Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias

Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias looks at a number of literary dystopias — Brave New World, 1984, We, A Handmaid's Tale — and finds one central similarity:

Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply made unattainable.

Cognitive Disconnect

Cognitive Disconnect shares some of Dr. Ancel "K-ration" Keys' diet and starvation study findings:

In the 1940s when he realized that starvation 'was going to be a huge problem' in war-torn countries, Keys led the first scientific studies of calorie restrictions, at the University of Minnesota. Their study was known as the Minnesota Starvation Study and the results were published in the legendary two-volume, Biology of Human Starvation. Decades later, it is still the definitive work on the subject. "I doubt another of its kind will ever be done," he said. Today, there are rights for human research subjects and it would be seen as too cruel and life-threatening.

Young male volunteers, all carefully selected for being especially psychologically and socially well-adjusted, good-humored, motivated, active and healthy, were put on diets meant to mimic what starving Europeans were enduring, of about 1,600 calorie/day — but which included lots of fresh vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean meats. The calories were more than many weight loss diets prescribe and precisely what's considered "conservative" treatment for obesity today. What they were actually studying, of course, was dieting — our bodies can't tell the difference if they're being starved voluntarily or involuntarily! Dr. Keys and colleagues then painstakingly chronicled how the men did during the 6 months of dieting and for up to a year afterwards, scientifically defining "the starvation syndrome."

As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish — with the men initially the most fit showing the greatest deterioration, according to Keys. The men's resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.

But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were profound. So much so that Keys called it "semistarvation neurosis." The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. �They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating.

Many of these traits are familiar with those who've spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually symptoms of starvation and restrictive eating, said David M. Garner, PhD., director of River Centre Clinic in Sylvania, Ohio.
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The extreme physical and mental effects Keys observed led to his famous quote: "Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren't feeding them is perfect hogwash."

Remembering a Head-Turning, Neck-Snapping Year for Cars

In Remembering a Head-Turning, Neck-Snapping Year for Cars, Ralph Kinney Bennett looks back at 1955:

Detroit would produce almost 8 million cars in the '55 model year, a whopping 44 percent increase over 1954. Luxury extras like automatic transmissions became more commonplace, ordered in 7 out of 10 new cars. Sale of air conditioned cars (an almost unimaginable luxury to most people at the time) would more than triple, although the 184,027 thus equipped were still a small fraction of total sales.

What I most remember is how old previous model cars began to look once the '55s came out. Take a look at a 1999 car now, or even a '95. They don't seem that outdated in comparison to today's models. But take a look at a 1955 Chevy and a 1949 model. You'll see what I mean.

Pictures By Telegraph

Pictures By Telegraph, from Pearson's Magazine, April 1900, describes the then-cutting-edge telediagraph, an early fax machine:

The equipment consists of two machines, almost identical in construction, the first being called the "transmitter," the second the "receiver." Each is provided with an eight-inch cylinder, which may be made to revolve by a delicate system of clockwork so finely regulated that both instruments work together to a nicety.

Above each cylinder rests a fine platinum needle, or stylus, not unlike the point in a telegraph key. A sheet of tin-foil, six inches by eight inches, ready to wrap round the transmitter's cylinder, and a sheet of ordinary carbon manifold-copying paper of the same dimensions, which, when placed between two sheets of blank paper, is to be wrapped round the receiver's cylinder — these complete the chief requirements.
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With a photograph of the subject before him, the artist draws its duplicate on the sheet of tin-foil, leaving a margin of about a half-inch on all sides. For this work, either pen or brush may be used; but, of first importance, the liquid must have more consistency than ink, and must be a non-conductor of electricity. An alcoholic solution of shellac is found most suitable for the purpose.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Dads in the 'Hood

Dad's in the 'Hood reports the good news that more inner-city fathers are sticking around to raise their children. It also reports some bad news:

In 2001, BET.com encouraged visitors to post Father's Day greetings. Organizers assumed that they would see a Hallmark fest of "I love you" or "I miss you." Instead they got a "venting session": "I hate you," "To all my deadbeat dads out there, I just want to say, thanks for nothing," and "That bastard forgot that I even existed," contributors railed.

The Classics in the Slums

According to The Classics in the Slums, by Jonathan Rose, academics like Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, are wrong. It is not an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these [underprivileged] people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." In fact, "Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music." For example:

Will Crooks (b. 1852), a cooper living in extreme poverty in East London, once spent tuppence on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled: "What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece." Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until her last illness, at age 54. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and "mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read." Margaret Perry (b. 1922) wrote of her mother, a Nottingham dressmaker: "The public library was her salvation. She read four or five books a week all her life but had no one to discuss them with. She had read all the classics several times over in her youth and again in later years, and the library had a job to keep her supplied with current publications. Married to a different man, she could have been an intelligent and interesting woman."

In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare could still attract enthusiastic, rowdy working-class audiences, who commented loudly about the quality of the performances. Caravans of barnstorming actors brought the plays to isolated mining villages. In response to popular demand, Birmingham's Theatre Royal devoted 30 percent of its repertoire to the Bard and other classic dramatists. In 1862, a theater manager provoked a near-riot when he attempted to substitute a modern comedy for an announced production of Othello.

