does indeed attract new drivers, but that doesn't mean it's not worth building. Besides benefiting those drivers (no small thing), it eases the strain on the road network. This year's report from the Texas Transportation Institute confirms other research showing that when you take population growth into account, traffic congestion has been increasing more rapidly in the cities that haven't been building roads. The reason for Los Angeles's traffic morass is that it didn't build enough freeways, incredible as that sounds. The great symbol of sprawl is not what it seems when you compare it with other cities using the Census Bureau's definition of an ''urbanized area,'' which extends until the point where there's open countryside. By this definition, Los Angeles is the most densely populated city in America, with 7,068 persons per square mile of urbanized area. Its traffic is terrible because it built only about half the freeways originally planned, so that it now has fewer miles of freeway per capita than any other major city.

You Call This Health Insurance?

In You Call This Health Insurance?, Arnold Kling distinguishes between true insurance and "split the check" plans:

One of the most serious impediments to rational debate on health care is the misuse of the term 'health insurance.' What we call health 'insurance' in this country was never designed to insure the consumer. Instead, its purpose is to insure steady, reliable incomes for health care providers. True health insurance is the economist's equivalent of a unicorn — we can describe it, but none of us has actually seen it.

What Blue Cross and Blue Shield pioneered was a "split-the-check" approach to health care. An equivalent plan for restaurant meals would be that instead of paying for your meal, you would pay an annual premium to "Blue Eats," which would in turn reimburse restaurants for their costs, plus a profit margin. Every individual member of "Blue Eats" would have an incentive to eat out a lot and order the most expensive items on the menu, because the cost is shared among all of the members of "Blue Eats."

"Blue Eats" would be a great marketing ploy by restaurants, because it would get people to eat out more and spend more at restaurants. Similarly, John C. Goodman argues that what we call "health insurance" originated as a marketing ploy by physicians and hospitals. It worked really well, too.

Insurable events are unlikely events.

Dawn of the Dead-Flesh Eaters

Ah, the healing power of maggots! From Dawn of the Dead-Flesh Eaters:

It seems that maggots, long neglected by medicine, have come back from the dead.

Their resurrection began in the early 1980s when Dr. Ronald Sherman, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, began exploring their potential benefits for patients with wounds, especially on their legs and feet.

Despite their reputation as disgusting and repulsive animals, maggots — blowfly larvae — are largely harmless. Their life cycle is simple: The flies lay eggs when they find decaying flesh. The maggots hatch, enjoy several meals at the nearest dead-animal buffet, develop cocoons known as pupae and turn into flies. Then everything begins again.

Without blowflies and maggots, decomposition would occur a lot more slowly, if at all, and forensic entomologists would have a lot harder time using bugs to figure out times of death in murder cases.

For centuries, according to Sherman, military doctors have noticed that maggots do a good job of eating dead flesh on a live person. "Soldiers injured on the battlefield whose wounds became infested with maggots did better and their wounds did better than soldiers who weren't infested," he said.

In the late 1920s, a former World War I surgeon began trying maggots on patients at Johns Hopkins University, and the treatment soon became common. Herb Nordquist, Donna's husband, remembers being treated with maggots 60 years ago when he had an infected foot. "It didn't bother me," he recalled as nurses removed his wife's maggots in a doctor's office nearby. "I had no idea what was going on."

Antibiotics soon entered the picture, however, and maggots fell out of favor as doctors turned to penicillin and its sister drugs. But Sherman's research resurrected the critters, and 15 years ago he created a "medical maggot" nursery, using rancid liver as food.

He and his wife now send shipments of 250 to 500 disinfected maggots — $70 plus shipping — to as many as 35 doctors a week. (Since maggots are tiny before they begin feasting on flesh, doctors can put dozens of them into a single wound.)

Cheetahs Flourish on Spanish Plain

A German couple has successfully bred cheetahs on a ranch in Spain. Cheetahs have been tamed and kept as pets for centuries, but they don't breed in captivity. From Cheetahs Flourish on Spanish Plain:

Popular as hunting animals and elegant pets with rulers ranging from Charlemagne to Akbar, the 16th century emperor of Mughal India, cheetahs are the only big cats that can be trusted not to turn on their owners if tamed, according to Heidenreich.

'Taming a cheetah is very easy, they are different to other big cats, never aggressive ... In 5,000 years there have been no accidents reported between cheetahs and humans.

'They never look for a fight because even if they get a very small injury on just one foot, they cannot run again and will die,' he added.

However despite their great beauty, usefulness as hunters and non-aggressive nature, the spotted sprinters have never been domesticated because of the difficulties of breeding them.

Akbar's cheetah stable is reported to have contained up to 1,000 animals, but almost all were caught wild, probably between the ages of three and five, and tamed.

'Why are they not a domesticated animal if people have been living with them since 3,000 years before Christ?' said Heidenreich. 'Because it was almost impossible to breed them in captivity.'

Axe Man Runs Amok on Norway Plane, Injures Pilots

From Axe Man Runs Amok on Norway Plane, Injures Pilots:

A man attacked two pilots and a passenger with an axe on a domestic Norwegian flight on Wednesday, police said.

The pilots, who witnesses said were covered in blood, managed to land the 18-seat Kato Air flight with seven passengers on board on its way from Narvik to Bodoe in northern Norway.

