First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say

From First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say:

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.
[...]
When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.
[...]
Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can't.

When you consider how many students can't find the US on a map, those stats don't look so bad.

About the study:

The survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut, is billed as the largest of its kind. More than 100,000 students, nearly 8,000 teachers and more than 500 administrators at 544 public and private high schools took part in early 2004.

Despite Violence, Iraqis Head to Polls In Large Numbers

Wow. Despite Violence, Iraqis Head to Polls In Large Numbers:

Former Gen. Uday Abdullah, a 50-year-old Sunni Muslim who commanded an Iraqi battalion until the fall of Baghdad, said he saw streams of neighbors walking to polling stations when he woke up yesterday morning. He lives in a Baghdad neighborhood with many former regime officers, and as he stood in line for an hour to vote, he bumped into former colleagues who had also come to vote.

"It felt great to vote," he said. "Like I was free."

Many Iraqi voters wore their best clothes, with whole families navigating past rolls of barbed wire and security checkpoints dressed in suits and ties, long skirts and flowery shirts, escorting children in party dresses. Handicapped voters rolled into the voting centers in wheelchairs. Children played soccer; women passed out candy and sweets to passersby. Many departed from election centers with the Arab cheer of "halhulah," traditionally shouted at weddings.

The Importance of Brad and Jennifer... and Maureen Dowd

In The Importance of Brad and Jennifer... and Maureen Dowd, James D. Miller has a few words to say about work-life balance and gender differences:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd complains that men with high-powered jobs would rather marry secretaries than their career equals. She further laments that the more a woman achieves in her career the less desirable she becomes to men. Dowd, of course, blames this situation entirely on men. But Dowd is wrong because it's women, not men, who are at fault here.

Although children are a blessing, they're also time sinks. Two married people can't both work jobs for 60 hours a week and have enough time to raise a few kids properly. Realizing this, many men who intend to have several children and time-intensive jobs often seek women who are more child- than career-oriented. But what about ambitious women? What do they need to do?
[...]
The majority of working parents can find enough time to spend with their children, but only because most of us have jobs that don't require 60+ hours of work each week. But the few who intend to climb to the very tops of their career ladders and are therefore willing to devote nearly every waking hour to their jobs face a choice of (A) not having children, (B) having neglected children, or (C) having a spouse who is willing to devote little time to his or her job. Dowd shouldn't attack ambitious men who have chosen option (C). Rather, she should convince career-oriented college women that they should stop dreaming of marrying investment bankers and start looking for men who don't want high-status, time-intensive jobs.

Tool for Thought

In Tool for Thought, writer Steven Johnson explains how he uses computer tools to aid his writing and thinking — not by simply searching, but by "riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring":

Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head — I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection — elect that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.

Unionization's Decline, a Human Capital Story

In Unionization's Decline, a Human Capital Story, Arnold Kling explains why unions haven't spread (much) outside of manufacturing:

In manufacturing, workers develop specific human capital. As someone who actually worked in a factory for a couple of summers, I can attest to this. You learn to operate the particular machinery in the plant, but that knowledge is of no value in a different plant.

In the service sector, skills are often transferable. You may have a license (to be a teacher, a nurse, or what have you) that makes you transferable. Or you may have a skill set (sales, general management, computer programming) that is transferable.

With specific human capital, there is mutual bargaining power. The company values your experience, but your opportunity cost is low, so they could try to keep your pay low and exploit you. So a union helps you out.

With generic human capital, you do not need bargaining muscle. If you are way underpaid, you simply take another job. So a union helps less.

Higher Ed, Inc.

Higher Ed, Inc. looks at the business of higher education:

Counting everything but its huge endowment holdings, Higher Ed, Inc., is a $250 to $270 billion business — bigger than religion, much bigger than art. And though no one in the business will openly admit it, getting into college is a cinch. The problem, of course, is that too many students want to get into the same handful of nameplate colleges, making it seem that the entire market is tight. It most certainly is not. Here�s the crucial statistic: There are about 2,500 four-year colleges in this country, and only about 100 of them refuse more applicants than they accept. Most schools accept 80 percent or more of those who apply. It�s the rare student who can�t get in somewhere.

An amusing analogy:

Another growth market? Foreign students. No one talks about it much, but this market has been profoundly affected by 9/11. Foreign students have stopped coming. There are enough rabbits still in the python that universities haven�t been affected yet. But they will be.

University funding in a nutshell:

Development is both PR and fundraising, the intersection of getting the brand out and the contributions in, and daily it becomes more crucial. That�s because schools like mine have four basic revenue streams: student tuition, research funding, public (state) support, and private giving. The least important is tuition; the most prestigious is external research dollars; the most fickle is state support; and the most remunerative is what passes through the development office.