Shakespeare provided a political script for labor leaders like J. R. Clynes (b. 1869), who rose from the textile mills of Oldham to become deputy leader of the House of Commons. In his youth he drew inspiration from the "strange truth" he discovered in Twelfth Night: "Be not afraid of greatness." "What a creed!" he marveled. "How it would upset the world if men lived up to it." Later, reading Julius Caesar, "the realisation came suddenly to me that it was a mighty political drama" about the class struggle, "not just an entertainment." Once he overawed a stubborn employer by reciting an entire scene from the play: Clynes, as a friend put it, was "the only man who ever settled a trade dispute by citing Shakespeare." Elected to Parliament in 1906, he read A Midsummer Night's Dream while awaiting the returns.

An argument for reducing the duration of copyrights:

Working-class autodidacts read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A 1940 survey found that while 55 percent of working-class adults read books, they rarely bought new books. An autodidact could build up an impressive library by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints such as Everyman's Library, but these offered only yesterday's authors. Thus Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, and Greek philosophy. There was one common denominator among these authors: all were dead. "Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me," Keating explained, but that did not bother him terribly. "Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation."

Nature, Nurture and Income

In Nature, Nurture and Income, Alex Tabarrok examines "a fascinating new paper" by Bruce Sacerdote, What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?

Holt's International Children's Services places children, primarily Koreans, with families in the United States. Holt has an interesting proviso to their adoption contract, conditional on being accepted into the program, children are randomly assigned. Sacerdote has collected data from children who were adopted between 1970-1980, and thus who today are in their mid 20's or 30's, and their adoptive parents.
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The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children is flat in parent income. What does this mean?
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What do parents transmit to their biological children but not to their adopted children? Genes. When we observe, as we do, that low-income parents tend to have low-income children and high-income parents tend to have high-income children we should not bemoan the inequities of nurture but rather the inequities of nature.

First Measured Century

James Q. Wilson is interviewed on crime in the 1960s in the First Measured Century:

Between 1963 and the early 1970s, the rate of violent crime more or less tripled in the United States. By "violent crime" I mean murder, manslaughter, and robbery and assault. So we had a tripling of the crime rate at a time when the country was by and large prosperous; [and,] except for Vietnam, more or less peaceful; in which the unemployment rates, even among African American adolescents, was really quite low.

And this change occurred in part because the population was getting younger, though nobody had predicted this in advance. In retrospect it turned out that the youth of the population does contribute to the crime rate. But that wasn't the whole story. Our population getting younger probably explains no more than 15 or 20 or 25 percent of the increase.

The rest of it was explained by two other factors: one that is easy to describe — namely, we had stopped sending people to prison. The prison population in the 1960s declined. It was lower at the end [of the decade] than it was at the beginning, even though the crime rate was going up.

The other is harder to describe and impossible to measure. And that is the ethos, the culture of the country, had changed. The notion of "do your own thing," "strike out on your own," "turn on, tune out, drop out." These slogans, this attitude of radical self-indulgence, had affected a significant fraction of the population, and this weakened the ordinary social constraints that were operating on people.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.)

Great composers scored on language

Fascinating. From Great composers scored on language:

They found that English had more of a swing than French, a rhythm produced by a tendency in English to cut some vowels short while stressing others. The melodies of the two languages also differed, with pitch varying far more in spoken English than French.

The team then did the same kind of analysis on music, comparing the rhythm and melody of English classical music from composers such as Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with that of French composers including Debussy, Fauré and Roussel. "The music differs in just the same way as the languages," said Dr Patel. "It is as if the music carries an imprint of the composer's language."

Greeks Statues Weren't White

Michael Blowhard points to some images of replica Greek statues:

OK, so ancient Greek statues weren't white. We know that. They were painted, or gold-leafed, or something. Very interesting. But what did they actually look like? Here's the answer, or one possible answer anyway. And talk about gaudy! What I'm most reminded of is the decor in NYC pizza parlors.

A Philistine Screed on Philistinism

A Philistine Screed on Philistinism opens with "a wry line, aimed at the funny bone of the elite":

"No passion in the world," H.G. Wells declared, "is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

Another witty bit of intellectual condescension:

I remember one snobby professor who described the standards of his university to new faculty members with a practiced line.

"The admissions requirements of ____ University," he liked to intone in comradely fashion, "can be found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty."

Ostensibly, Carlin Romano is reviewing Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism, but he has more to say on the topic of Philistines than on the lackluster text. I'd never heard of Hubbard's The Philistine:

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), editor of The Philistine monthly magazine from 1895 to 1915. (At one point it boasted a circulation of more than 100,000 and published such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane.) A soap salesman and state-side admirer of William Morris who started the fabulously successful and semi-communal Roycrofters printing operation in Aurora, N.Y., Hubbard grew wealthy writing and publishing more than seven million, well, philistine words.

His aphorisms exuded middle-class, can-do common sense, apotheosized hard work and efficiency, and bristled at preachy promulgation or nit-picking by cultural mandarins. "The world is moving so fast these days," Hubbard wrote, "that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it."

"A committee," he observed, "is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour." Some credit him with the immortal, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Hubbard's business credo proclaimed, "I believe that when I make a sale I make a friend." Perhaps more tellingly, for the history of philistinism from Arnold to shop-to-drop America today, he asserted, "I believe in sunshine, fresh air, spinach, applesauce, laughter, buttermilk, babies, bombazine, and chiffon, always remembering that the greatest word in the English language is 'Sufficiency.'"

A Thanksgiving Lesson

A Thanksgiving Lesson from Alex Tabarrok (of Marginal Revolution) and Governor William Bradford (of the early Pilgrim settlement):

It's one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society. Of course, they were soon starving to death.

Fortunately, 'after much debate of things,' Governor William Bradford ended corn collectivism, decreeing that each family should keep the corn that it produced. In one of the most insightful statements of political economy ever penned, Bradford described the results of the new and old systems.

