Ooh. Prehistoric “Bear-Dog” Fossil Unearthed:
Scientists are marveling at a fossil find in California’s San Joaquin Valley that has produced the remains of a never-before-seen badger-like creature and a monstrous predator that looks like a cross between a bear and a pit bull.
Rifts and the Right addresses the (growing) rift between libertarians and conversatives:
Libertarians should realize that it is not, by definition, a contradiction of limited government principles to suggest that the erosion of traditional values has had adverse effects on American society. In fact, the existence of a culture that fosters shared values is essential to a free society.
Those wacky engineers at Carnegie Mellon have created a new, improved pogo stick, the BowGo:
The BOWGO (patented) is a new kind of pogo stick that bounces higher, farther and more efficiently than conventional devices. The BOWGO is a product of the Toy Robots Initiative and is a scaled-up, human-sized version of the Bow Leg. The Bow Leg is a highly resilient leg being developed for running robots at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. The key technology is the fiber-reinforced composite (FRC) spring that bends like a bow to store elastic energy. Compared to the steel coil spring used in a conventional pogo stick, the bow spring stores 2-5 times as much energy per unit mass, and precludes the sliding friction that results when long coil springs buckle sideways. The BOWGO also uses rollers to guide the plunger, in place of the usual plastic guide bushings, providing smooth, almost frictionless motion. The force/deflection characteristic of the bow spring is tailored to provide high-energy storage with minimal shock at ground contact. A large, rubber-padded foot allows the BOWGO to be used on relatively soft surfaces such as grass, sand and gravel.
Can Terrorists Build the Bomb? provides “an examination of each step a terrorist organization would need to take to pull off a nuclear attack, and what is being done to raise the hurdles.” Step One is acquiring the raw materials:
All the next Mohammed Atta would need to make a bomb big enough to instantly obliterate everything within a third of a mile is about 100 pounds of uranium enriched to 90 percent: a lump about the size of a bowling ball, or a bigger lump if the enrichment level is lower. It takes even less plutonium, which is far more fissile than uranium, to build an equally destructive bomb: about 35 pounds, a grapefruit-size hunk.
Sod Off, Swampy! explains what happened when environmentalists stormed London’s International Petroleum Exchange:
But London traders, just after lunch, are more likely to be powered by two or three pints of strong ale than the milk of human kindness.The trespassers were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women,” said a photographer, according to The Times of London. “It was really ugly. They followed the [Greenpeace] guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”
“The violence was instant,” reported one aggrieved recipient of a rain of blows to the head. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
“Sod off, Swampy!” shouted one tardy trader, steadying himself against the railings of the balcony of the pub across the street as his colleagues threw the protesters bodily onto the sidewalk. (Swampy was an enviro-protester who gained fame by living unbathed in a tunnel for eight months.)
Meanwhile, other traders inside the building were punching and felling men and women with a politically correct lack of sexual discrimination. Those who had already been punched onto the floor were shocked to look up and see traders trying to overturn heavy filing cabinets onto them.
A laconic spokesman for the IPE said, “We are dealing with the situation.”
The protesters who had violently breached private premises and attempted to halt a legitimate activity expressed themselves aggrieved with the rules of engagement. One of them told The Times, “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot. They were Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs.”
From Nude Man Steals, Wrecks Philly Police Car:
The episode unfolded at around 1:30 a.m. when police were called to a block in North Philadelphia to investigate complaints about a person screaming in the street. Officers arriving on the scene said they found a man running about in his bathrobe in the freshly fallen snow.The officers gave chase. The man shed his robe, then allegedly bit a female officer on the arm, climbed into her patrol car and hit the gas. He drove only a few blocks before crashing, police said.
Is this the beginning of the zombie apocalypse?
It rarely rains in California, but when it rains, it pours. From California Storms Spur Tornadoes; Six Dead:
And in Orange County’s rural Silverado Canyon area east of Irvine, boulders crashed into an apartment and crushed a 16-year-old girl, Caitlin Oto.“If you saw the damage up there, it almost looks like the houses exploded, the way it went completely through the homes,” said Capt. Stephen Miller of the Orange County Fire Authority.
From Leader to Police: Toughen Up!:
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged police Tuesday to toughen up after a television news report showed two police officers fleeing from a man brandishing what appeared to be a baseball bat.