Competition at the top of the pyramid has become intense:

Until 1991, the Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology met around a conference table each April to fix financial aid packages for students who had been admitted to more than one school. That year, after the Justice Department sued the schools, accusing them of antitrust violations, the universities agreed to stop the practice. As happened with Major League Baseball after television contracts made the teams rich, bidding pandemonium broke out. Finite number of players + almost infinite cash = market bubble. Here�s the staggering result. Over the past three decades, tuition at the most select schools has increased fivefold, nearly double the rate of inflation. Yet precious few students pay the full fare. The war is fought over who gets in and how much they�re going to have to be paid to attend.

The top schools are largely indistinguishable:

�Diversity is the hallmark of the Harvard/Radcliffe experience,� the first sentence in the Harvard University register declares. �Diversity is the virtual core of University life,� the University of Michigan bulletin announces. �Diversity is rooted deeply in the liberal arts tradition and is key to our educational philosophy,� Connecticut College insists. �Duke�s 5,800 undergraduates come from regions which are truly diverse,� the Duke University bulletin declares. �Stanford values a class that is both ethnically and economically diverse,� the Stanford University bulletin notes. Brown University says, �When asked to describe the undergraduate life at The College — and particularly their first strongest impression of Brown as freshmen — students consistently bring up the same topic: the diversity of the student body.�

Read the whole article.

How to kick someone's ass with an umbrella

Boing Boing recently discovered How to kick someone's ass with an umbrella, or, as Pearson's Magazine titled it (in 1901), Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (PartI). It's just one of the many fascinating articles in the Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives, edited by Joseph R. Svinth. My favorite quote, from the intro:

In this way blows can be made so formidable that with an ordinary malacca cane it is possible to sever a man's jugular vein through the collar of his overcoat.

The walking-stick article, by the way, is the work of E.W. Barton-Wright, creator of bartitsu — a collection of jiu-jitsu "tricks" with a hokey pseudo-Japanese name. Bartitsu has a claim to fame though: Sherlock Holmes relies on his training in bartitsu (misspelled baritsu, which is at least conceivably Japanese, in Doyle's story) to throw Moriarty off a waterfall in Switzerland. This is how he survives what was originally supposed to be his final story.

John Stossel Takes on Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior

John Stossel's latest ABC News special covers a mix of topics. John Stossel Takes on Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior:

No. 10 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Littering
No. 9 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Extra Cell Phone Fees
No. 8 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Noise
No. 7 – MYTH – Gas Prices Are Higher Than Ever
No. 6 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Congress' Pork Barrel Spending
No. 5 – NASTY BEHAVIOR – Welfare for Farmers
No. 4 – MYTH – Outsourcing Is Bad for American Workers
No. 3 – MYTH – Public Schools for Poor Kids, Not Politicians' Kids
No. 2 – MYTH – Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America
MYTH No. 1 – Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place

Software Engineering Proverbs

GeekPress led me to some Software Engineering Proverbs, including this one:

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said that, given eight hours to chop down a tree, he'd spend six sharpening his axe.

— TidBITS 654, quoted by Derek K. Miller, via Art Evans

People Against People

Most people do not think like economists and look at all of the tradeoffs involved in a "moral" decision. From People Against People:

In January, Greenpeace launched coordinated campaigns in Hong Kong and Thailand against power companies for causing global warming by generating electricity from coal. Greenpeace Hong Kong claimed global warming had killed 150,000 people. This is deeply misguided thinking. Nicola Mahncke, from Chung Hom Kok in Hong Kong hit the nail on the head in a letter to the Editor of the Sunday Morning Post, pointing out the money the anti-global warming treaty Kyoto Protocol would waste would be better spent 'saving the lives of nearly 1 billion people who do not have access to clean water'.

She might have added that electricity generated by coal saved millions in poor countries from early death from respiratory diseases caused by cooking with wood and coal.

Where Have All the Children Gone?

In Where Have All the Children Gone?, Pavel Kohou colorfully addresses declining birthrates:

In the third century AD there was a prophet called Mani. He preached a doctrine of conflict between Good and Evil. He saw the material world as the devil's creation. Marriage and motherhood was a grave sin in his view, since by bearing children people multiply the works of Satan. The Manichean ideal was to move mankind to a superterrestrial realm of Good by way of gradual extinction.

