Health Club Industry Sees Growing Market

Years ago, I thought, Why doesn't the gym have a kids' gym attached? From Health Club Industry Sees Growing Market:

The childhood obesity epidemic combined with cuts to schools' physical education budgets has inspired commercial gyms and health clubs to launch programs aimed at those under 18. The idea appeals to kids, and also to parents looking to help their children develop a healthy lifestyle or improve their chances of winning an athletic scholarship or a spot on a sports team.

The programs are a growing source of revenue for the health club business. The number of gym members under the age of 18 rose 29 percent to 4.5 million in the five years ended in 2003, according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association.

Kim Hreha started Cardio Kids in September of 2003 because clients at her other gym, Ladies Workout Express, said their children weren't getting enough exercise at school, and the mothers also worried about the kids playing outside after school without supervision.

WSJ.com - Professional Toys and Games of Tag

From WSJ.com - Professional Toys and Games of Tag:

One hit toy this Christmas was the RX5 microscope. With it, kids can view fungi, amoebas and other childhood fascinations. But scientists, doctors and researchers have also snatched up the plaything, which comes with a powerful lens and can be used to send images over the Internet. It also has an $89 price tag that is less than one-tenth of its professional-grade counterparts.

Interest from adults is taking Digital Blue Inc., the microscope's maker, by surprise. 'I founded the company,' says Digital Blue CEO Tim Hall, to 'get kids playing something other than videogames.'

I thought the adults simply found the microscope amusing. It looks like they're using it for real work:

Andrew Westphal, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says he was recently able to examine some microscopic dust from outer space with the help of the RX5's plastic lens. That is because a conventional microscope's glass lens would have suffered from the hydrofluoric acid used to separate the particles from other elements. "Had it not been for the toy, we would have been at a loss," he says.

Meanwhile, patients suffering from Morgellons, a rare type of skin disease, have been getting medical information by using the microscope in sending images of their lesions to Morgellons Research Foundation in McMurray, Pa. The toy is "made for kids so it's pretty easy to us" to use, says Mary Leitao, the foundation's executive director. Collectors of stamps and sports memorabilia are also using the microscope for authentication purposes, Digital Blue says.

How Evil Works

How Evil Works reviews The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy:

The crudity of Hitler's genetics, the patent falsity of Lysenko's experiments, their visions of "world domination" — all seem ludicrous in hindsight. Recordings of Hitler's speeches make him appear laughable, hysterical, absurd. Looked at now, Stalin's kitsch propaganda films seem like parodies. Yet it is clear from archives, from memoirs, from recollections, that very few people were laughing at the time. The propaganda, the education, the parades, the spectacles, the falsified history, the marble statues, the Socialist Realist novels: they worked.

Both regimes treated pseudo-science as an infallible new religion:

The science itself was very different in Soviet and Nazi society, in other words, but its function was essentially the same. The supposed neutrality and incontrovertibility of scientific doctrine gave both regimes a good part of their intellectual legitimacy. Science, or rather pseudoscience, gave people a moral justification for behavior that had formerly been unthinkable. German concentration-camp guards, convinced that their Jewish prisoners were biologically inferior humans, had few qualms about murdering them. Soviet concentration-camp guards, convinced that their political prisoners were flawed humans who had to be re-educated through hard labor, saw nothing wrong with mistreating them, even if they died in the process.

NPR : Last Laughs 2004: Cartoonist Matt Groening

If you enjoy The Simpsons — and, really, who doesn't? — you might enjoy this NPR interview with Matt Groening.

Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect

The BitTorrent Effect looks at Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, who entered a "starving artist" period after quitting his job at MojoNation:

What kept Cohen going, say friends and family, was a cartoonishly inflated ego. "I can come off as pretty arrogant, but it's because I know I'm right," he laughs. "I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team." While we're having lunch, his wife, Jenna, tells me about the time they were watching Amadeus, where Mozart writes his music so rapidly and perfectly it appears to have been dictated by God. Cohen decided he was kind of like that. Like Mozart? Bram and Jenna nod.

"Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he'll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes pouring out. And you can see by the lines on the screen that it's clean," Jenna says. "It's clean code." She pats her husband affectionately on the head: "My sweet little autistic nerd boy." (Cohen in fact has Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)

By the way, this passage intrigued me:

Cohen says he loves Amazons, a cross between chess and the Japanese game Go, because it is pure strategy. Players take turns dropping more and more tokens on a grid, trying to box in their opponent.

GMAT Score - Admissions Criteria 1

I found this bit of GMAT trivia amusing. From GMAT Score - Admissions Criteria 1:

The math and verbal scores range from 0 to about 52. (I know that ETS claims the scale can go as high as 60, but it has never actually gone over 52).

I found this bit less amusing:

Most people don't know that they can take the GMAT under what ETS, the test administrator, calls "non-standard accommodations." That means you can get twice as much time as everyone else, if that's what you need to compensate for a medical condition. ETS doesn't promote this accommodation very aggressively, but I've had many of my students take the test "non-standard" and all of them who have gotten a truly significant accommodation (such as double time) have gone up at least 100 points from what they were scoring with me on practice tests given under standard conditions.

I had one student who consistently scored in the mid 500s with me. He took the test under non-standard conditions (he got double time), went up more than 100 points, and was accepted at Harvard.