[Ending corn collectivism] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

Among Bradford's many insights it's amazing that he saw so clearly how collectivism failed not only as an economic system but that even among godly men "it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them." And it shocks me to my core when he writes that to make the collectivist system work would have required "great tyranny and oppression." Can you imagine how much pain the twentieth century could have avoided if Bradford's insights been more widely recognized?

Math Whiz Breaks Calculation Record

Whoa. From Math Whiz Breaks Calculation Record:

A 38-year-old with degrees in psychology, education and computer science needed only 11.8 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head, setting a new record, organizers said.
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"I first think of an elegant problem-solving algorithm and the result comes immediately," said Mittring, who beat the previous record of 13.55 seconds, set by the Frenchman Alexis Lemaire in 2002, according to organizers of the Tuesday night event.

Scientist Who Created K Ration Diet Dies

What a fascinating guy! From Scientist Who Created K Ration Diet Dies:

Ancel Keys, the University of Minnesota scientist who invented the K ration diet used by soldiers in World War II and who linked high cholesterol and fatty diets to heart disease, has died at the age of 100.
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Keys was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., and was an adventurous child. He worked in a lumber camp, shoveled bat droppings in an Arizona cave and mined for gold in Colorado, all before finishing high school. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1922, but took time off to sail to China as a crewman aboard the liner President Wilson.

He returned to college, earning a bachelor's degree in economics and political science and a master's degree in zoology at the University of California. By 1930 he had a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

But his career didn't take shape until he went to Copenhagen to work with Nobel Prize winner August Krogh, a physiologist � someone who studies bodily processes and function. Inspired, Keys earned a second Ph.D. in physiology from Cambridge University in England and became an instructor at Harvard University.

In 1935 he launched his first exotic study, on the effects of high altitude on the human body. The next year he was lured to the University of Minnesota, where he began studying the physical differences between athletes and nonathletes.

Eventually he built his lab beneath the university's Memorial Stadium.

In 1941, Keys was asked to help develop an Army ration that soldiers could carry in combat. He purchased supplies, such as hard biscuits, dry sausage and chocolate bars, at a Minneapolis market. When the Army mass-produced the packages, he was surprised to see them marked with the letter K, for Keys. The K ration was born.

During World War II he also served as a special assistant to the secretary of war.

Afterward, Keys conducted one of his most famous studies, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. He fed 36 volunteers a "semistarvation" diet, mirroring the conditions found in occupied Europe. The men lost an average of 25 percent of their weight, and Keys found that their hearts shrank, endurance fell and personalities changed. The study, he concluded, held a powerful lesson for those in charge of rebuilding postwar Europe: "Starved people cannot be taught democracy."

Keys also noted that deaths from heart disease dropped dramatically in countries where food supplies had run short during the war. And he started looking for the connection.

He found his answer through a study of 286 middle-aged businessmen from Minneapolis and St. Paul that began in 1946. He concluded that those who suffered heart attacks had high levels of cholesterol in their bloodstreams. And he pinned that on their high-fat diets.

Crossing the Fossa Regia

I wouldn't have sought out a Tunisian travelog, but I enjoyed Michael J. Totten's Crossing the Fossa Regia nonetheless:

Tunisia isn't an island, but it might as well be. If you visit you will arrive the same way you would an isolated coastal town in Alaska — by boat or by plane. No Western traveler arrives from the border states. You won't take the bus from anarchic Algeria, nor will you pull up at a remote border post in a rental car from Libya. Tunisians have all but walled themselves off from the fundamentalism and fanaticism that surround them. They look instead to their more like-minded neighbors across the Mediterranean to the north. You will think of Europe, too, if you go.

Tunis, the capital, is a cosmopolitan mix:

After checking into our hotel, my wife Shelly and I headed straight for the old city — the ancient Tunis medina. We walked the maze of twisting streets, carpet stalls, cafes, shuttered windows, arched passageways, minarets, and secret paths. Turkish lamps lit the darkened covered corners of the souk. Potted flowers in hanging baskets added delicate touches of color and life. The aromas of orange oil and curling smoke from burning incense were amplified by the warm heavy air. The muezzin's haunting call to prayer from the Great Mosque in the center was the perfect grace note. This was the East in its glory, the most intoxicating place in the capital.

We left the medina through the arch to the east and found ourselves in the French imperialist quarter known today as the Cit� Nouvelle. In the space of less than 100 feet we walked from the Middle East to France, and we did it without leaving Africa.

And it's fairly liberal:

Some conservative women did wear the hijab over their hair, but they were distinctly in the minority. Men wore collared button-up shirts and young women competed to see who could resemble hot young French models the most.

Despite Shelly's blue eyes and red hair, she didn't get stared at much. If you want to turn heads in Tunis, dress like a Saudi. While sitting at the Caf� de Paris on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the Cit� Nouvelle's own Champs Elysee, three women walked past wearing black head-to-toe chadors that covered up all but their eyes. I leaned to the right to get a view of everyone else on the street. Almost every man and most of the women turned their heads to gawk at the three wraiths in black.

Then they crossed the Fossa Regia into the Sahara:

Matmata sat atop an eerie upland moonscape. The Berbers went underground more than a thousand years ago to escape the infernal heat of the Sahara. You would, too, if you didn't have central air. You would tunnel into the walls with your hands if you had to.