The attacker, in his 30s, was immediately arrested at Bodoe airport

Then, five paragraphs later...

The attacker said he was Algerian, police said.

Minor detail.

The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught

David Halberstam opens The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught with the notion that you can't learn leadership from a book. Or from a great general, who is great within a hierarchy. Or from a great football coach, who also expects to be obeyed without question.

Then he switches to the tale of a great general. I'm not sure if we're supposed to learn from it or not:

In the fall of 1950, General Douglas MacArthur had just executed his brilliant Inchon landing behind North Korean lines. Trapped, the North Korean army hastily retreated north. Thanks to Inchon, MacArthur, a general who always put himself above the normal chain of command, was at the pinnacle of his success. No one dared question him as his armies started pursuing the enemy across the 38th parallel. But President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were properly nervous as MacArthur went farther north, because just across the Korean-Chinese border were hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. The one thing Truman and the Joint Chiefs feared was a larger, wider war with the Chinese. In mid-October Truman flew to Wake Island and met with MacArthur. Speaking as a general and a self-appointed expert on the mind of the Oriental, MacArthur assured him the Chinese would not enter the war, but that if they did, the result would be the greatest slaughter in history.

And so MacArthur, exceeding his orders, sent his forces farther north, pushing them to race to the Chinese border so that they could be home by Christmas. In late November, his troops — most wearing summer-weight uniforms in Arctic temperatures, fighting in terrible terrain with their lines of communication vastly overextended — were hit by surprise by hundreds of thousands of Chinese. The American units, terribly vulnerable to this assault, largely fell apart (though the Marines' fighting withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir is one of our most valorous moments).

A month later, in late December, with MacArthur alternating between talk of using the atom bomb and getting off the Korean peninsula completely, Ridgway took command of the Eighth Army in Korea. He was nothing less than a miracle worker. Today he would be called the real deal. He was already known as a great soldier, having led the airborne jump behind German lines on D-Day. A friend of mine in the CIA briefed him during the Korean War and later told me that he had never dealt with anyone as demanding, as probing, and as relentless as Ridgway. He was highly intelligent and ferociously focused. He needed to know everything, especially about the enemy. He was furious with commanders who did not know their men and who did not know exactly where the enemy was. He pushed his troops hard, but he was always out there at the front, sharing as much as possible in their hardships. He wanted his troops warmly clothed, well fed, and well led by tough field officers whom he did not fear to relieve if he felt they weren't getting the job done. There would be no more retreating, he told his command upon his arrival. They would turn around and start moving north again — hence his nickname, "Wrongway Ridgway."

Kwikpoint Iraqi Visual Language Survival Guide Cards

A firm called Kwikpoint is offering "visual language survival guides" for Iraqi Arabic. Normally the term "survival guide" isn't quite so literal.

A couple sections (part one, part two) provide lots of little pictures you can point to in front of an Iraqi person to say things like "is the improvised explosive device hidden under the dead goat?" and "was the bomb maker planning manual or remote detonation?" As Boing Boing points out:

Visually, they're unsettling. The images are functional icons, like highway signs or web UI buttons, so they reflect a simplified aesthetic -- like early childhood storybooks. The subject matter is violent, but the look is "see spot run" or "happy Lego people at play."

Manna from China

Alex Tabarrok draws an amusing analogy in Manna from China:

If cheap goods from China are bad for the United States then surely zero-priced Manna from Heaven must have been terrible for the Israelites.

Bombing Iraq to Prosperity

Tyler Cowen's Bombing Iraq to Prosperity cites an actual USA Today headline that is "no less absurd": Growth from Hurricanes Could Outweigh Costs:

Although natural disasters spread destruction and economic pain to a wide variety of businesses, for some, it can mean a burst in activity and revenue.
For that reason, economists tallying the numbers expect the hurricanes will be neutral in their effect on the U.S. economy, or may even give it a slight boost, particularly because of an expected reconstruction boom in the already red-hot construction industry.

Haven't these people heard of the "broken window" fallacy?

Cochrane estimates that in Florida, the state hit hardest by the storms, 20,000 jobs will be created that otherwise would not have been. Two-thirds of those jobs will be in construction. The rest will be in areas including utilities, retailing, insurance and business services. Another 2,500 jobs will likely be added in Mobile, Ala., according to Economy.com.
Economic consulting firm Global Insight estimates the hurricanes at most will shave two-tenths of a percentage point off gross domestic product, the broadest gauge of U.S. economic activity, in the third or fourth quarters. That will be offset by reconstruction activity.

As Cowen says, "I would not have dared this as satire."

Poor Definitions

From Johan Norberg's Poor Definitions:

Does anyone know this gentleman: He has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two colour televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family�s essential needs.

This is the typical American poor, according to the definition by which there are 12.5 percent living in poverty. There is also real poverty in the US, people who experience something like overcrowding, temporary hunger or difficulty obtaining health care. But that�s only about a third of those officially classified as poor, and the groups shouldn�t be confused.