WSJ.com - New Obesity Boom In Arab Countries Has Old Ancestry

WSJ.com - New Obesity Boom In Arab Countries Has Old Ancestry opens with an anecdote from Mauritania that explains the Middle East's obesity epidemic — amongst women:

Jidat Mint Ethmane grew up in a nomad family in this impoverished nation in the western Sahara. When she was 8, she says, her mother began to force-feed her. Ms. Ethmane says she was required to consume a gallon of milk in the morning, plus couscous. She ate milk and porridge for lunch. She was awoken at midnight and given several more pints of milk, followed by a pre-breakfast feeding at 6 a.m.

If she threw up, she says, her mother forced her to eat the vomit. Stretch marks appeared on her body and the skin on her upper arms and thighs tore under the pressure. If she balked at the feedings, her mother would squeeze her toes between two wooden sticks until the pain was unbearable. 'I would devour as much as possible,' says Ms. Ethmane. 'I resembled a mattress.'

Today, Ms. Ethmane, 38 years old, is slender because her family ran out of money to continue the force-feeding technique, known as gavage. The term stems from the French word for the process used to force-feed geese to make foie gras. Yet in a recent interview in her family's one-room house, Ms. Ethmane says she still believes in the practice. 'Beauty is more important than health,' she says. Her husband, Brahim, agrees: 'It is thin women who are not healthy.'

Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive

Whoa. Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive:

Thanks to FTA, Kegs, and the online Apple community, you can now relive, play, and enjoy old Apple 2 games and other disks through the internet and web browser. This web site uses an ActiveX application and Apple IIgs emulator to automatically download and play most Apple 2 disk images online. To play a game, just select the disk from the menu and click on Yes to automatically download the ActiveX emulator and disk images. (Note: Requires Internet Explorer and Windows)

The Vanishing

In The Vanishing, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a book that looks at many failures, including the collapse of Viking Greenland:

The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years — and then they vanished.
[...]
The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. [...] But Greenland's ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure.
[...]
The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock — particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit — they called them skraelings, "wretches" — and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen's robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

Celebrity Tsunami Stories

With the death toll at 59,000 and climbing, we get these hard-hitting stories:

Yahoo! News - Czech Supermodel Injured in Tidal Wave:

Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, who appeared on the cover of 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, was injured and her photographer boyfriend is missing after the pair were caught up in the Asian tsunami disaster, a spokeswoman for the boyfriend said Tuesday.

Yahoo! News - Reports: Jet Li Escapes Maldives Flooding:

Vacationing action star Jet Li injured his foot as he protected his daughter from tsunami waves that flooded his hotel in the Maldives, Hong Kong newspapers reported Tuesday.

Li, who played the villain in "Lethal Weapon 4," was with his daughter in the hotel's lobby Sunday when huge waves gushed into the hotel, the Apple Daily newspaper reported, quoting a friend vacationing with Li.

Li slightly injured his foot while picking up his daughter, the report said. Ming Pao Daily News reported Li struck his foot against a floating piece of furniture.

Drink Your Medicine? Weighing the Health Benefits, Risks of Alcohol

From Drink Your Medicine? Weighing the Health Benefits, Risks of Alcohol:

There is a drug that can lower your risk of heart attack, diabetes, osteoporosis and mental decline by 30% to 60%, but doctors aren't prescribing it.

The reason? It is alcohol.

Will We Be Richer Than Our Kids?

From Will We Be Richer Than Our Kids? :

Throughout our history, children have lived better than their parents, usually by a wide margin. The math is simple. The U.S. economy, despite occasional dips, has grown consistently at 3 percent a year or more. So, at age 48, you will be four times richer than the average American when you were born.

James K. Glassman dismisses the weak dollar and our trade deficit and points to these three threats to American growth:

• We're developing a science gap.
  
  
• We're discouraging what economist John Maynard Keynes called "animal spirits" — the drive to take business and investing risks that ultimately benefit others as well as ourselves.
  
  
• We won't have enough workers to provide the Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired Americans.

French 'Urban Gymnastics' Gaining Devotees

The Associated Press has a "health news" article on the very cool sport/art of parkour, French 'Urban Gymnastics' Gaining Devotees:

The name means obstacle course in French and the goal of the sport's traceurs, also known as freerunners, is to run, jump, vault or climb over obstacles in the most fluid manner possible.

Urban Freeflow describes parkour:

Parkour is very basically the art of movement where participants (otherwise known as 'Free-runners') use objects within their urban surroundings, to create new and interesting ways of moving. It encompasses running, jumping, vaulting and climbing to overcome these obstacles, where the ultimate aim is to do so in the most fluid and flowing way possible. For people unfamiliar to Parkour, the easiest picture to paint is to say that what we do is the closest you can get to the Matrix, Spiderman and Hong Kong martial arts movies in the sense of movement, but without the need for special FX or wires.

Times Online - When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus?

From When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus?:

No one knows the exact date of the birth of Jesus Christ. December 25 was selected by the Western Church only in the 4th century to rival the pre-Christian Roman feast of the Victorious Sun. Nor was Christ born in Year 1 as the era bearing his name continues to pretend. The New Testament locates the event shortly before the death of King Herod which occurred in 4BC. A 6th-century Roman monk, Dionysius the Small, is guilty of the miscalculation: he wrongly placed the birth of Jesus in the year 753 ab urbe condita — after the foundation of the city of Rome — instead of 747 or 748.