The underground "troglodyte" houses were a cool 75 degrees at midday. George Lucas thought them the perfect setting for Star Wars. Both Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi lived on the desert planet Tatooine (which is the name of a real town a few miles away) in caves tunneled out from the center of open-air pits. Not everyone in Matmata lived underground, though. Most of the buildings were top-side and — whenever possible — were cooled down the usual way.

In Tunis the mosques were architectural masterpieces, with soaring minarets, marble floors, Roman columns, and intricately tiled blue and white walls. The mosque in Matmata was made of the same white- and lime-washed adobe as the walls inside the Berber houses. It was primitive and misshapen as though it were a gigantic version of a clay mosque made by a child in art class.

Chickens, donkeys, and even camels ran loose in the streets. It was hard to believe there was another street in the same country that made me think of a less-fancy Champs Elysee. Some people lived in one-room caves even in the middle of town — the Berber version of tin shacks. The gender apartheid was total. The number of women we saw while in town: zero. We did, however, see a bloody fly-blown goat's head on the sidewalk.

The backwardness and extreme conservatism was as exhausting as the heat. The streets full of men had an edge to them, even though every last one was kind, generous, and embarrassingly friendly.

Then they visited the Middle East's version of Miami:

The Zone Touristique was a bit like Las Vegas and a lot like Cancun. Vaguely Middle Eastern-themed hotels, some shaped like castles and Berber ksars, fronted the horseshoe-shaped bay. They catered to hip young Eurotourists who mostly came to Tunisia for the beach. I saw handbills advertising nightclubs and meet-markets. A large wooden sign just a block from our hotel informed me that Sousse's sister city back in the States was Miami.

The amount of wealth in a given place in Tunisia seemed to me directly proportional to its amount of contact with people from somewhere else, even if that contact was in the past. Souse benefited from being inside Rome's Fossa Regia, more recently from restoration by the French who fell in love with the city, and currently by an enormous injection of cash in the form of tourist Euros every single day of the year.

When Every Child Is Good Enough

The Incredibles has spurred discussion on the notion that every child is special. From When Every Child Is Good Enough:

Competition has long been out of fashion at education schools, as indicated in a 1997 survey of 900 of their professors by Public Agenda, a nonprofit public opinion research group. Only a third of the professors considered rewards like honor rolls to be valuable incentives for learning, while nearly two-thirds said schools should avoid competition.

To some critics, that cooperative philosophy is one reason that so many boys like Dash are bored at school. "Professors of education think you can improve society by making people less competitive," said Christina Hoff Sommers, author of "The War Against Boys" and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "But males are wired for competition, and if you take it away there's little to interest them in school."

In his new book, "Hard America, Soft America," Michael Barone puts schools in the soft category and warns that they leave young adults unprepared for the hard world awaiting them in the workplace. "The education establishment has been too concerned with fostering kids' self-esteem instead of teaching them to learn and compete," he said.

The No Child Left Behind Act was an attempt to put more rigor into the system by punishing schools whose students don't pass standardized tests, but it has had unintended consequences for high achievers. Administrators have been cutting funds for gifted-student programs and concentrating money and attention on the failing students.

"In practice, No Child Left Behind has meant No Child Gets Ahead for gifted students," said Joyce Clark, a planner in the Pittsburgh public schools' gifted program. "There's no incentive to worry about them because they can pass the tests."

"The Incredibles" might take comfort from a recent report, "A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students," by the John Templeton Foundation. It summarizes research showing that gifted children thrive with more advanced material and describes their current frustration in prose that sounds like Dash: "When they want to fly, they are told to stay in their seats. Stay in your grade. Know your place. It's a national scandal."

But if they do fly, what happens to the children left on the ground? One of the report's authors, Nicholas Colangelo, a professor at the University of Iowa who is an expert in gifted education, pointed to research indicating the left-behind do not suffer academically or emotionally.

Brad Bird wisdom:

"Wrong-headed liberalism seeks to give trophies to everyone just for existing," he said. "It seems to render achievement meaningless. That's a weird goal."

He sounded very much like Professor Colangelo, who says that children want to compete and can cope with defeat a lot better than adults imagine. "Life hurts your feelings," Mr. Bird said. "I think people whine about stuff too much. C'mon, man, just get up and do it."

Baby Dies After Her Arms Are Severed

I don't know what to say. From Baby Dies After Her Arms Are Severed:

But, on Monday, authorities discovered a grisly scene at the family's apartment after the child's father called a day-care center, and asked them to check on his wife and daughter.

Day-care workers called 911 after talking to the mother; an operator then called Schlosser.

Asked if there was an emergency, Schlosser calmly responded 'Yes,' according to 911 tapes released by police.

'Exactly what happened?' the 911 operator asked.

'I cut her arms off,' Schlosser replied, as the hymn 'He Touched Me' played in the background.

'You cut her arms off?' he repeated.

'Uh huh,' she answered.

Five Killed in Hunting Incident in Wisconsin

Crazy. From Five Killed in Hunting Incident in Wisconsin:

A trespassing deer hunter in Wisconsin opened fire without warning on other hunters when they asked him to leave, killing five and wounding three, police said on Monday.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minnesota, a member of that city's Hmong community, emptied his SKS semiautomatic rifle into the hunter who confronted him on Sunday and others who had come to his aid, Sawyer County Sheriff James Meier told a news conference.
[...]
He said Vang apparently got lost, asked for directions and later wandered onto a 400-acre parcel of private land where "he found an empty deer stand and crawled up and occupied it." Hunters often build platforms called stands from which they watch for deer to appear within shooting range.