And "some other interesting facts about American poverty from a Heritage backgrounder by Robert Rector":

• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna and other European cities.
• Despite the recession, nearly one million black children have been raised out of poverty since the welfare reform of 1996.
• The census report that the top fifth of households has $14.60 in income for every $1.00 in the bottom quintile. But these figures don�t include taxes and the social safety net, and they don�t adjust for the size of households (the top quintile has 70 percent more people than the bottom quintile). When adjusted accordingly, the ratio of the income of the top quintile to that of the bottom quintile falls from $14.60 to $1.00 to $4.21 to $1.00.

Why do you have a murderer on your t-shirt?

Johan Norberg cites Paul Berman's take on Che Guevara in Why do you have a murderer on your t-shirt?:

"Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution�s first firing squads. He founded Cuba�s �labor camp� system�the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che�s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for �two, three, many Vietnams,� he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: �Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become ��� and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy�a tragedy on the hugest scale."

The Swedish Mother Model

In The Swedish Mother Model, Johan Norberg cites a Guardian article by Catherine Hakim:

"[T]here is a pay threshold in Nordic countries below which are 80% of all women, and above which are 80% of all men.

�What is more, the glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US.�
[�]
75% of Swedish women are working in the public sector — traditionally the lower-paid, lower-qualified end of the employment market — while 75% of men are working in the racier, more demanding private sector. What has happened through the years of family-friendly policies, she says, is that private companies have reduced their number of female employees because they can�t afford the cost of the generous maternity packages."

Facts About Cuba

Johan Norberg points out some simple Facts About Cuba:

Before Castro, Cuba was as rich as Italy, and richer than Spain. Cuba has not merely lagged behind, it has actually grown poorer, and is now more than five times poorer than these countries. It used to be among the richest in Latin America, now it�s among the poorest.

Study Shows Dogs Able to Smell Cancer

Dogs are truly amazing. From Study Shows Dogs Able to Smell Cancer:

It is thought that a dog's sense of smell is generally 10,000 to 100,000 times better than a human's.

The idea that dogs may be able to smell cancer was first put forward in 1989 by two London dermatologists, who described the case of a woman asking for a mole to be cut out of her leg because her dog would constantly sniff at it, even through her trousers, but ignore all her other moles.

One day, the dog, a female border collie-Doberman mix, had tried to bite the mole off when the woman was wearing shorts.

It turned out she had malignant melanoma — a deadly form of skin cancer. It was caught early enough to save her life.

Another anecdote:

Then in 2001, two English doctors reported a similar case of a man with a patch of eczema on his leg for 18 years. One day his pet Labrador started to persistently sniff the patch, even through his trousers. It turned out he had developed skin cancer and, once the tumor was removed, the dog showed no further interest in the eczema patch.

Fruitful, Consuming Paranoia: A Sci-Fi Master's Madness

In Fruitful, Consuming Paranoia: A Sci-Fi Master's Madness, Sam Munson reviews I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick:

It's difficult to imagine a writer who could have appreciated the adaptation of his works into a series of increasingly bad movies more than Philip K. Dick. The progression from Blade Runner through Total Recall to Paycheck has all the hallmarks of one of his stories — black irony, psychological degradation and the implication of a vast conspiracy organized to deceive and persecute one man. The young Dick would have written it as a dark comedy, the older as a bizarre Christian fable.

Dick's journey from neurotic bohemian to full-blown religious psychotic is as fascinating a tale as anything he ever wrote. And it has fallen into capable hands in Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead.

Philip K. Dick was never particularly sane:

He was born in Chicago in 1928. After his parents' divorce, his mother Dorothy took him first to Washington, D.C., and then to Berkeley, Calif. Philip was a withdrawn and sensitive child, subjected to both Freudian and Jungian therapy by the time he was 15. His anxious, self-dramatizing mother lived, in Mr. Carrère's phrase, in a state of excited "bovarysme." It's not surprising, given these circumstances, that Dick turned toward literature, and particularly toward the fantastic and grotesque.

In his early 20's, after an adolescence colored by his mother's subtle domination and his fears of latent homosexuality, he published his first science-fiction story and decided he'd found his vocation. From his beginnings as an unknown and frustrated writer of science fiction, he became a theological guru and existential mascot to the burgeoning counterculture, a highly respected author in a small but explosively broadening field; he finished as a prematurely aged, functional-but-insane casualty of LSD and scores of other drugs, writing an interminable religious text called the Exegesis. He died in 1982, after achieving his first substantial material success with the sale of the movie rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that would become Blade Runner.

In the last decade of his life, Philip K. Dick "came to the conclusion that reality as we know it is an illusion used by the Roman Empire to numb the minds of Christians." Riiiiggghhhht.

The Accidental Theorist

I love the intro to Paul Krugman's The Accidental Theorist:

Imagine an economy that produces only two things: hot dogs and buns. Consumers in this economy insist that every hot dog come with a bun, and vice versa. And labor is the only input to production.

OK, timeout. Before we go any further, I need to ask what you think of an essay that begins this way. Does it sound silly to you? Were you about to turn the virtual page, figuring that this couldn't be about anything important?

Krugman's point?

You can't do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful. Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments — parables, if you like — that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings.

Scientific Method v Fundamentalism

In Scientific Method v Fundamentalism, Umberto Eco distinguishes science from the ideology of progress (and from religious fundamentalism) — and he starts with this seemingly trivial anecdote:

Recently I read in the papers that the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking has made a statement that is sensational, to say the least. He maintains that he made an error in his theory of black holes (published back in the 70s) and proposed the necessary corrections before an audience of fellow scientists.