The Long Tail: Why Long Tail content is different

Why Long Tail content is different cites an insightful take on TV's catering to the Lowest Common Denominator from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

WSJ.com - In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn't Mean A Lot of Padding

I can remember when it was practically scandalous that Marcus Allen didn't wear knee pads. Now most pads have fallen out of fashion. From WSJ.com - In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn't Mean A Lot of Padding:

In the National Football League, the hip pad is dead. So are the tailbone pad, the elbow pad and the forearm pad. The thigh pad and the knee pad are endangered species. The size of shoulder pads is shrinking by the season.

NFL players, who once lumbered around the field weighed down by head-to-toe padding, now wear less protective gear than at any time since the early 1900s, when football was in its infancy. "I think they'd wear nothing if they could," says Rams head coach Mike Martz. Cleveland Browns equipment manager Bob Monica says he's given up trying to convince millionaire players that it's in their interest to wear full padding. "Talking to these guys is like talking to a wall," he says.

The depadding of the NFL is part machismo, part peer pressure and part vanity. Tactics also have changed. The NFL is focused on speed, not just in-the-trenches toughness, and passing has superseded the ground game as the predominant offensive weapon. A player wearing a two-ounce knee pad the size of a coaster thinks he's at a disadvantage competing against someone who is not.

The result is a faster, higher-scoring game that mirrors the revved-up version of the NFL found in videogames. It also better suits players competing for attention in a sport saturated by media coverage.

"When you're on TV, millions of people see you," says Dane Looker, a Rams wide receiver. "You don't want to look sloppy out there." Before the season, Mr. Looker had the sleeves on his jersey sewn tighter to better show off his biceps.

The Science of Guerrilla Warfare

T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), wrote The Science of Guerrilla Warfare for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Here is the thesis: Rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as the Arab revolt had in the Red Sea ports, the desert, or in the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2% active in a striking force, and 98% passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyze the enemy's organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen's definition of strategy, 'the study of communication,' in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In 50 words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.

The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

Bernard B. Fall wrote The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency for the April 1965 issue of the Naval War College's Review:

Let me state this definition: RW = G + P, or, 'revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action.' This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system. This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else. 'Guerrilla' simply means 'small war,' to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies to all Western armies) that everybody knows how to fight small wars; no second lieutenant of the infantry ever learns anything else but how to fight small wars. Political action, however, is the difference. The communists, or shall we say, any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other European anti-Nazi underground) most of the time used small-war tactics--not to destroy the German Army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

But the "kill" aspect, the military aspect, definitely always remained the minor aspect. The political, administrative, ideological aspect is the primary aspect. Everybody, of course, by definition, will seek a military solution to the insurgency problem, whereas by its very nature, the insurgency problem is military only in a secondary sense, and political, ideological, and administrative in a primary sense. Once we understand this, we will understand more of what is actually going on in Viet-Nam or in some of the other places affected by RW.

The New Yorker: Holy Smoke

Holy Smoke, Joan Acocella's review of two new books on the Crusades, notes "two facts about the Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads":

The first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing your brother-in-law�s castle, cutting off his nose — these were unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of the period — above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence. Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise: the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off. They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.

Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin — indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins.

The end of the world

The end of the world notes the enduring popularity of apocalyptic theories, whether religious or secular:

In his book, The Great Year, Mr Campion draws parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem.
[...]
Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption.

Dave Barry - Dave Barry: One nation, purple or maybe plum, with goofiness for all - sacbee.com

In One nation, purple or maybe plum, with goofiness for all, Dave Barry praises our American diversity:

And as Americans, we must ask ourselves: Are we really so different? Must we stereotype those who disagree with us? Do we truly believe that all red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that all blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?

Yes. This is called 'diversity,' and it is why we are such a great nation — a nation that has given the world both nuclear weapons and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Armor vs. Attitude

In Armor vs. Attitude, Ralph Kinney Bennett explains that "armor is a very relative thing" with this anecdote:

There's a famous old story about some late 19th century Chinese warlord who bought some gunboats fitted with state-of-the-art Krupp armor. When he moved confidently up-river against a rival warlord's forts, his opponent's guns tore through the gunboats' armor. He indignantly telegraphed a complaint to Krupp. The company wired back to inform him that his opponent had recently purchased the latest Krupp armor-piercing guns and ammunition. Tough luck.

Danish Kids Drunkest in Europe, Turks Most Sober

From Danish Kids Drunkest in Europe, Turks Most Sober:

The poll showed that 36 percent of Danish kids had been drunk 20 times or more in their lifetime, with the next highest being the Irish at 30 percent.

Fifty percent of Danish youngsters had also consumed alcohol 40 times or more in their lifetime, compared with 48 percent of young Austrians and 46 percent of young Czechs.

The Netherlands topped the league of those who had drunk alcohol 10 times or more in the last 30 days, at 25 percent.

Binge drinking, defined as five drinks in a row, was most common in Ireland with 32 percent of respondents, followed by the Dutch and Germans at 28 percent and Britain and the Isle of Mann at 27 percent.

Czech youngsters were most likely to consume cannabis, at 44 percent, followed by the Swiss at 40 percent.

Women with Breast Implants Have Higher Suicide Risk

It's almost shocking to see a science article not confuse cause and effect. From Women with Breast Implants Have Higher Suicide Risk:

A new study adds to evidence that women with cosmetic breast implants have a higher rate of suicide than other women and shows, for the first time, that they may be more likely to have a history of psychiatric illness as well.