Meier said a hunter using the land saw Vang in the stand, radioed others in his party and said he was going to ask the intruder to leave. The land owner and others in the party arrived shortly thereafter, the sheriff said, and Vang after walking about 40 yards "turned and he opened fire on the group" after apparently removing the telescopic sight from the rifle.

Four men and one woman were killed. Three other men were wounded, one of whom remained in critical condition on Monday.

One of the victims had noticed the number of the hunting license tag Vang was wearing and scrawled it in dust on an all-terrain vehicle the party was using. That, along with a physical description, led to Vang's arrest, with the help of two other hunters, when he emerged from the woods later, Meier said.

The magazine and chamber of the rifle Vang was carrying were empty, the sheriff said. The rifle can hold 20 rounds.

In case you weren't aware, "About 75,000 Hmong have settled in Minnesota in the last 30 years," as refugees from Laos.

The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World

The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World explores the rift between American and European points of view:

Opinion polls taken before, during, and after the war show two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. Americans and Europeans disagree about the role of international law and international institutions and about the nebulous but critical question of what confers legitimacy on international action. These diverging world views predate the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush, although both may have deepened and hardened the transatlantic rift into an enduring feature of the international landscape.

Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. I wonder why that would be...

In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War

Some scary combat reporting, from In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War:

Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.

As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.

"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"

With that, the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their way up the stairs.

After four attempts, Corporal Miller's lifeless body emerged from the tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to their base.

"I was trying to be careful, but I was trying to get him out, you know what I'm saying?" Lance Cpl. Michael Gogin, 19, said afterward.

So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the eyes.

For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen armed conflicts, including the war in Iraq since its start in March 2003, the fighting seen while traveling with a frontline unit in Falluja was a qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of battle.

From the first rockets vaulting out of the city as the marines moved in, the noise and feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at other times, hardly real at all. The intimacy of combat, this plunge into urban warfare, was new to this generation of American soldiers, but it is a kind of fighting they will probably see again: a grinding struggle to root out guerrillas entrenched in a city, on streets marked in a language few American soldiers could comprehend.

The price for the Americans so far: 51 dead and 425 wounded, a number that may yet increase but that already exceeds the toll from any battle in the Iraq war.

More:

The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working their way through Falluja's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their backs.

In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including 6 dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a one-in-four chance of being wounded or killed in little more than a week.

The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and as new as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city at night, firing at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back to the base.

The glow of the insurgents' flares, throwing daylight over a landscape to help them spot their targets: us.

The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as tracer rounds ricocheted above.

The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and the explosion when it strikes.

The screams of the marines when one of their comrades, Cpl. Jake Knospler, lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.

"No, no, no!" the marines shouted as they dragged Corporal Knospler from the darkened house where the bomb went off. It was 2 a.m., the sky dark without a moon. "No, no, no!"

Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.

Homegrown terror

According to Homegrown terror, many of the greatest terrorist threats to America aren't from foreign Islamists:

On April 10, 2003, a team of federal agents armed with a search warrant entered a storage unit in a small Texas town and were stunned to find a homemade hydrogen cyanide device — a green metal military ammo box containing 800 grams of pure sodium cyanide and two glass vials of hydrochloric acid. The improvised weapon was the product of 62-year-old William Joseph Krar, an accomplished gunsmith, weapons dealer, and militia activist from New Hampshire who had moved his operations to east central Texas just 18 months earlier.
[...]
Along with the sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid, and glacial acetic acid, Krar and Bruey's armory included nearly 100 assorted firearms, three machine guns, silencers, 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 60 functional pipe bombs, a remote-controlled briefcase device ready for explosive insertion, a homemade landmine, grenades, 67 pounds of Kinepak solid binary explosives (ammonium nitrate), 66 tubes of Kinepak binary liquid explosives (nitromethane), military detonators, trip wire, electric and non-electric blasting caps, and cases of military atropine syringes.

The storage unit also contained an extensive library of required reading for the serious terrorist: U.S. military and CIA field manuals for improvised munitions, weapons, and unconventional warfare; handbooks on assault rifle conversions to full-auto and manufacturing silencers; formulas for poisons and chemical and biological weapons; descriptions of safety precautions in handling; and information on means of deployment. Many of the same easily acquired, open-source materials, translated into Arabic, were found in Al Qaeda terrorist manuals recovered in Afghanistan and Europe.
[...]
His activities were being monitored when, on January 11, 2003, Krar was arrested by a Tennessee state trooper in the course of a routine traffic stop on the outskirts of Nashville. Searching Krar's rental car, Trooper William Gregory found a plastic bag containing "seven marijuana cigarettes, one syringe of unknown substance, one white bottle with an unknown white substance, 40 wine-like bottles of unknown liquid," as well as two pistols, 16 knives, a stun gun, a smoke grenade, three military-style atropine injections, 260 rounds of ammunition, handcuffs, thumb cuffs, fuse ropes, binoculars, and "other various close hand-to-hand combat items." Gregory also found Krar's passport, a birth certificate, a California credit union card for "William Fritz Hoffner," and a Christian missionary identification card with Krar's photo and the name "W. F. Hoffner." There were also other documents, letters to IDC America, and four pages of what appeared to be a clandestine operations plan for cross-country travel and communications. Gregory busted Krar on marijuana possession, took him into custody, and impounded the car.

Google Scholar

Google's new Google Scholar ("Stand on the shoulders of giants") search engine might make academic research tolerable:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Undergraduates Study Much Less Than Professors Expect, Survey of Student 'Engagement' Says

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the latest National Survey of Student Engagement:

Only about 11 percent of full-time students say they spend more than 25 hours per week preparing for their classes — the amount of time that faculty members say is necessary to succeed in college. Forty-four percent spend 10 hours or less studying.