For those involved in the sciences there is nothing exceptional about this, apart from Hawking's exceptional standing, but I feel that the episode should be brought to the attention of young people in every nonfundamentalist or nonconfessional school so that they may reflect upon the principles of modern science.

Science is about falsifying hypotheses:

Modern science does not hold that what is new is always right. On the contrary, it is based on the principle of "fallibilism" (enunciated by the American philosopher Charles Peirce, elaborated upon by Popper and many other theorists, and put into practice by scientists themselves) according to which science progresses by continually correcting itself, falsifying its hypotheses by trial and error, admitting its own mistakes — and by considering that an experiment that doesn't work out is not a failure but is worth as much as a successful one because it proves that a certain line of research was mistaken and it is necessary either to change direction or even to start over from scratch.

Fundamentalism is about received wisdom:

According to these people, all that there is to understand has already been understood by long-vanished ancient civilisations and it is only by humbly returning to that traditional and immutable treasure that we may reconcile ourselves with ourselves and with our destiny.

In the most overtly occultist versions of this school of thought, the truth was cultivated by civilisations we have lost touch with: Atlantis engulfed by the ocean, the Hyperboreans, 100% pure Aryans who lived on an eternally temperate polar icecap, the sages of ancient India and other amusing yarns that, being indemonstrable, allow third-rate philosophers and writers of potboilers to keep on churning out warmed-over versions of the same old hermetic hogwash for the amusement of summer vacationers.

Eco sees modern science as the "philosophy" that should be taught in schools.

Riding with Alexander

Oliver North's new film on Alexander the Great comes out soon. Riding with Alexander explains Oxford classics professor Robin Lane Fox's peculiar request of Oliver North, in return for his expertise:

Seven hours later, we parted, Oliver having put no end of questions about the outlines of the script, then forming in his mind, and me having specified my non-negotiable reward for this advice: a place on horseback in the front ten of every major cavalry charge by Alexander's cavalrymen to be filmed by Oliver on location. I have ridden for years, including in horse-races, but even Oliver was surprised. To his credit, he agreed, and we lived up to the deal, as filmgoers can now see.

Humans Have Been Polygamous For Most Of History

Humans Have Been Polygamous For Most Of History, FuturePundit notes, citing Genes expose secrets of sex on the side:

Men and women differed in their participation in reproduction, the researchers report. More men than women get squeezed out of the mating game. As a result, twice as many women as men passed their genes to the next generation.

'It is a pattern that's built up over time. The norm through human evolution is for more women to have children than men,' said Jason Wilder, a postdoctoral fellow in UA's Arizona Research Laboratories and lead author on the research articles. 'There are men around who aren't able to have children, because they are being outcompeted by more successful males.'

Co-author Michael Hammer, a research scientist in UA's Arizona Research Laboratories, said, 'We may think of ourselves as a monogamous species, but we're coming from an evolutionary history that's probably slightly polygamous. If we're shifting toward monogamy, it's so recent it hasn't left an imprint on our genome.'

Or the same reproductive behavior is continuing, but in a culturally accepted fashion, Wilder said. 'The modern version that we generally don't find offensive is that men tend to remarry and have more children much more often than women do.'

Since I just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven (about early Mormon history and modern fundamentalist Mormons), and I'm currently reading about the Mongols, I find this remarkably apropos.

Think Wasabi Clears Your Sinuses? Think Again

The famously spicy sushi condiment only makes your sinuses feel clear. From Think Wasabi Clears Your Sinuses? Think Again:

U.S. researchers found that eating wasabi appeared to increase congestion in a small group of healthy volunteers, despite the fact that participants said they thought that the spice had cleared their nasal passages.

'Actually, wasabi is a congestant,' study author Dr. David S. Cameron told Reuters Health. 'It makes the space of your nasal passages smaller, but it makes you feel more open.'

Cameron explained that wasabi probably clogs up sinuses by increasing blood flow to the lining of the nose. That extra blood takes up space, he said, which constricts the nasal passageway.

Wasabi may make the nose feel more open, Cameron noted, by causing changes that increase the cooling effect of air breathed through the nose, or by stimulating flaring of the nostrils, which enables air to flow more easily though the nose.

Wasabi does have some legimate uses though:

While wasabi may not work as a decongestant, previous research has suggested that it is not without other health benefits. For instance, lab research shows that wasabi may inhibit the growth of cancer cells in test tubes, prevent platelets from forming blood clots, and may even fight asthma or cavities. And, appropriately for a condiment used to season raw fish, wasabi has antimicrobial properties.

How Russia's Chechen Quagmire Became Front for Radical Islam

How Russia's Chechen Quagmire Became Front for Radical Islam explains how the Chechen cause "began as a nationalist struggle professing democracy and freedom as its goals, but is now soaked in the rhetoric and blood of global jihad":

Radical Islam has mutated into something akin to communism in the past — a convenient, off-the-shelf ideology that can clothe complex local conflicts that few would care about otherwise. These include separatist struggles in Aceh in Indonesia, Indian-controlled Kashmir and Russian-ruled Chechnya. In a host of other countries from Morocco to Malaysia, Islamists have replaced communists as the principal source of opposition to established ruling orders.