The women getting implants were compared against women getting other cosmetic surgeries:

Compared with women who underwent either breast reduction or other cosmetic procedures, those who received breast implants were 70 percent more likely to have a history of admissions for psychiatric illness.

FuturePundit: Violent Societies Select For Southpaws

Violent Societies Select For Southpaws presents a number of factoids supporting a fascinating thesis:

1. Among the Jula (Dioula) people of Burkina Faso, the most peaceful tribe studied, where the murder rate is 1 in 100,000 annually, left-handers make up 3.4% of the population. But in the Yanomami tribe of Venezuela, where more than 5 in 1,000 meet a violent end each year, southpaws account for 22.6%.
2. And the ratio of left-handers to right-handers is higher in successful sportspeople than it is in the general population, suggesting there is definite advantage to favouring the left hand or foot in competitive games, such as tennis.
3. Statistical evidence links several auto-immune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis, with left-handedness.
4. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting.

Why the Left Should Favor Social Security Privatization (and the Right Should Oppose It)

Arnold Kling opens Why the Left Should Favor Social Security Privatization (and the Right Should Oppose It) with an amusing allusion:

The debate over Social Security privatization is starting to remind me of my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story, In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump. At one point in the story, Pooh and Piglet are discussing the best bait to use in a trap for a Heffalump (author A. A. Milne's deliberate mispronunciation of elephant). Pooh, who likes honey, starts arguing for honey as bait. Meanwhile Piglet, who likes acorns, starts arguing for acorns. Suddenly, each of them realizes that he is arguing against his own interest: if acorns are chosen for the trap, then Piglet will have to supply them; whereas if honey is chosen for the trap, then Pooh will have to supply it. So the argument ends, with Piglet giving in first.

I think something similar would happen if the Left and the Right were to think through the consequences of Social Security privatization. Krugman and others on the Left would suddenly realize that they are in favor of it, and conservatives might decide that they should be against it.

The Left is against the regressive payroll tax that is currently used to fund Social Security. The Right, of course, doesn't want to see the transition costs of privatization (the interest on all those bonds) paid out of general revenues.

At any rate, Social Security's role has changed since the 1930s:

Today, we refer to Social Security as an "entitlement." In the 1930's, however, that was not the case. It was thought of as social insurance. The difference is significant.

In the 1930's, relatively few people lived significantly past the retirement age of 65. In those days, it would have been foolhardy to save enough to last until you were 80. But if everyone contributed to a collective pool, then we could insure that the few who lived long past retirement would not be destitute.

Since the 1930's, longevity has increased by more than a decade. However, the Social Security retirement age has been raised only a few years. As a result, Social Security no longer represents insurance for the unusually long-lived. It is now an "entitlement" for everyone.

Back when it was insurance, Social Security's tax burden was low, and the benefits clearly flowed to people in need. Today, the tax burden is high, and benefits go mostly to people who had the means, if not the incentive, to save to provide for themselves.

I would like to see us bring back the Social Security of the 1930's. Actually, the benefit increases that have been enacted since then strike me as humane. But I would like to bring back the principle of insurance, by raising the retirement age to account for the increase in longevity, and by indexing the retirement age to longevity going forward. Raising the retirement age would increase the portion of retirement funded by personal saving and reduce the portion that needs to be funded by taxes.

Educated... and Bored

Educated...and Bored suggests that education professors are bored with the old-fashioned teaching techniques that work:

My old guitar teacher has a saying: "You can educate yourself into boredom."

What he means is that you can study the classical guitar repertoire so thoroughly and for so many years that you simply become bored with it. This happened to another teacher of mine, a lovable, gruff, old German immigrant, a professor of organ and harpsichord. Having spent upwards of 50 years studying the great works of the Renaissance and Baroque, he became bored with classical music, sold his harpsichord, and took up Oriental painting.

Indeed, the same things happened in classical music more generally. As the 20th century unfolded, composers became bored with the classical forms of the past, bored with tonality, bored with harmony. Thinking that beauty was played out, composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Elliot Carter, or Pierre Boulez wrote atonal works that sounded to most people like a collection of wrong notes. Or think of John Cage's infamous piece "4:33," which merely consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence: What could more perfectly display an attitude of boredom towards the very idea of music?

You see the same phenomenon in architecture, where modern architects aren't content to replicate the great, beautiful, human-friendly buildings of the past. Instead, because they are bored with beauty and usability, architects such as Frank Gehry busily set about creating disjointed, monstrous eyesores...

The same phenomenon may explain why so many education professors (and hence public school teachers) gravitate towards trendy educational methods that deny children a good foundation in reading. Not necessarily because of ill-will, stupidity, or ignorance. Boredom is the thing to look for.

The "Follow Through" study looked at 700,000 students between 1967 and 1995 and compared several types of educational models. "Direct Instruction" (a rigorous, skill-based method that uses phonics when teaching reading) certainly seems effective if you look at The Washington Times' chart of the study's results.

Yahoo! News - Study: Return of Wolves Changes Ecosystem

As Yahoo! News - Study: Return of Wolves Changes Ecosystem points out, removing apex predators from the top of the food chain can have far-reaching effects:

After wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996, researchers noticed they were most successful bringing down elk where the prey had to deal with a change in terrain, such as crossing a stream. Elk soon learned to avoid those areas.