Yet students' grades do not suggest that they are unprepared for their academic work: About 40 percent of students say they earn mostly A's, with 41 percent reporting that they earn mostly B's.

Rethinking doomsday

Rethinking doomsday summarizes a number of doomsday scenarios, their likelihoods, and their likely consequences. The good news is that the media have been overblowing the threats.

This anecdote about nuclear reactor security didn't put me at ease though:

Could intruders force their way into a reactor to wreak havoc? Past incidents have demonstrated that one need not have sophisticated plans or skills in order to gain some level of access to a nuclear plant. In 1993, a mentally ill man drove his mother's station wagon past the guarded entrance at Three Mile Island (TMI). Although he was driving at about 35 miles per hour, the surveillance cameras couldn't swivel fast enough to keep up with his car. The intruder drove through a fence, then a roll-up door, and into the turbine building, where he got out of his car and hid before he was arrested four hours later. Fortunately, his intentions were not malicious.

Eliica eight-wheeler

The British Auto Express looks at the new Eliica eight-wheeler from inventor Hiroshi Shimizu:

Called the Eliica — short for Electric Lithium-Ion battery Car — this radical 800bhp eight-wheeler from Japan is proof that electric vehicles can be fast and fun to drive, too. Boasting a four-second 0-60mph sprint and seven-second 0-100mph time, the Eliica is faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo.

Electric motors offer tremenous torque right off the line, so it's no surprise that an electric car can out-accelerate a Porsche 911 Turbo. The problem with electric cars is that they have very little range, and batteries are expensive and heavy.

Once you're used to a roaring internal combustion engine, the electric motor feels odd:

At our drive at Keio University near Tokyo, we punched the 'D' button on the dash, pointed the car down the road and flattened the gas pedal. With a faintly audible whirr of eight 100bhp in-wheel motors, the 0-60mph sprint was smooth, effortless, quiet — and surreal. The mind-boggling acceleration was on a par with that of a 500bhp GT racing car. Yet the lack of a transmission meant there were no jerky cog swaps as we were thrust back in our seat by an incredible 0.8Gs.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

Roger Ebert's Review of National Treasure

Roger Ebert's Review of National Treasure brings back some of the biting sarcasm:

'National Treasure' is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

Ebert considers the whole thing a rip-off of The Da Vinci Code — which he didn't exactly like:

I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code.

Jayhawk Down

In Jayhawk Down, Nick Gillespie insightfully points out that the cost of living reflects both supply and demand — that is, "Economic freedom may be just another word for nothing else to do":

Living in Huntsville and, less dramatically, in Oxford taught me that the price of a house didn't simply reflect the cost of living but also the demand for living in a given area. If you can't move a five bedroom house at $100,000, there ain't a lot of living going on.

Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine

Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine explains why Jews were so successful in the early Soviet Union:

The story of the Jews in the early Soviet Union is similar to the story of the Jews in America. That is, they were especially successful in the realms of education, journalism, medicine, and other professions that were central to the functioning of Soviet society, including science.

Jews in the Soviet Union were much more literate than any other group, they were untainted by any association with the imperial regime, and they seem to have been very enthusiastic about what the Communist Party was doing. This was to some extent a conscious commitment to ideology, but mostly it was just because there were no more legal barriers against Jews. The doors opened, and they flooded in and did exceedingly well in the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s.

My belief is that you can�t understand the second part of the Jewish story in Russia — the anti-Semitic policies, and what happens to Soviet Jews later, their desire to emigrate, for example — unless you know the first part of the story, which is mostly about amazing success.

Notes from Antiquity

Notes from Antiquity explains that Greek poems and plays were actually musicals:

Greek poets and dramatists regularly set their work to music themselves, and from at least the fifth century B.C. on they used a highly sophisticated system of musical notation. The very idea of poetry, in fact, originally tended to imply music, and Athenian tragedy at its artistic peak, in the fifth century B.C., was a complex combination of poetic text, solo and choral song, recitation with instrumental accompaniment, and dance. This has an unsettling if little-recognized implication: watching a play by Euripides or reading poetry by Sappho is perhaps as incomplete an experience today as watching a 'play' by Wagner or reading 'poetry' by Stephen Sondheim would be.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.)

How Pixar conquered the planet

How Pixar conquered the planet examines the most successful film studio of all time:

In Hollywood, though, figuring out Pixar's secret has become a matter of panicky necessity. Since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computer-animated feature film, the company has had an unbroken record of triumphs, as popular with critics as the box office, resulting in 17 Oscars and sufficient millions to make Pixar, movie for movie, the most successful studio of any kind in the history of cinema. (The Incredibles took $70.7m [£38m] in its first three days in America, more than the rest of that weekend's top 10 put together.) Other animation studios, saddled with a string of flops, have been left to glower from the sidelines - with the exception of Disney, the grandfather of them all, thanks to a deal under which it provided most of the financing for Pixar's hits.

At Pixar, the work is tremendously technical and time-consuming — yet gleefully childish:

Telling a good story in animated form, though, requires a particularly bizarre kind of personality — an equal mix of childishness and deep, very adult patience. Pixar's offices are carefully calibrated to nurture the requisite eccentricity. The animation team work not in cubicles but in miniature open-fronted wooden cottages, each individually furnished by their occupants with a clashing variety of leopardskin sofas and extensive toy car collections. (In a detail that epitomises Pixar's alchemical knack for turning freewheeling creativity into profit, the cottages were actually cheaper than standard-issue office cubicles.)