In the course of history, Manichaeism was ruthlessly eradicated as an heretical, ungodly doctrine. When looking at demographic statistics, however, one might think that the populations in developed countries have converted en masse to Manichaeism and decided to become extinct. The birth rate in most western countries has fallen bellow replacement level.

Children have shifted from being a valuable investment to being...pets:

To put it straightforwardly, and perhaps a little cynically, in the past children used to be regarded as investments that provided their parents with means of subsistence in old age. In Czech the word "vejminek" (a place in a farmhouse reserved for the farmer's old parents) is actually derived from a verb meaning "to stipulate": in the deed of transfer, the old farmer stipulated the conditions on which the farm was to be transferred to his son. Instead of an "intergenerational" policy, there used to be direct dependence of parents on their children. This meant that people had immediate economic motivation to have a sufficiently numerous and well-bred offspring — whereas today's anonymous system makes all workers pay for the pensions of all retirees in an utterly depersonalized manner.
[...]
Today, children no longer represent investments; instead, they have become pets — objects of luxury consumption. However, the pet market segment is very competitive. It is characteristic that the birth rate decline in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, was accompanied by soaring numbers of dog-owners in cities. While in the past dog-owners were predominantly retirees, today there are many young couples that have consciously decided to have a dog instead of a baby. These are mainly young professionals who have come to a conclusion (whether right or wrong) that they lack either time or money to have a child. Thus, they invest their emotional surpluses into animals.

Colors to the Mast

In Colors to the Mast, Wretchard notes that politicians and leaders have to stand by their statements, now that everything gets recorded and indexed on-line:

The emergence of the Internet has closed down the 'memory hole' within which the former apologists of Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein could hide their bad advance and from which they could emerge at whiles to offer new sage advice. The term 'memory hole' itself was coined by George Orwell who used it to describe the mechanism through which the media manipulated historical memory. One of the tenets of the Party in Orwell's 1984 was that 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past', and the key to achieving mastery over history was the liberal use of the 'memory hole'.

Religious War: East and West

Religious War: East and West opens by citing "the underground diplomats" at the New Sisyphus:

One of the most common observations about World War II was that if only Western leaders had heeded what the National Socialist Worker's Party and its leader Adolf Hitler were saying, they would have known of the grave danger facing the world. After all, it's not as if the Nazi Party or its frenzied Führer tried to hide what they were about. On the contrary, in speech after speech, newspaper after newspaper and book after book, Hitler and other senior Nazis laid out in some detail their plans for European domination, the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the elimination of the Jewish people.

And what do America's enemies say today?

In an audiotape released on January 23, 2005, Zarqawi puts forth a view which he has repeated many times in the past, but which, like Mein Kampf, some are determined never to hear. In the audio Zarqawi cursed democracy because it promoted such un-Islamic behavior as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule. Freedom of speech was particularly evil because it allowed "even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy."

A Strangely Important Figure

Andrew Stuttaford sees Ayn Rand as A Strangely Important Figure:

To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas.

Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in — oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life.

This rings true, in a darkly comic way:

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism."

Righting Copyrights

Robert S. Boynton, director of New York University's magazine journalism program, tackles copyrights in Righting Copyrights:

Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you.

Ah, irony:

The line between science fiction and reality is often difficult to discern, as exhibited by the case of the college student who received trademark #2,127,381 for the phrase "freedom of expression." Fortunately, the student was Kembrew McLeod, who applied for it in order to make a point. McLeod, now professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, is no stranger to using media pranks to exploit the absurdities of the system. In fact, he even once sold his soul in a glass jar on eBay.

Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

According to Victor Davis Hanson, Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old:

But this country is now in its third century and assurances that the United States is about through are getting old. In the early 20th century the rage was first Spengler and then Toynbee who warned us that our crass consumer capitalism would lead to inevitable spiritual decay. Next, the Hitlerians assured the Volk that the mongrel Americans could never set foot on German-occupied soil, so decadent were these Chicago mobsters and uncouth cowboys. Existentialism and pity for the empty man in the gray flannel suit were the rage of the 1950s, as Americans, we were told, had become depressed and given up in the face of racial inequality, rapid suburbanization, and the spread of world-wide national liberationist movements.

In the 1960s and 1970s we heard of the population bomb and all sorts of catastrophes in store for the United States and the world in general that had unwisely followed its profligate paradigm of consumption; yet despite Paul Ehrlich�s strident doomsday scenario, the environment got cleaner and the people of the globe richer. And then came the historian Paul Kennedy, who, citing earlier Spanish and English implosions, "proved" that the United States had played itself out in the Cold War, ruining its economy to match the Soviet Union in a hopeless arms race — publishing his findings shortly before the Russian empire collapsed and the American economy took off (again).