'When you remove the wolves, the elk are able to browse unimpeded wherever they want, as long as they want,' said co-author Robert L. Beschta. 'Now that the wolves are back, the ecology of fear comes into play.'

Comparing old photographs and other descriptions of the area with present conditions, Ripple and Beschta found streamside vegetation sharply declined in the mid-1920s, about the time the last wolves were killed.

Vegetation along streams prevents erosion, cools the water for fish, cycles nutrients through the food web, and provides habitat for birds and amphibians.

2blowhards.com: Fact Attack

Fact Attack cites a number is factoids from The Economist:

• The 4.9% of families in America with net worth of $1 million or more accounted for 42% of all donations to charitable organizations.
• In rural Peru, 24% of young women say they lost their virginity to a rapist. In rural Uttar Pradesh (in India), 83% of married women surveyed said that before they moved in with their husbands, they didn't know how women become pregnant.
• Average life expectency in Zimbabwe has plunged from 61 years in 1990 to 34 years today. AIDS is the most important cause of this decline.

Bringing the Public Back to Public Spaces

In Bringing the Public Back to Public Spaces, Glenn Reynolds explains that both offices and home-offices have their problems — and notes a phenomenon I've definitely noticed too:

I've noticed a lot of small business people in my area giving up their offices, and having meetings in public places — Starbucks, Borders, the Public Library, and so on. In fact, a real estate agent recently told me that the small-office commercial real estate market is actually suffering as a result of so many people making this kind of move.

More:

If a home is, in Le Corbusier's words, a "machine for living," then an office is a "machine for working." But nowadays, the machinery is looking a bit obsolescent. The traditional office took shape in the 19th Century, and the shape it took was in no small part the result of technology: the need for people to be close to each other, and to services like telegraphs, telephones, messengers and (later) faxes, copy machines, and computers.

You can pretty much carry all that stuff with you now. And people are doing it.

When Is Enough Enough?

When Is Enough Enough? argues that AIDS gets too much attention compared to other diseases:

Although AIDS cases and deaths are declining and the disease remains completely preventable, it nonetheless gets almost $180,000 in research funds per death from the National Institutes of Health. Compare that to its closest rivals: Parkinson's disease, prostate cancer, and diabetes. All of these receive about $14,000 per death. Alzheimer's gets about $11,000.

I'd prefer a metric more like dollars per lost year. A disease or accident that takes you at 25 is more destructive than one that takes you at 70 rather than 80.

Yahoo! News - Concussions Kept Tintin Forever Young -- Study

From Yahoo! News - Concussions Kept Tintin Forever Young -- Study:

Comic book hero Tintin never aged during his 50-year career because the repeated blows he took to the head triggered a growth hormone deficiency, according to an analysis in the Christmas edition of a Canadian medical journal.

Claude Cyr, a professor of medicine at Quebec's Sherbrooke University, said a study of the 23 hugely popular Tintin books showed the intrepid Belgian reporter suffered 50 significant losses of consciousness during his many adventures.

'We hypothesize that Tintin has growth hormone deficiency and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (a disorder of the pituitary gland) from repeated trauma. This could explain his delayed statural growth, delayed onset of puberty and lack of libido,' Cyr wrote.

His article was in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which has a tradition of publishing studies into the ailments of fictional characters in its Christmas edition.
[...]
Another study surmised that Beatrix Potter's ever energetic Squirrel Nutkin character was in fact autistic.

As the article points out, "Tintin was created by Belgium's Georges Remi under the pen name Herge." Hergé, by the way, is a homonym, in French, for RG, Georges Remi's initials, reversed. A certain Roman de Tirtoff went by a similar pseudonym, Erté, or RT.

China's Textbooks Twist and Omit History

It comes as no surprise that China's Textbooks Twist and Omit History:

Most Chinese students finish high school convinced that their country has fought wars only in self-defense, never aggressively or in conquest, despite the People's Liberation Army's invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the ill-fated war with Vietnam in 1979, to take two examples.

Similarly, many believe that Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance, not by the United States.

'The fundamental reason for the victory is that the Chinese Communist Party became the core power that united the nation,' says one widely used textbook, referring to World War II.

No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of catastrophic decisions made in the 1950's, during the Great Leap Forward, by the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.

Similar elisions occur in everything from the start of the Korean War, with an invasion of South Korea by China's ally, North Korea, to the history of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as an irrevocable part of China.

The Chronicle: 12/10/2004: The Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism

For quit some time, "liberal" was a good word, particularly in the United States. Then things changed. From The Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism:

In the year 1951 no less a demagogue than Sen. Joseph McCarthy still used 'liberal' positively, at least on one occasion. In a speech he accused Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being part of 'a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men.' In that very year Sen. Robert A. Taft, idol of recent American conservatives, thought it necessary to state that he was not a conservative but 'an old-fashioned liberal.'
[...]
"Conservative" was a word (and a political idea) that Americans eschewed for a long time. During the 19th century much of the political history of Europe and, in particular, of Britain was marked by the debate between conservatives and liberals. In the United States that was not so.
[...]
During the 19th century, liberalism, by and large, meant political and economic individualism, an emphasis on liberty even more than equality, a reduction and limitation of the powers of government. From the beginning of the 20th century, liberals, by and large, accepted and advocated the spread of equality, meaning more and more legislation and government bureaucracy to guarantee the welfare of entire populations. That kind of administrative intervention, with its occasional legislative and bureaucratic excesses, turned millions of Americans against "government" (though they were often the same Americans who were enthusiastic about the political and military powers of government).