By donning Islamist garb, leaders of these widely different causes can open the door to foreign funds, particularly from wealthy Gulf states, and also to manpower from a pool of footloose militants looking for work.

Learning Economics

I've heard Learning Economics (by Arnold Kling) described as the next Economics in One Lesson (by Henry Hazlitt). The opening paragraph of the author's introduction gives a taste:

Each year, thousands of people study economics, but not many learn it. Most of them leave their economics courses ignorant of important basic facts, such as the differences in the standard of living over time and across countries, as well as basic economic principles, such as the way that a global oil market renders meaningless the notion of "energy independence."

A Llama in the Yard Makes an Impression On the Neighbors

A Llama in the Yard Makes an Impression On the Neighbors reports on a new trend:

People have used animals as prey, pets and food for thousands of years. Bored with conventional landscaping, some homeowners now are using bulls, sheep, chickens and other live animals as outdoor decor.

"Why do people have horses? You never see them ride them," says Don King, president of Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America, an organization of 5,000 cattle breeders. Instead, he says, the point is: "You can have something that no one else has."

There's something oddly...decadent...about buying llamas, Texas longhorns, and African pygmy goats as lawn decorations.

Better Health Through Play

Better Health Through Play explains how, while games have been used for teaching and training for years, now it's health care's turn:

Rosser, who heads the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, knows how he'd like to see games used. Since 2001, he's worked with games like Super Monkey Ball, for Nintendo's GameCube console, to train doctors in laparoscopic surgery. What Rosser found was that students who had played video games for more than three hours in one week — even once — had 37 percent fewer errors during the procedure, and got the operation done 27 percent more quickly.

'If you played in the past, or are currently playing, you're significantly better than the non-players,' Rosser said. 'Video games were the determining factor — more than years of experience, gender, dominant/non-dominant hand, all of that.'

It's only natural, really, that games would help doctors with laparoscopies — that's when surgeons use a tiny camera and joystick-controlled tools to cut and sew. It's about as close to gaming as surgery gets.

Super Monkey Ball saves lives.

Man Aflutter Over Dead Parrots

When I first started to read Man Aflutter Over Dead Parrots ("A dispute over four dead parrots will end in a Norwegian court next month..."), I immediately thought, Norwegian Blue — beautiful plumage!:

Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?

Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!

Owner: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.

Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.

Owner: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

Mr. Praline: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.

Owner: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!

Mr. Praline: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up! (shouting at the cage) 'Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I've got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show...

Americans Get Plenty of Sleep, Watch Lots of TV

Americans Get Plenty of Sleep, Watch Lots of TV presents an amusing lesson on the meaning of statistics:

The average American spent 8.6 hours a day sleeping last year, only 3.7 hours working and had 5.1 leisure hours — half of which was spent watching television, a survey showed on Tuesday.

The national study included everyone from working parents with almost no free time to retirees and teenagers — helping to explain why this 'average' day does not reflect anyone's actual day

Citing Terror Fight, Putin Seeks Political Overhaul

Citing Terror Fight, Putin Seeks Political Overhaul explains Putin's suggested changes:

Speaking before a special meeting of top government and regional leaders, Mr. Putin called for eliminating direct elections for Russia's 89 regional governors. Instead, he wants them to be nominated by himself and confirmed by local legislatures. He also advocated eliminating the district elections that account for half the composition of the 450-member lower house of Russia's parliament, or Duma, and virtually all its opposition members. Instead, all members would be elected through national party slates.

Why?

Mr. Putin has been under pressure to respond to recent attacks by terrorists demanding independence for the republic of Chechnya, especially the assault on a school in Beslan two weeks ago that left more than 300 dead, many of them children. After that attack, Mr. Putin said that the government had failed to protect its citizens and called for new approaches to law enforcement, which he said had been paralyzed by corruption.

But critics pointed out that yesterday's initiative mainly targeted regional governors and parliament, not Russia's notoriously ineffective police and intelligence services.

You're not alone if you don't see the connection between strangling democracy and fighting terrorism:

"This would be like Bush saying after Sept. 11 that from now on, governors will be elected by state assemblies rather than by the people," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few opposition legislators left in parliament after Kremlin-backed parties swept last year's elections. "What has this got to do with fighting terrorism? Putin is exploiting these terror attacks to strangle democracy and strengthen his personal power."

What Really Kills the Troops

What Really Kills the Troops? Accidents:

In the last two decades, the Department of Defense has reduced deaths in the military by more than half. That's deaths from accidents, not enemy action. For the last 35 years, accidents have been the most common cause of death for military personnel. In the early 1980s, it averaged 2,300 people killed a year (or about 70 per 100,000 personnel). For the last few years it�s averaged less than 30 per 100,000. Even during the last two wars in the Persian Gulf, combat deaths were far less of a problem than accidents. In 1991, combat deaths were 6.9 per 100,000 troops. This was eclipsed by deaths from illness (14.5) and suicide (12).

While the war in Iraq combat casualties get a lot of attention, they are still smaller than deaths from accidents (which are currently killing about a thousand troops a year.) Of course, if you are in Iraq, your risk of death due to combat is much higher (about 400 per 100,000), because only about twelve percent of the armed forces personnel are there.