In the Carter "malaise years," we were warned about the impending triumph of "Asian Values" and the supposed cultural superiority of Japan, Inc., which would shortly own most of whatever lazy and ignorant Americans sold them — before the great meltdown brought on by corruption, censorship, and ossified bureaucracies in Asia.

Combat Ki and Genki Sudo

I don't understand Japanese particularly well, but I can nonetheless recommend this video of a Japanese TV show segment on juko-kai practitioners (Americans, by the way) demonstrating their combat ki by getting punched in the throat, kicked in the ribs, and kicked someplace else (even more delicate) — first by what look like American football players, then by Japanese (lightweight) puro resu fighter Genki Sudo (or Sudo Genki, in Japanese).

On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run

As Dale Bozzio used to sing, "Nobody walks in LA." Nobody (in the middle class) takes a bus or train either. On the east coast, things are a bit different. Anyway, Greyhound is now facing competition from buslines that go from one Chinatown to another. From On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run:

A bus pulled out of South Station terminal on a Friday morning and headed for New York City. Its windshield was cracked, its speedometer motionless. Orange peel graced its seat trays, and its safety warnings consisted of a single sign: "Watch your step."

The driver said not a word until he stopped the bus outside Cheng's Driving School in New York City's Chinatown. Then, as passengers gathered their bags, he stood up and screamed, "No parking here! You get out!"

The bus, according to the lettering near its luggage compartment, was owned by "Kristine Travel" and operated by "Lucky River," though the sign on its side said "Travel Pack" and its ticket agents called the company "Lucky Star." Its price for the trip from Boston to New York — 187 miles in 4 1/2 hours — was $15.

That may seem an impossibly low fare, yet another carrier on the Boston to New York run has lately started charging $15, too. The name on the side of its buses is Greyhound.

Greyhound Lines Inc. is a $1 billion company owned by Laidlaw International Inc., a $4.6 billion company. The only national bus network, "big dog" was racing along America's highways even before Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert hopped on a Greyhound in 1934's "It Happened One Night." But today, a dozen or so Chinese-owned bus lines are giving the dog a run for its money.
[...]
"If Greyhound wasn't a giant, maybe they could beat us," Shui Ming Zheng says through an interpreter. "But because they are a giant, they cannot."
[...]
"Common sense tells me that if JetBlue profits on a $79 fare to Buffalo, we can profit on a $15 fare to D.C.," says Mr. Wong, who handles management. "We copied the airline concept to a bus line." Greyhound, he adds, "really feels the pain."

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow:

Following the lead of Ireland, which dropped its rates to 12.5% from 24% between 2000 and 2003, one nation after another has moved toward lower corporate rates with fewer loopholes. The Netherlands, the second most popular European target for U.S. investment, recently joined the movement, lowering its corporate rates by three percentage points to 31.5% and simplifying its tax structure.

The corporate-tax cutters of recent years stretch from Portugal, where the rate has dropped 10 points to about 27%, to Austria, down nine points to about 25%. Even Germany, which has Europe's highest rate and has bitterly opposed the plummeting tax rates elsewhere in the region, has done some dramatic trimming — from as high as 56% six years ago, according to data from KPMG LLP, to 38.3% last year.

At this point, you may be asking, just what is the corporate tax rate in the US?

Germany's trims leave the standard U.S. rate — about 40% including average state taxes — above that of every country in Europe, according to separate studies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and KPMG.

Sigh.

New York Post Online Edition: 'C' Sickness on the Subway

As my friend, Dan, said, "Man, who needs terrorists when you've got bums?" From 'C' Sickness on the Subway:

A fire in a subway control room has put the C line out of service for up to five years and caused serious problems on the A line that will make the commute miserable for hundreds of thousands of subway riders, officials said yesterday.

The unstaffed room containing 600 electrical devices called 'relays' that are used to power signals and switches along a segment of the vital Eighth Avenue line were destroyed Sunday in the blaze.

Cops blamed a vagrant who set a shopping cart full of wood blocks ablaze six feet into the tracks at the Chambers Street station. Cops are searching for the derelict.

The flames quickly spread across the ceiling and along a wall, igniting wires that led to the locked control room.

The blaze melted thousands of the wires and knocked out power to dozens of signals and switches.

'It's major, major damage,' said Transit Authority president Larry Reuter.

"It's a barbecue. It's black and melted."

Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori's War on Terror

Fascinating. From Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori's War on Terror:

When Ellen Perry began making her documentary 'The Fall of Fujimori,' she said, she never thought her tale of a government wielding sweeping police powers in the name of democracy would become a story with eerie parallels to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Iron-fisted Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000, before fleeing to Japan amid allegations of murder and corruption.