Another source of the dislike of liberalism was anti-Communism. Just as the political advocacy of liberalism had moved closer to socialism, the ideology and foreign policy of liberals and Democrats often seemed (and were) more tolerant of Communism and the Soviet Union than were nonliberals and most Republicans. Liberals were, or seemed, less patriotic (more precisely, less nationalistic) than most Americans. And it is, of course, the viscous cement of nationalism that binds so many of the preferences and beliefs of masses of people together.

AUE: FAQ excerpt: "The exception proves the rule."

Most of us have heard that "the exception proves the rule" doesn't mean what it might first appear to mean — that an exception to a rule somehow demonstrates the rule's greater truth — and that "proves" simply means "tests":

The common misconception (which you will find in several books, including the Dictionary of Misinformation) is that 'proves' in this phrase means 'tests'. That is not the case, although 'proof' does mean 'test' in such locutions as 'proving ground', 'proofreader', 'proof spirit', and 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.'

The phrase actually has a fairly straightforward legal meaning. An example demonstrating the original legal sense:

'Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11.0 p.m.'; 'The exception proves the rule' means that this special leave implies a rule requiring men, except when an exception is made, to be in earlier. The value of this in interpreting statutes is plain.

Or, as Lord Atkin said:

A rule is not proved by exceptions unless the exceptions themselves lead one to infer a rule.

Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis. The exception proves the rule in cases not excepted.

Wondering why we've been largely terror-free since 9/11

Wondering why we've been largely terror-free since 9/11 looks at the opportunity costs to fighting terror:

The opportunity costs of this fight, in resources, energy, and know-how — and in our civil rights — are enormous. As Mueller points out, economist Roger Congleton has figured that delaying all airline passengers for only half an hour each adds up to total economic costs of $15 billion a year. Imagine what else smart fellows like the authors of that Rand study, or all the people involved in the new and burgeoning industry, both private and public, of fighting domestic terror assaults, might be able to do if they weren't expending their energy on what might be a smaller threat than we seem to think?

The 2004 Good Gift Games Guide

The 2004 Good Gift Games Guide presents a number of boardgames — for adults:

Once upon a time, when you were shorter and less concerned about carbs, winter meant board games. With several weeks off from school and increasingly inhospitable weather outside, whiling away the hours over Battleship or Payday seemed like a pretty good use of time. [...] You've grown up since then, and maybe you now dismiss board games as "kids' stuff." But I'll tell you a secret: Board games have grown up, too. In the last 15 years a new breed of game has hit the market, those designed specifically for adults. And more people are turning to board games as one of the best (and cheapest) forms of at-home entertainment.

The recommended games meet three criteria:

1. Easy to learn, with rules that can be explained in less than five minutes
2. Entertaining, so committed to the fun factor that even the guy who comes in dead last has a great time playing
3. Quick, lacking downtime and requiring no more than an hour to complete.

The games:

• Ticket to Ride
• Boomtown
• Carcassonne: The City
• Alhambra
• Memoir '44
• Cranium Hoopla
• Hansa
• BuyWord
• San Juan
• Loco!

Can Terrorists Turn Out Gotham's Lights?

Can Terrorists Turn Out Gotham's Lights? opens with the surprising consequences of last year's blackout:

Who stayed lit after Gotham's lights went out during the blackout of August 2003? Batteries and standby generators kicked in to keep trading alive on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. But the AmEx failed to open; true, it had backup generators for the trading-floor computers, but it depended on Consolidated Edison to cool them, so that they wouldn't melt into puddles of silicon. Banks kept their ATM-control computers running at their central offices, but most of the ATMs themselves went dead. With their robust backup generators, Verizon's wireline switching centers smoothly handled traffic volumes three times above normal, but cell phone service deteriorated fast, since soaring call volumes quickly drained the cell tower backup batteries. Traffic lights went out, but backup generators kept the city's Traffic Management Center alive enough to re-synchronize about half of them quickly when the power came back on. The dedicated fiber line that links City Hall to the city's broadcast media went dark when a Time Warner hub lost power. The radio communications system for police, fire, and other emergency services progressively lost capacity as the backup batteries for many radio repeaters ran down. Power from a satellite truck, though, allowed Katie Couric and Lester Holt to broadcast the Today show from Rockefeller Plaza.

The Times Square "W" hotel was open for business and humming: management had upgraded the backup system after an earlier outage reminded everyone that electricity ran not just the electronic room keys but also the water pumps that flushed the toilets. But the New Yorker Hotel in midtown went dark. To much acclaim, it had previously installed a "synchronous" cogeneration plant — which unfortunately has to shut down when grid power fails so that it doesn't electrocute linemen working on the wires outside. As it happened, the hotel was hosting a seminar for elevator mechanics that day; they helped extract guests trapped in the hotel's elevators, including a group trapped in the middle of a 20-story blind shaft, which required breaking a hole through a wall on the 15th floor.