Days begin with an hour-long "sweatbox", where the movie's director gathers the animators and critiques their latest shots in front of the others. But for the most part, the nuts and bolts of the work is done inside the cottages, at computer screens, as artists painstakingly manipulate hundreds of points on a character's body, spending whole days on shots that could last for no more than 10 frames.

So true:

It is an article of faith at Pixar that trying to make your animated characters look as realistic as possible is as pointless as it is difficult. [...] "There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail — to create photographically real humans," says Brad Bird, the writer and director of The Incredibles and, previously, The Iron Giant. "To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What's wonderful about the medium of animation isn't recreating reality. It's distilling it."

What's wonderful about the medium of animation isn't recreating reality. It's distilling it. More Brad Bird wisdom:

"Really, really little kids should not see this movie ," says Bird, who wrote and directed the film, and provided the voice for its funniest character, Edna, a fashion designer to the superheroes. "They should wait till they get older. We're getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don't want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old."

Bird makes no effort to disguise his anger at critics who suggest the movie, brilliant though it undoubtedly is, may fail as a result of failing to cater properly to an audience of young children. "I reject that whole point of view — that animation is a children's medium," he says. "The way people talk about it is, well, hey, it's a good thing I have kids, because now I get to see this. Well, hey, no, man! You can just go and see it. There's no other art form that is defined in such a narrow way. It's narrowminded, and I can't wait for it to die."

The Bell Curve After Ten Years

In "You Have To Tell The Truth" — The Bell Curve After Ten Years, Steve Sailer presents "ten points about The Bell Curve that remain important today." His fourth point stands out: Contrary to the detractors' myth, relatively little of The Bell Curve concerns race.

The first 126 pages described "the emergence of a cognitive elite" via the higher education system. The heart of the book is the next 142 pages on "cognitive classes and social behavior," which examines the impact of IQ on poverty, schooling, unemployment, family, crime, and so forth. Here, Herrnstein and Murray looked only at data drawn from non-Hispanic whites — to avoid confusing the effect of IQ with that of race.

Then, from p. 269 to p. 315, comes the much-denounced Chapter 13 on "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability." Murray and Herrnstein carefully step through the evidence, pro and con, and reach the following judicious conclusion:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

That's it — the conclusion to the chapter that launched a thousand screeds. Not surprisingly, it's almost never quoted.

Diversity in Academia?

From Diversity in Academia?:

The New York Times reports on new survey research by Dan Klein on the voting behavior of academics. Anthropologists are comfortable living with cannibals in South America but they vote Democrat 30 to 1. Economists are among the least 'biased', they vote Democrat to Republican at about 3 to 1.

Angry Greeks Deny Alexander the Great Was Bisexual

Sigh. Angry Greeks Deny Alexander the Great Was Bisexual:

A group of Greek lawyers are threatening to sue Warner Bros. film studios and Oliver Stone, director of the widely anticipated film 'Alexander,' for suggesting Alexander the Great was bisexual.

Ground 'Moves' as Cane Toads Invade Australia Park

As Ground 'Moves' as Cane Toads Invade Australia Park reports, hundreds of thousands of poisonous baby cane toads have invaded Australials Arakwal National Park:

"You should see the ground down there, it is just black and it is just moving, it is a seething mass of young cane toads, it looks like the ground is moving," local ecologist Steve Phillips told Australian radio.

Park officials plan to destroy as many of the toads as possible before they grow into adults, hoping that once numbers are reduced the threatened wallum froglet and wallum sedge frog populations will pick up.

Cane toads are one of Australia's worst environmental pests.

You see, can toads aren't native to Australia:

They were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 to stop the French Cane Beetle and Greyback Cane Beetle from destroying sugar cane crops in the northeastern state of Queensland.

The biological warfare experiment backfired as the beetles could fly and escape being killed.

The toads thrived, meanwhile, and quickly multiplied.

With females laying up to 35,000 eggs a year, the amphibians -- some as big as dinner plates — have now spread out from Queensland west into the Northern Territory and south into New South Wales, threatening the unique Australian fauna in their path.

While cane toads will eat anything and appear easy prey for larger animals, they possess highly poisonous sacs behind their heads which kill predators quickly.

Will Bush Look to 1992 for New Tax Code?

As David Wessel points out, "By expressing interest in tax reform without offering specifics, Mr. Bush encouraged every tax geek with a plan for a better tax system to shout about its imminent enactment." From Will Bush Look to 1992 for New Tax Code? :

Republicans and business allies long have objected to taxing profits once at the corporate level, and again when paid to shareholders as dividends. The Treasury's 268-page report made few ripples when it came out in January 1992. It has been gathering dust on bookshelves like mine ever since.

Which brings us to CBIT, known to its inventors as "see-bit." In this approach, interest paid by corporations, dividends paid on shares of stock and capital gains from the sale of stock would be tax-free to individuals. Companies no longer would be able to deduct interest payments.

This would be a big deal. In 2002, the last year for which Internal Revenue Service data are available, corporations deducted $923.4 billion in interest. Without that, they would have paid $323 billion more taxes at the 35% corporate-tax rate. The 1992 Treasury plan would have used this money to finance an across-the-board cut in the corporate-tax rate. In Mr. Bush's current search for "revenue neutral" tax reform — where he has to find a loser for every winner — the money might finance changes to either the corporate or the individual income tax.