He was democratically elected in 1990, but used dictatorial powers throughout his reign while proclaiming that his actions were done in the name of democracy to defeat a brutal insurgency.
[...]
Even while death squads roamed Peru, his government built schools, provided food and clothes to the poor, tamed inflation of more than 7,600 percent in 1990 and ended guerrilla warfare and terrorism waged by the Shining Path and other groups.

"On paper, he was extremely successful," Perry told Reuters. "The questions lie in how he did it. (His methods) were draconian. They were unconstitutional. They were undemocratic, but do the benefits outweigh the consequences?"

AFF's Brainwash - A year's end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper

Johnny Ramone died soon after Ronald Reagon. Many people find it odd, even ironic, that a punk musician like Ramone looked up to Reagan and shared his conservative politics. From A year's end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper:

Yet it wasn't only political beliefs that Johnny Ramone had in common with Reagan. Each played a central role in a major movement once considered on the fringe.

Every movement needs a founding myth — not myth as in a belief in fantastical stories, but as in an easily retold narrative that tells us how we got where we are today, helping us make sense of the current situation. Interestingly, the oft-retold narratives of punk rock and the modern conservative movement follow a somewhat parallel story line. They go like this.

First, there is the Fall from Grace.

The Old Republic, choked by FDR's odious New Deal, gives way to a decades-long left-liberal dominance in politics. Conservatives who advocate limited government are derided as anachronistic survivors of a time that we're better to have left behind.

Rock 'n' roll, the first art form centered on youth, grows old and sclerotic by the 1970s. The chaotic excitement of The Blackboard Jungle gives way to the self-destructive decadence of Woodstock and Altamont; where there was once Buddy Holly, there was now Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Though darkness descends, a remnant of true believers thrives.

Amidst a hostile political atmosphere and an ascendant welfare state, a small reduct of conservative intellectuals and activists keep the flame of freedom alive. But they're few and dismissed by "respectable" opinion; Barry Goldwater was written off as a dangerous warmonger.

In an area marked by rock-opera excess and singer-songwriter smarminess, a few groups — the Stooges, New York Dolls, and Dictators — quixotically cling to the idea that rock is supposed to be about fun and danger and not about some higher purpose. Yet they remain confined to a few dingy clubs.

Redemption. The remnant finds a champion and finally fights back against the forces of darkness.

In 1976, conservatives, smarting from the Nixon years of wage and price controls and government expansion — Amtrak, EPA — unite behind a new champion, a California governor willing to challenge his own party's sitting president. Ronald Reagan's efforts fails that year, but four years later, he realizes the goal that was so out of reach for Barry Goldwater — the White House.

That same year, the Ramones release their eponymous first album, giving the back-to-basics rock 'n' roll revival — dubbed "punk" around this time, thanks to Punk, the magazine that chronicled it — a new flag to rally around. Ramones was unlike any else that had come before it. No one played as fast or wrote (complete!) songs as short. And no album since has inspired so many people to start their own bands, launching an entire movement.

And, finally, a look back in appreciation.

Once derided as a right-wing nut, Ronald Reagan lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union — two things his detractors said couldn't happen. He received a hero's goodbye from the country he loved, and even old adversaries paid him tribute.

After a career of incessant touring, commercial frustration, and various indignities — an early gig opening for Johnny Winter resulted in the band being pelted with garbage — the Ramones went out on top of the world, with a guest star-studded final concert, induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and a critically acclaimed film documentary of their career.

The Long Tail: Maximum City

From Maximum City:

One of the complaints I used to have as a foreign correspondent was how hard it is to find places in the world that still feel foreign. What's foreign? How about this: 2am, driving back from a state-of-the-art call center in the middle of Bombay, my driver is slaloming through rubble in a scene that would look like Fallujah but for the Brahman cows grazing in the fast lane. On the shoulder a half-naked five year old girl is squatting to pee on a huge slab of broken concrete, lit by a fire of burning garbage. The billboard behind her advertises the latest BlackBerry. India!

Wired News: Improvised Bombs Baffle Army

Improvised Bombs Baffle Army reports on a number of high-tech efforts to detect and destroy improvised explosive devices. The PING project can find weapons caches:

Another Pentagon microwave project, code-named PING, is already in the country, and has been 'very successful' at finding insurgent weapons caches, said Billy Mullins, an associate director of strategic security for the Air Force. The machine, which fits inside a Humvee, sends out waves, looking for metal that will bounce the signals back. Concrete won't stop the microwaves, so PING can examine a building's interior.