By the way, Tokyo’s elite riot police are trained in aikido.
According to The Economist, Hedge funds are the “latest thing”:
Some hedge funds actually hedge, meaning they attempt to invest in a manner that offsets adverse market movements. But since they also want to capture returns, the hedge is never complete and many funds do not even bother (see chart 2). Responding to institutional demand, notes Greenwich Associates, some new hedge funds restrict themselves to holding long positions in common stocks, just like ordinary mutual funds or, for that matter, traditional accounts managed by brokers on behalf of clients.Hedge funds have some common characteristics. They are usually pooled investments (like mutual funds) structured as private partnerships (unlike mutual funds). Many carry substantial leverage and are quite rigid about the flow of money from clients. Initial ?lock-ups? for as long as four or five years are not uncommon; rarely is money allowed to come in or go out more than monthly. This restriction allows hedge funds to take positions in the most illiquid corners of the market including options, futures, derivatives, and unusually structured securities.
The part that kills me: some hedge funds actually hedge.
In Ego, Testosterone, and the Academy, Arnold Kling describes Summers’ talk as “as near a perfect example of judicious, thoughtful speculation as any imperfect human being might produce”:
Summers argues that to be a professor at a top university is to be at the very top of one’s profession, just as a corporate CEO is at the top of a firm. He says that to reach the top of a profession, one must dedicate an inordinate amount of time. He says that this need for professional dedication conflicts with family responsibilities for both men and women, but this tends to take more of a toll on women.Summers’ other point concerns statistical distributions. On a variety of attributes, statistical measures show that men have higher variance than women. Thus, if you look at the very top or at the very bottom of the distribution, you will find a larger share of men, while if you look in the middle, you will find a slightly larger share of women. He conjectures that this difference at the extremes exists for some attribute that is important in math and some branches of science. If to be at the top of one of those fields you need a genetic trait that is found only once in every 5000 or 10,000 people, and if rare genetic traits are more often found in men, then when you look at the top of those fields you will see more men.
The Way We Live Now: Unintelligent Design explains, in a nutshell, why no scientist can take “intelligent design” seriously:
From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims — that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.
What kind of intelligent designer makes bad designs?
Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
Colleges: An Endangered Species? describes how American higher education has changed over the years:
Until about fifty years ago, our most prestigious academic institutions were pretty much the domain of well-born prep school boys. In 1912, Owen Johnson’s enduringly popular novel (most recently reprinted in 2003) Stover at Yale gave a picture of Ivy life as a gladiatorial contest among alpha males who, by beating out their rivals for a spot on the team or in the club, learned to achieve ‘victory…on the broken hopes of a comrade,’ and went on to rule the nation. In 1920, Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton ’17) called Stover at Yale the ‘textbook’ for his generation.
[...]
At the turn of the century, when Stover was prepping for Yale, fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college. By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million. In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population. Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.
Of course, the schools themselves have changed dramatically. Before the Civil War, most schools were centers of moral learning, closely tied to a particularly church. This changed with the introduction of the land-grant system:
By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges “where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Eventually these “land-grant” colleges evolved into the system of state universities.
Incidentally, Cornell is both a private university and a land-grant school:
In 1895, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, whose private endowment was augmented by land granted to New York State under the Morrill Act, looked back at the godly era and declared himself well rid of “a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged.”
It was only a matter of time — and, frankly, he lasted longer than the oddsmakers predicted. From ‘Gonzo’ Godfather Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself:
Hunter S. Thompson, a renegade journalist whose ‘gonzo’ style threw out any pretense at objectivity and established the hard-living writer as a counter-culture icon, fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.
This headline, Death Highlights Dangers of Laser Hair Removal, paints a very different picture from what actually happened. No one was burned to death by a laser. A North Carolina college student died from an overdose of the prescription topical anesthetic cream they gave her (without a prescription) to apply before her laser treatment. She was in her car, on the way to the treatment, when she started to have seizures.
Naturally, “Some doctors say the death illustrates the need for greater regulation of the industry.” In fact, those doctors seem to think that such treatments should only be applied under a doctor’s supervision…
NPR interviews Monty Python’s Eric Idle:
His Beatles-parody mockumentary The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch comes out on DVD next month. He’s also written the book for the Monty Python farce Spamalot on Broadway.