The big selling point for CBIT was that it would both end the double taxation of corporate profits and get rid of tax-code provisions that encourage companies to finance investments with debt (issuing bonds) instead of equity (selling stock.) This, the Treasury argued at the time, would reduce the cost of capital to U.S. companies so they would invest more and invest more efficiently, and thus propel the U.S. economy faster.

How Big Bird and Kermit Saved the World

From How Big Bird and Kermit Saved the World:

A documentary that will examine the cultural, political and social impact of the various foreign versions of 'Sesame Street' is getting ready to begin a yearlong shoot across several continents.

Among the topics of 'The World According to Sesame Street' are the impact of an HIV-positive 'Muppet' character in compelling the South African government to address the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic, the creation of a strong female character that challenged traditional gender roles in Egypt and programing designed to foster cross-cultural tolerance in post-conflict Kosovo.

Everything reactionaries say about Sesame Street is true. Wow.

Bob Dylan Tops Rolling Stone's Greatest-Song List

This should surprise no one. From Bob Dylan Tops Rolling Stone's Greatest-Song List:

'Like a Rolling Stone,' Bob Dylan (news)'s scornful, ironic ode to a spoiled woman's reversal of fortune, was named the greatest rock 'n' roll song of all time on Wednesday by Rolling Stone magazine.

Rolling Stone magazine chose "Like a Rolling Stone" as the greatest rock song. Second greatest? The Rolling Stone's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." See a pattern?

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes

For the past seven years, the American Film Institute has put together a special for CBS. This year, it's AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:

Previous programs within this series have included AFI 100 Years...100 Movies (1998), ... 100 Stars (1999), ... 100 Laughs (2000), . . . 100 Thrills (2001), ... 100 Passions (2002), ... 100 Heroes & Villains (2003) and ... 100 Songs (2004).

This one sounds like fun:

Chronologically, the ballot spans from 1927-with the first full-length sound film, THE JAZZ SINGER: "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!"-to 2002 and "My precious" from THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS.

CASABLANCA has seven quotes in AFI's ballot, making it the most represented film.

THE WIZARD OF OZ is the second most represented film with six quotes.

Humphrey Bogart has 10 quotes on the ballot, the most represented male actor. Al Pacino and the Marx Brothers follow with six quotes each and Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, James Stewart and Jack Nicholson are all represented with five quotes each. Funnymen Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Mike Myers each have four quotes represented.

Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh each have four memorable movie quotes on the ballot.

Billy Wilder is the top represented writer with 13 quotes, some co-written with I.A.L. Diamond, Charles Brackett and Raymond Chandler. Frances Ford Coppola has nine quotes represented, with seven coming from THE GODFATHER Trilogy. Mario Puzo, Coppola's collaborator on THE GODFATHER trilogy, has a total of eight quotes. Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch each have seven quotes (all from CASABLANCA), followed by Woody Allen with six and Cameron Crowe, William Goldman and Stanley Kubrick with five quotes each.

1939 is the most represented year with 19 movie quotes. 1942 has 17 quotes and 1980 has 12.

Hollywood's Odd Couple: Cage and Bruckheimer

Hollywood's Odd Couple: Cage and Bruckheimer is a puff-piece on the oddball actor and the very Hollywood producer:

Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage (news), who had been specializing in quirky roles, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer first teamed for 1996's 'The Rock' and hope to work the same magic in action-adventure film 'National Treasure.' Their previous movies — 'Rock,' 'Con Air' and 'Gone in Sixty Seconds' — have reaped $750 million in global ticket sales.

The Rock, Con Air, and Gone in Sixty Seconds — oh, right, all of Cage's bad movies. OK, The Rock wasn't bad, and National Treasure, their latest teamup, looks fun.

Nursery Rhymes Have More Violence Than Kids TV

Nursery Rhymes Have More Violence Than Kids TV presents the findings of an amusing study on violence in the media:

Children's nursery rhymes contain 10 times more violence than British television shows broadcast before the country's 9 p.m. 'watershed' after which more adult content can be shown, research published on Thursday said.

Reimagining the Far West Side

The City Journal's Reimagining the Far West Side brings together a number of architects' classical skyscrper designs for New York's Far West Side:

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has gotten everyone talking about architecture, but so far it's a one-sided conversation, as if the only question worth discussing is: What kind of modernism do we want? [...] But since we've now had 50 years of modernism here in New York, and only a half-dozen good buildings among hundreds of awful ones to show for it, maybe what we really want now is ... not modernism.

Although New York is full of modernist glass box, tower-in-the-park skyscrapers, it's best known for its classical skyscrapers, like the Empire State Building, the RCA Victor Building, and the Waldorf-Astoria:

If Chicago takes the palm for inventing the skyscraper, New York can claim to have brought it to full flower. The classical skyscraper is one of Gotham's gifts to the world, the urbane expression of its technical genius, wealth, and confident cosmopolitanism.

The plan?

The City Planning Commission has proposed re-zoning for redevelopment a vast area of the Far West Side — more than 60 blocks from Seventh to Twelfth Avenues and from 30th to 43rd Streets. At the center of this redevelopment, an area now mostly of parking lots, rail yards, low-rise garages and repair shops, and the tangle of approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the planners envision a new boulevard, running between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and zoned for massive office buildings suitable for major corporate headquarters. For this north-south street, called Hudson Boulevard, City Journal has asked six renowned architects to design a half-dozen truly postmodernist buildings, skyscrapers that bypass modernism's dead end and bring New York's long and vibrant tradition of classical tall buildings triumphantly into the twenty-first century.

Perish the poor

Jane Galt tak