Some stats:

It takes almost 11 gigawatts of electricity to keep New York City lit in the late afternoon on a hot summer day — a huge amount of power. [...] Few of us have even the vaguest idea just how much a gigawatt of power might be. So let's talk Pontiacs instead: 110,000 of them, parked door to door in Central Park. At exactly the same moment, 110,000 drivers start the 110,000 engines, shift into neutral, push pedal to metal, and send 110,000 engines screaming up to the tachometer's red line. Collectively, these engines are now generating a total of about 11 gigawatts of shaft power.

Without electricity, of course, the computers don't run — and a modern economy runs on computers:

Much of the city's wealth exists and grows within a steady flow of the half-gigawatt (or so) of power required to keep silicon hot, screens lit, phones humming, discs spinning, lasers shining, and air conditioners running to dump the waste heat that all this digital hardware produces. The well-tempered electron is the new medium of exchange. Without power, the wealth of the modern city evaporates. The 8/14 blackout cost the city an estimated $1 billion.

Some history:

Electric New York started in 1882, at Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station power plant. Edison had designed and built six "Jumbo Engine-Driver Dynamos," each one a 27-ton, steam-driven 100-kilowatt behemoth, four times bigger than any other electric generator previously built. The entire useful output of all these tons of steel, and the mountains of coal that they would burn, ran down thin metal wire — 15 miles of it, snaking through New York City's bustling financial district to the 85 customers who had installed Edison's new electric lamps.

A French scientist, Sadi Carnot, realized that "the bigger the gap in temperature between the furnace and the condenser, the more useful work you can extract," and "bigger systems are easier to keep hot because they have less surface per unit of volume" — which has led to bigger and bigger power plants, and greater and greater efficiency. But these large, centralized plants need to move electricity to the consumer:

A 1-gigawatt plant — of which there are now plenty — can power the homes, workplaces, and factories of 400,000 people, but the power has to get to them, moving either above the tarmac or underneath it.

And that grid can fail:

Weather has caused four massive outages in recent memory: hurricanes in 1992 and 1996, and ice storms in 1998 and 2002. Spasms of human stupidity have worked their mischief, too. In 1991, construction workers installing drawbridge support pillars in the Chicago River put one in the wrong place; seven months later, a car-size crack opened up in the roof of a freight tunnel directly beneath it, and the ensuing flood shut down utility power for weeks in the heart of Chicago.

When a serious disturbance hits the grid, problems can cascade and amplify like trucks and cars piling up on a highway. Because they are so long and carry so much current, the wires store huge amounts of power in the electric and magnetic fields that surround them. They have enormous electrical inertia, and when things change abruptly at one end, the wires themselves act like massive malignant generators that knock voltage and current out of phase and send huge amounts of "reactive power" sloshing up and down the system, like waves in a bathtub — except that they propagate at close to the speed of light.

What about smaller, decentralized alternatives (and backups)?

With 2,000 square feet set aside for on-site power, a diesel generator together with ancillary power conversion electronics and a buried fuel tank can provide a megawatt of power for a week. On the same footprint, a solar array with its essential backup batteries can provide only a hundreth as much power, and at roughly a hundred times the capital cost. [...] Some 3 to 5 percent of the public grid's capacity is backed up by arrays of batteries (and ancillary electronics), parked under desktops or in office closets or basements, that cushion delicate equipment from electrical blips and supply power during blackouts ranging from minutes to hours. Also backing up the grid stand some 80 gigawatts of on-site diesel generators — about 10 percent of the total generating capacity that lights the grid.

Wired 12.12: Roads Gone Wild

Roads Gone Wild examines a new philosophy of traffic engineering: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer.:

Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior — traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings — and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous — and that's the point.
[...]
Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."

Removing lane lines and center lines gets people to drive more safely:

A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.

American road design has long aimed to segregate pedestrians from cars:

The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing that they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes.

You can actually reduce travel times after narrowing roads, removing lane lines, etc. — if you open up residential neighborhoods a bit:

Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways strewn with malls.

Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning | csmonitor.com

From Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning:

From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them several times per week at school saw their academic performance decline significantly as well.
[...]
When [parents' education and working status] were removed from the equation, having more than one computer at home was no longer associated with top academic performance. In fact, the study says, "The mere availability of computers at home seems to distract students from learning." Computers seem to serve mainly as devices for playing games.

Still, there were a few exceptions: Academic performance rose among those who routinely engaged in writing e-mail or running educational software.

We're supposed to be terribly surprised that owning a computer doesn't improve math and reading skills; only using it to write e-mails or run educational software helps.

Dubbing In Product Plugs

I'm surprised it has taken this long to catch on. From Dubbing In Product Plugs:

After decades of dubbing dialogue into the movies they send around the world, Hollywood studios have taken the next step: dubbing product placements.

Digital technology has made it easy and inexpensive to substitute one product plug for another in the domestic and overseas versions of the same movie. And it gives studios a new stream of revenue when they can sell product-placement rights not only in the U.S. but also overseas.

The practice actually goes back a decade:

The practice actually dates back to a pioneering effort in the 1993 futuristic police drama "Demolition Man." Pepsico Inc. bought a major role for its Taco Bell brand in the U.S. release, which depicted the fast-food chain as a candlelight establishment and "the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars." But in the overseas version of "Demolition Man," the featured restaurant was Pizza Hut, another Pepsico brand.

Spiderman 2 featured Dr. Pepper in the US, and a fruit-flavored soft drink called Miranda overseas. Looney Tunes: Back in Action featured Sprint cellphones in the US; overseas, the phones had the orange square logo of Orange, France Telecom's mobile unit. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle features a Cingular Wireless camera phone; it's T-Mobile overseas.