'When you find a large amount of metal in a country that doesn't use a lot of metal in its construction, you have an idea that there's something there that there shouldn't be,' Mullins told a military research conference last week.

Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary and Stop Signs

Roger Ebert has a tongue-in-cheek Movie Glossary with entries for various movie tropes and clichés. I didn't know this bit of trivia though:

All movies set before 1955 should have yellow and black stop signs.

From the Wikipedia:

Stop signs originated in Detroit, Michigan in 1915. The first had black letters on a white background and were somewhat smaller than the modern one. As they became more widespread, a committee supported by AASHO met in 1922 to standardize them, and it selected the octagonal shape that has been used in the US ever since.

The unique eight-sided shape of the sign allows drivers facing the back of the sign to identify that oncoming drivers have a stop sign and prevent confusion with other traffic signs.

In 1924, the sign changed to black on yellow, the predominant color until 1954. Another competing group, the NCSHS, simultaneously advocated an even smaller, red-on-yellow stop sign. All of these signs were typically mounted only two or three feet above the ground.

These two organizations conflicted but eventually combined into the Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which in 1935 published the famous Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD) detailing the stop sign's appearance. The MUTCD stop sign was altered eight times between 1935 and 1971, mostly dealing with its reflectorization and its mounting height; the most drastic change came in 1954, when the sign gained its white-on-red color. Red is also the color for stop on traffic signals, unifying red as stop signal for drivers worldwide.

The mounting height reached its current level of seven feet in 1971.

Shattered Glass

I finally saw Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass, the reporter who fabricated "Hack Heaven" and other colorful stories for The New Republic. I had been meaning to catch it ever since I heard NPR's interview with Charles Lane, the editor who fired Glass, and it definitely pulled me in. It's amazing what a compulsive liar can get away with...for a while.

Exploring the law of unintended consequences

Exploring the law of unintended consequences shares a number of anecdotes about...unintended consequences:

Bruce Schneier, in his excellent Beyond Fear, reports that drivers in Russia have made interesting choices that have not always resulted in improving their situations. Crime is a large and growing problem in Russia, and one of the biggest threats is in the area of auto theft. To combat car theft, automobile owners installed car alarms. The result? Thieves waited until the owner approached the car to turn off the alarm, and then shot him, took his keys, and drove away in the car. Round one to the bad guys. Fine. So car owners quit using alarms, and instead installed security systems that made cars virtually impossible to hotwire. Ah ha! Round two to the good guys. Not so fast — since cars were extremely difficult to hotwire, thieves turned to carjackings instead, which is far more likely to result in injury or death to the car owner. Round three to the bad guys, and once again we see how 'security' sometimes serves only to make things easier for the criminals.

This one's beautiful:

Microsoft has touted its Windows Media Player (or WMP) as an industy- and DRM-friendly app that supports so-called "protected" media files. Basically, if you try to play a DRM-laden Windows media file, WMP checks to see if you have a valid license to do so. If you do, the file plays; if you don't, WMP heads off to a web site specified by the media file to acquire and download (and often purchase) a license.

But guess what? WMP doesn't check to see where it's going, or even what it's downloading, so individuals up to no good simply redirect it to sites where users end up with spyware, viruses, and other nastiness on their Windows machines.

Many safety measures simply convince people to take more risks.

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy reports on a hard-to-believe discovery:

A forgotten workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy, researchers said on Tuesday.

The details:

The find was made in part of the Santissima Annunziata convent, which let out rooms to artists centuries ago and where the likely muse of the Renaissance artist's masterwork, the Mona Lisa, may have worshipped.

"It's a bit absurd to think that, in 2005, we have found the studio of one of history's greatest artists. But that is what has happened," said Roberto Manescalchi, one of three researchers credited for this month's discovery.

"The proof is on the walls."

Frescos adorning part of the workshop were left undisturbed over the centuries and gradually forgotten. The wing of the convent was eventually split by a wall and is partially claimed today by the Institute of Military Geography.

In a slide-show presentation to media, Manescalchi pointed to one colorful fresco with a character conspicuously missing from the foreground.

The white silhouette bore a striking resemblance to da Vinci's painting of the archangel Gabriel, who appears in his "Annunciation" hanging in Florence's Uffizi gallery.

Manescalchi, who refers to the silhouette as "The Ghost," told reporters it was not clear to him whether the angel was removed or perhaps never completed.

The walls were also adorned with paintings of birds, one of which strongly resembled a sketch from da Vinci's "Atlantic Codex," a 1,286-page collection of drawings and writings by the painter, sculptor, inventor and scientist.