TV Pictures Will Keep Getting Better as Pixels Multiply, Web Advances

According to TV Pictures Will Keep Getting Better as Pixels Multiply, Web Advances, we're within a few years of having televisions indistinguishable from reality:

International Business Machines makes a 22-inch display with nine million pixels — or 10 times the number in a current high-definition TV set. It's a specialized device for the engineering market, and it costs $6,000. That's a lot of money, for sure, but it's also a bargain compared with the $300,000 that the Lawrence Livermore Lab paid for the first model a few years back as an inducement to IBM to build the thing.

Mr. Bardsley says that for a 50-inch screen viewed from five feet away, nine million pixels are enough to fool the human eye. Any higher resolution would be overkill, he says, because the eye wouldn't be able to discern the extra information.

But besides ultrahigh resolution, the perfect display would also need to have twice the possible range of colors that today's sets have; contrast would need to be improved as well. And, of course, there would need to be a commensurate improvement in the cameras that take the pictures.

Of course, it's a perfectly realistic two-dimensional image we're discussing.

A Dog's History of America

Mark Derr's A Dog's History of America shares this darkly fascinating tidbit:

Indians, like many others, ate dogs. So apparently did the Spanish — as did many whites who became desperate for food as they worked their way to the West — but they had a crueler use for dogs: They were "specifically bred and trained to hunt down and disembowel Indians," and the Spanish followed the "practice of bringing along on any campaign chained Indian slaves as food for the dogs." They were known as "war dogs," and they brought terror everywhere they went.

On a more heroic note:

"A young mother was gathering beans in front of a newly built log house when she turned to fuss at her little dog for its persistent barking and saw that it was holding at bay a cougar sitting on a stump just twenty feet from her baby. The woman hastily scooped up her child and ran into the house to wait for her husband. He soon returned with his big dog and immediately tracked and killed the cougar. He found in its stomach the remains of their brave little dog."

Step Toward Universal Computing

Step Toward Universal Computing reports on a new "near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit":

Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run 'transparently' on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes.

Yeah, but how does it perform?

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game — a Linux version of Quake III — running on an Apple PowerBook.

This isn't entirely new:

One of the key breakthroughs is an "intermediate representation," a kind of lingua franca that gives the software the flexibility to translate from one platform to another.

Unlike most other emulators, QuickTransit translates blocks of code rather than a line at a time. In addition, it identifies and stores the most commonly executed code.

"It's like a translator versus an interpreter," said lead engineer Frank Weidel. "Instead of working on every chunk of code, QuickTransit translates a sentence, or a paragraph, at a time. That's how we get the performance."

Strange Patterns of Casualties in Iraq

From Strange Patterns of Casualties in Iraq:

In Iraq, American combat losses continue at a historically low level. Since March, 2003, American troops have suffered 7,900 casualties (including 976 dead.) This is an unprecedented killed to wounded ratio of 1:7. In past wars, the ration had been 1:4 or 1:5. American combat deaths over the Summer were 42 in June, 54 in July and 66 in August. There are the equivalent of three American combat divisions in Iraq, each running several hundred patrols and other combat operations each day. Never have combat divisions, operating in hostile territory, kept their casualties this low. The news media, concentrating on any losses as the story have generally missed the historical significance of the low casualties. The American armed forces have developed new equipment, weapons and tactics that have transformed combat operations in an unprecedented way. This is recognized within the military, but is generally ignored, or misunderstood, by the general media.

The health ministry announced that 2,956 people were killed and 11,669 injured because of anti-government violence and terrorism in the last four months. That's a death rate from the violence of 48 per year per 100,000 population. This is much higher than the death rate from crime in the United States, of 5.6 per 100,000. But lower than the rate of 58 in crime ridden South Africa. However, the rate in Iraq has more than tripled, from 15 per 100,000, earlier in the year. However, the fighting has been concentrated in a few areas, as have the casualties. Najaf, where the al Sadr gunmen fought police and American troops, and in Sunni Arab areas to the north where anti-government gunmen sought to retake control of the country. Najaf accounted for 18 percent of the dead. Baghdad accounted for 28 percent of the dead. Baghdad is the target of many terrorist attacks, as well as a large Shia population, and the source of most of the al Sadr gunmen. Baghdad was also the home of many of Sadam Hussein's most dedicated followers. Only ten percent of the casualties are women and children (who make up some two thirds of the population), indicating that the losses are largely from anti-government forces fighting, without much success, coalition troops.

Russia unveils Stalin spy service

Russia unveils Stalin spy service describes "a special exhibition in Moscow [that] marks the 60th anniversary of Smersh's founding." What is (or was) Smersh?

The security organ, set up during World War ll, was one of the most powerful and dreaded tools of the Soviet wartime regime.

Its name, taken from the Russian Smert Shpionam, or Death to Spies, was said to have been coined by Stalin himself.

Directly subordinated to the Soviet leader, it was used to infiltrate the Nazi secret services and to enforce order and loyalty on the war front.

I didn't realize there was a real Smersh. Ian Fleming's early Bond stories featured SMERSH (in ALL CAPS), but the movie versions (and later stories) featured the fictional SPECTRE.