All this isn't cheap and easy...yet:

It can cost from $10,000 to $90,000 to dub a logo into a short scene. The process has become simpler and cheaper over the years as more special-effects agencies offer dubbing services. As more movies are shot with digital cameras, instead of being filmed on conventional 35 mm film and then converted to a digital computer file, the cost is expected to go down still more, says Chris Taday, vice president of European promotions for Sony's Columbia TriStar Films. "There are big brands in Europe for which we want to use films as promotional tools, and we want to leverage that," Mr. Taday says.
[...]
For now, product dubbing is largely confined to still shots: Dubbed products are usually little more than props in the background, because dubbing a moving object, frame by frame, is complicated. "It's easy as long as a package of soap powder sits on a kitchen counter, but it's more complicated when a housewife picks it up, or someone passes in front of her and you see only a piece of it," says Norm Marshall, chief executive of NMA Entertainment & Marketing, Los Angeles. Eventually, movies could digitally alter the appearance of the same product for local markets, he adds. "Unilever may market the same soap product around the world, but the packaging and color may be different."

Superheroes Minus Masks

Superheroes Minus Masks asserts that the secret identities superheroes protect are powerful metaphors. In the process, it gives a quick rundown of the popular device:

The Scarlet Pimpernel, a fop who secretly rescued innocent nobles from the guillotine in revolutionary France, popularized the hero with a hidden identity. He was created in 1903 by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. As a Hungarian aristocrat paying her way by writing romances for bourgeois English audiences, she knew a few things about masks and hidden agendas.

The Pimpernel spawned Zorro, the Shadow and the Lone Ranger. Then, in the 1930s, a Jewish mama's boy from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel created a new kind of hero. Siegel's father was killed by a robber when Jerry was in his teens, and soon Siegel conceived of a bulletproof crime fighter named Superman. He gave his hero a secret identity, but with a potent twist. The Pimpernel and his imitators were well-established adults who invented masked alter egos who could battle evil without jeopardizing their social positions. Superman came from another world, already superhuman, and learned to pass as an earthling. Superman was the reality, Clark Kent the invention.

The Comfort Zone

In The Comfort Zone, Jonathan Franzen tells his own story of "growing up with Charlie Brown":

Like most of the nation�s ten-year-olds, I had an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house. My brothers, who are nine and twelve years older than I, were less like siblings than like an extra, fun pair of quasi-parents. Although I had friends and was a Cub Scout in good standing, I spent a lot of time alone with talking animals. I was an obsessive rereader of A. A. Milne and the Narnia and Doctor Dolittle novels, and my involvement with my collection of stuffed animals was on the verge of becoming age-inappropriate.

This was in 1970:

In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz�s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen �A Charlie Brown Christmas� the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical �You�re a Good Man, Charlie Brown� was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying �Peanuts� reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, �Peanuts� collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid�s bedroom in America without a �Peanuts� wastebasket or �Peanuts� bedsheets or a �Peanuts� gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.

Schulz's strip featured iconic characters reduced to big faces with simple, but expressive features:

Charles Schulz was the best comic-strip artist who ever lived. When �Peanuts� d�buted, in October, 1950 (the same month Tom was born), the funny pages were full of musty holdovers from the thirties and forties. Even with the strip�s strongest precursors, George Herriman�s �Krazy Kat� and Elzie Segar�s �Popeye,� you were aware of the severe constraints under which newspaper comics operated. The faces of Herriman�s characters were too small to display more than rudimentary emotion, and so the burden of humor and sympathy came to rest on Herriman�s language; his work read more like comic fable than like funny drawing. Popeye�s face was proportionately larger than Krazy Kat�s, but he was such a florid caricature that much of Segar�s expressive budget was spent on nondiscretionary items, like Popeye�s distended jaw and oversized nose; these were good jokes, but the same jokes every time. The very first �Peanuts� strip, by contrast, was all white space and big funny faces. It invited you right in. The minor character Shermy was speaking in neat letters and clear diction: �Here comes ol� Charlie Brown! Good ol� Charlie Brown . . . Yes, sir! Good ol� Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!�

Creation Museum

In Kentucky, they're opening a new Creation Museum, complete with SFX theater:

Biblical history comes alive, as God�s Word — beginning in Genesis — explains the universe we see today.

Yes, if you look carefully, those are two dinosaurs walking onto Noah's ark.

Archetypal Stories

Some say that there are only seven — or maybe eight — Archetypal Stories:

1. Cinderella - Unrecognised virtue at last recognised. It's the same story as the Tortoise and the Hare. Cinderella doesn't have to be a girl, nor does it even have to be a love story. What is essential is that the good is despised, but is recognised in the end, something that we all want to believe.


2. Achilles - The Fatal Flaw, that is the groundwork for practically all classical tragedy, although it can be made comedy too, as in the old standard Aldwych farce. Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy is the Fatal Flaw In reverse.


3. Faust- The Debt that Must be Paid, the fate that catches up with all of us sooner or later. This is found in all its purity as the chase in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. And in a completely different mood, what else is the Cherry Orchard?


4. Tristan - that standard triangular plot of two women and one man, or two men and one woman. The Constant Nymph, or almost any French farce.


5. Circe - The Spider and the Fly. Othello. The Ba