Another painting was similar to a drawing in da Vinci's codex on the flight of birds.

Manescalchi speculated that da Vinci had assistants in his workshop and probably used a "secret" corner room for his dissections of human corpses, aimed at improving his understanding of anatomy.

BBC NEWS | Health | Untidy beds may keep us healthy

If only I'd known this argument when I was little. From Untidy beds may keep us healthy:

Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies.

A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed.

Wired News: Many Faces of the Mac Mini

According to Many Faces of the Mac Mini, "Apple's new Mac mini computer appears to be something of an omnia omnibus — all things to all people":

Lots of sites, like (PVRblog or MacMerc, are detailing how to turn a mini into a living-room digital video recorder.
[...]
In Austin, Texas, a colocation company is building a low-cost data center out of dozens of Mac minis.

Underwriters Technologies' Mac mini colocation is housed in Austin's Data Foundry facility, a former bank vault where space is at a premium.

Because the Mini measures only 6.5 inches square and is 2 inches high, Underwriters can cram a standard server rack with three times as many minis as full-size servers.

"Size is a huge advantage," said Patrick Dayton, a senior project manager at Underwriters. "By taking into consideration remote power, we can get approximately 100 units in a single cage, as opposed to 30."
[...]
Benzaquen said the mini is the ideal size for a standard car stereo compartment, and it's 18-volt power supply is easily fed with standard 12-volt auto power. And because Mac OS X has voice recognition built in, the mini can be controlled hands free.

Benzaquen said the Mac mini could be a high-end stereo, storing as many as 16,000 songs on an 80-GB drive. Add an LCD screen, and passengers can watch DVDs or play games.

Wired News: Wild Things Are on the Beach

Wild Things Are on the Beach presents the work of Theo Jansen: "immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind," and built from cheap plastic tubes:

"I was making animals with just the tubes because they were cheap but later on they turned out to be very helpful in making artificial life because they are very flexible and multifunctional as well. I see it now as a sort of protein — in nature, everything is almost made of protein and you have various uses of protein; you can make nails, hair, skin and bones. There's a lot of variety in what you can do with just one material and this is what I try to do as well."

The "animals" are enthralling:

"I think they are absolutely beautiful," said Bruce Shapiro, robotic artist. "He has figured out a way to use inexpensive materials to construct wind-powered walking machines. What makes them so compelling is the wave of actuators, like the motion of a centipede's legs. I suspect that, as humans, we recognize this action as specific to living things, hence our fascination with Jansen's 'organisms.'"

You can see this in the videos, especially Animaris Geneticus and Animaris Currens Ventosa walking.

He keeps improving his animals:

Currently Jansen is working on giving the seventh generation of these creatures, comprising a herd of seven animals, the ability to move even in the wind's absence. His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterwards. Eventually he plans to increase the efficiency so that they can go on for days or even years.

"They have a food source in the wind so they can store energy and use it later on," said Jansen. "The downside is that they might have to wait for days, for the wind hopper to move on and on and then be able to move for maybe five minutes. They are just like snakes. Snakes also lie in the sun for days digesting their food. On the beach the animals have to catch the wind and wait for a long time before they have enough wind in their stomach to go for a walk."

Yingzi

Mark Rosenfelder's Yingzi attempts "to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system." He sketches out an English-based alternative to Chinese characters (hanzi), applying the same concepts:

• the limited role of pictograms
• the clever compound pictures (indeed all three examples are from Chinese)
• the phonetic-and-radical system (97% of Chinese characters work this way)
• the inclusion of radicals as part of the character (rather than as separate symbols, as in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing)
• the relative information content of radicals and phonetics
• compounds used as secondary phonetics
• the handling of multisyllabic and foreign words
• the handling of subsyllabic morphemes (the model here is Mandarin -r, represented by ér)
• the organization of dictionaries (in fact, the graphic at the top of the page shows part of the radical index for a Chinese dictionary, organized by stroke count)
• the psychological effects.

New Scientist Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills

Only academics would find this conclusion controversial. From Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills:

Gladiators' combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium, according to a controversial theory based on reconstructing the fighters' tactics from Roman artefacts and medieval fight books.

In fact, it should be obvious that the ancient gladiator was only a step away from the modern pro wrestler:

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented."

In the past couple decades, the western martial arts have been rediscovered:

To try to better understand what these scenes show, he turned to the pages of fighting and martial arts manuals produced in Germany and northern Italy in medieval and Renaissance times. These manuals provided instruction in everything from sword-fighting to wrestling. They are a good parallel for gladiatorial combat, Tuck argues, in part because opponents were professionals who used similar arms and armour. "And they're incredibly important because they show sequences of moves, and have accompanying descriptions," he says.