On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents

On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents discusses Sgt. McCary's experiences as an intelligence officer in Iraq — now that he's back in the states. He's not your typical soldier:

Sgt. McCary graduated from Vassar College with a degree in French literature before enlisting in the Army in 2000. Before basic training he had never touched a gun in his life. Because he had a college degree and a knack for languages, the Army sent him to its Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., for Arabic instruction. He picked up the language so quickly that his instructors nicknamed him 'the sponge.'
[...]
In the field, Sgt. McCary learned other critical skills. One was the ability to lie. "If you are not a Muslim brother in this culture you are nothing, so I had to construct an entirely new working persona," he says. Though he has no Arab heritage, he tells Iraqis his mother is Lebanese. He sprinkles every conversation with asides such as "Praise be to God." When a local says he is afraid to talk because the mujahedeen will kill him, Sgt. McCary recites a phrase commonly used in Iraq: "A good Muslim fears only one person." Then the sergeant points to the sky. As part of the ritual, the other person says, "Allah."
[...]
Despite the setbacks, a year in Iraq has made Sgt. McCary and his battalion a smarter, tougher, more cynical fighting force. The same tank commanders who had never worked with a counterintelligence soldier before now go out of their way to request his presence on raids and patrols. Sgt. McCary's battalion commander nominated him recently for the Bronze Star.

"You couldn't design a better counter-insurgent," says Maj. John Nagl, who is third in command of Sgt. McCary's battalion. "He's interested in other cultures, willing to question his own beliefs and mores."

Germ Study Suggests Bloodletting May Work

Bacteria thrive on iron, which is why the "barbaric" custom of bloodletting may have worked. From Germ Study Suggests Bloodletting May Work:

University of Chicago microbiologists report Thursday in the journal Science that the staph germ — a leading cause of pneumonia and other infections — fuels itself with iron in a previously unknown way.

Early in staph infections, the germs blow open red blood cells. The Chicago researchers found staph then snatches their oxygen- and iron-carrying component, called heme, and discovered the genes that govern the process.

When they weakened those genes, staph no longer sickened worms or mice, said lead researcher Eric P. Skaar. Next step is hunting drugs to block staph's iron-stealing ability.
[...]
Now derided as a nonsensical if not barbaric custom, bloodletting was abandoned in the mid-20th century after antibiotics were invented.

But the mystery persists: "How could a procedure popular for 2,500 years have really been completely worthless?" Rouault asked.

Bloodletting was used for lots of reasons, many that "didn't make good sense," she stressed. But, searching old medical texts, she found that starting in 18th-century France, certain physicians advised it only at the start of a high-fever illness. Even in 1942, medicine's leading English-language textbook advised early bleeding for high-fever pneumonia.

War Games

Back in October of 1991, Dave Kopel & Glenn Reynolds wrote about the Afghans' supposed martial prowess — and Americans' supposed lack of martial prowess. They pointed to Americans' (or American geeks') experience with War Games:

So here's the funny thing. While the official American culture around, say, 1977, was revolted by anything military, a bunch of the nation's smartest young males — the "leaders of tomorrow" — were reading Panzer Leader and Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart's Strategy, and of course Sun Tzu's Art of War — which wargamers were reading long before it became a business-school cliché.

This was no accident. Many of those who founded the wargame publishing business feared that, with the anti-militarism caused by the Vietnam, and (later) with the adoption of the all-volunteer army, American society would become estranged from all things military, leaving ordinary citizens too ignorant to make meaningful democratic judgments where war is concerned. They hoped that realistic simulation games would teach important principles.

When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?

This Straight Dope Staff Report answers the question, When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?:

Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I'd be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.

That's if society collapses more-or-less instantaneously. With a little warning, the various power plants could last quite a while:

Now, let's address a scenario where the zombification process is gradual. If the operators and utilities had sufficient advance warning they could take measures to keep the power going for a while. The first thing would be to isolate key portions of the grid, reducing the interties and connections, and then cease power delivery altogether to areas of highest zombie density. After all, it's not like the zombies need light to read or electricity to play Everquest. Whole blocks and zones would be purposely cut off to reduce the potential drains (and to cope with downed lines from zombies climbing poles or driving trucks into transformers). Operators would work to create islands of power plants wherever possible, so if a plant were overrun by zombies and went down it wouldn't drag others down with it. In cooperation with regional reliability coordinators, the plant operators would improve plant reliability by disabling or eliminating non-critical alarm systems that might otherwise shut down a power plant, and ignoring many safety and emissions issues.

Fuel supply would eventually be a problem. Hydro plants would fare best, essentially having an unlimited fuel supply given normal rainfall, and could operate until some essential component failed or wore out. Nuclear plants could run for perhaps a year or more before they would need refueling. Refueling is a tricky operation requiring many specialized personnel, and it's doubtful that a nuclear plant could effectively refuel if 90% of the nuclear technicians and engineers in the country were running around glassy-eyed in the parking lot. Coal power plants on average have maybe 45-60 days' worth of coal on hand. If the power output of the plant were reduced, this could be stretched for six months or more, but eventually it would run out unless deliveries could be maintained. There are a few mine-mouth coal power plants in the U.S. that could conceivably run for years, provided enough miners and operators remained un-zombified. Natural gas plants might be the most vulnerable, since maintaining the gas wells, balancing the gas flow, and otherwise keeping the pipeline system intact requires considerable effort. In addition, most power plants have little or no gas storage available on-site, so a zombie situation could put natural gas plants in a real bind.

So, should we all switch to solar?

As to your final question, I can suggest a better tactic than relying on solar. Go to the abandoned hardware stores, load up a flatbed trailer with gasoline generators, and take them and a few dozen tanker trucks of gasoline to your house. You could have power for a long time, possibly years or more, until the zombies finally come for you.

Hating the Producers

In Hating the Producers, Arnold Kling discusses health-care spending — but first he describes the difference between right- and left-wing economists:

Right-wing economists tend to emphasize the benefits of private producers and the harms of government intervention. Left-wing economists do the opposite.

For example, recently left-wing economist Jeff Madrick argued that Wal-Mart causes harm by hiring workers at low wages. He suggested government solutions, such as raising the minimum wage and changing laws to make it easier for labor unions to organize.

For non-economists, hating producers like Wal-Mart is easy. However, it gets a lot trickier once you understand some economics. It is difficult, although not impossible, to use economic analysis to blame Wal-Mart for low wages.

My own thinking is that we should be happy with Wal-Mart, not only for lowering prices for consumers, but for finding employment for low-skilled workers. If those workers are being paid according to the value of their output, then artificially raising their wages will cause them to lose their jobs. On the other hand, if they are not being paid as much as the value of their output, then what they need are other employers willing to hire them. I would say that what they need are more Wal-Marts.

The City That Raised Itself From the Dead

The City That Raised Itself From the Dead tells of the rise and fall — and literal rise — of Galveston, Texas:

For some reason, the San Francisco earthquake (1906) and the great Johnstown flood (1889) have always captured the public's attention, but what happened at Galveston in the space of a few hours caused a death toll much higher than these two disasters combined.

Galveston in 1900 was America's biggest cotton port and the third busiest harbor in the country. It was said to have "more millionaires, street for street" than any other U.S. city. Its famous Strand was known as the "Wall Street of the Southwest" and its harbor was called the "Western Ellis Island" because it was second only to New York as a port of entry for immigrants. It seemed destined to become one of the largest centers of commerce and industry in the western United States.

Poised as it was on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston was also a part of the vast weather monitoring service of the recently-organized U.S. Weather Bureau. Dr. Isaac Cline was the chief local forecaster for Galveston, part of a network of 158 weather observatories across the country augmented by more than 2500 volunteer observers, and tied in by telegraph to numerous coastal stations, river monitoring stations and weather outposts in the West Indies.

When some of the city fathers had suggested that perhaps a barrier wall should be built along the coastal side of the island as a protection against hurricanes, Dr. Cline opposed the project as a waste of money. He characterized fears that a hurricane could endanger the city as "an absurd delusion." The idea had been abandoned. Dr. Cline, after all, was a highly trained weather expert.

Then an "x-storm," an extreme hurricane hit:

Dr. Cline raised the black and red hurricane flag at the Galveston weather station on Friday, September 7, but few people paid attention. Angry winds, precursors of the storm, blew late Friday and early Saturday. Galveston, an island about 30 miles long and two miles wide, was virtually at sea level. Flooding from the Gulf began early. By noon on Saturday southern and eastern parts of the city were under water. When night fell on September 8th winds were blowing at 80 miles per hour, hurling roof shingles and other debris through the streets.

By this time all four bridges leading off the island had been destroyed. The 37,000 residents of Galveston had no choice but to ride out the storm. One of the last communiqu�s from the city, read, "Gulf rising rapidly, half the city now under water�great loss of life must result."

Sometime before midnight the wind gauge at Dr. Cline's weather station recorded 100 miles per hour and then was blown away. The barometer dropped to 28.55, the lowest ever recorded at that time.

As the winds howled out of the darkness, the storm surge came. The highest point of ground on Galveston Island was 8.7 feet above sea level. The wall of water that roared out of the Gulf was 16 feet high. People on the roofs of taller buildings could hear the crashing sounds as houses and buildings around them were carried away.

By the early hours of September 9th the storm had passed. More than 2000 people had perished at Johnstown. About 700 would die six years later in San Francisco. The best estimates for Galveston range from a minimum of 6,000 to a maximum of 12,000, counting those lost in areas beyond the city. Among the dead, Dr. Cline's wife.

More than 3,600 buildings and houses had been destroyed. Damage estimates in today's dollars would be $700 million. Rotting bodies littered the streets and beaches creating a terrible stench in the summer heat. Attempts to load bodies onto barges, weight them down and bury them at sea went awry. Many of the corpses washed back to shore the following day. Cremation was the only practical solution. Mass funeral pyres glowed amid the devastation for more than a week.

It took some time for news of what had happened in Galveston to get out to the nation. When relief trains attempted to reach the city the engineers found the rails blocked by debris and piles of corpses.

Then Galveston literally rose again:

Three civil engineers, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley, supervised the amazing work. Quarter-mile-square sections of the city were enclosed with dikes. All structures within these sections were jacked up. Even the gas, water and sewer lines were raised. Then sand from the Galveston ship channel was pumped into each section through huge pipe lines until it was filled to the new level.

It took 16 million cubic yards of sand (imagine one million dump trucks) to raise 500 city blocks, some just a few inches, others almost a foot, above sea level.

Another Kind of Blowback

Another Kind of Blowback opens with a ch