Most people see a fight as an exchange of blows, but a trained fighter sees closing, disengaging, and grappling:

From the manuals and art, Tuck infers that there were often three critical moments in the course of a gladiatorial bout. The first was initial contact, with both gladiators, fully armed, moving forwards and going for a body shot. The second was when one gladiator is wounded and seeks to distance himself from his opponent. In the third both gladiators drop their shields, seemingly undamaged, before grappling with each other, he says.

In the fight books, this act of throwing down weapons and shields to grapple was a common way to conclude a fight, without necessarily intending to finish off an opponent. Judging from the Roman art, the same happened during gladiatorial bouts, says Tuck.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)

Going with the Crowd

Going with the Crowd introduces a familiar scenario:

A few weeks ago, my family and I were wandering about in an unfamiliar part of the city where we live. We were getting hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. We happened upon a block that had three restaurants in a row.

All three restaurants served types of food that we enjoy. Although it was early in the evening, one was already quite crowded. Another had a couple at one table near the window. The third appeared to have no customers.

In such a situation, many people might think that there must be some reason why no one is at the third restaurant. Maybe there's something wrong with it. The restaurant with just one couple might also appear questionable for the same reason.

I think you see where this is going:

So, in the absence of any additional information, the natural thing to do would be to join the crowd in the first restaurant. It must be a good, well-known restaurant. Higher quality brings more customers. Right?

Suppose that the likelihood of someone choosing a restaurant is proportional to the number of people already in the restaurant. Given that all the restaurants are initially empty and that the first customer chooses randomly, what happens to the number of people that end up in the different restaurants?

Statistician Susan Holmes of Stanford University has created a Java applet that allows you to simulate such a situation.

Attack of the Machines - Is your stockbroker a robot?

Attack of the Machines - Is your stockbroker a robot? opens with an observation my brother pointed out to me years ago:

Every day, hundreds of reporters from CNBC, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and other outlets concoct a story about the stock market. From the chaos of the New York Stock Exchange, they discern rational human behavior to explain why the S&P 500 rose precisely 11.46 points today.

Tech stocks up? Why, it's because Intel's CEO made positive comments. Oil stocks down? A respected analyst issued a bearish forecast. When stocks fall across the board, it is frequently attributed to investors 'taking profits.' (Strangely, in the zero-sum game of investing, stocks never seem to rise due to investors 'taking losses.')

Choose a phenomenon that's supposed to affect the market (either up or down), then choose either "because of" or "despite" to describe the market's behavior that day.

The article's focus is on how human decisions are being slowly replaced by computer-based decision-making, but those narrative rationalizations about the market are meaningless even if human's are in charge; the market's a complex system with many, many actors.

Anyway, program trading has increased in volume over the years (as you'd have to expect):

According to the New York Stock Exchange, program trading for all of 2004 was a record 50.6 percent of volume, up sharply from 37.5 percent in 2003.

This all sounds vaguely familiar...

Then there are the trading geeks, guys with black boxes in Lower Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., who have written ultra-secret algorithms that dictate the purchase or sale of stocks whenever prices hit certain tripwires. In the past few years, quantitatively driven hedge funds have proliferated. And every day, the code on which they rely can trigger a buy and a sell on the same groups of stocks�sometimes several times a day. Thanks to program trading, a relatively small quantitative firm with only several hundred million dollars in capital can nonetheless account for a big chunk of the NYSE's daily volume on a given day.

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask) opens with this summary of human sleep (and sleep research):

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider "normal" today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.An excellent quote from Robert Heinlein:

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

This is so true:

The "owls" are constantly being treated as lazy, though they are more likely to be sleep-deprived (cannot fall asleep until the wee hours, then being rudely awoken by the alarm clock after just a couple of hours) and spend more hours awake (and presumably productive) than "larks" do. If you are asleep, this means you need it.

I didn't realize these accidents were sleep-related:

People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents — all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.

Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims

From Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims:

Indian pictorial texts known as "codices," as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.

Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.

Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.

"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming," said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.

There's more:

"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims," Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized."

While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people — apparently alive — being held down as they were burned.

The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.

"We have found cooking dishes just like that," said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones." However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.

In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.

All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.

"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice," which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.

Untangling ultrawideband

Untangling ultrawideband describes a technology that could make even video cables unnecessary:

The two incarnations of UWB are variations on the same highly unusual technological theme. Unlike conventional radio transmitters, which transmit on a particular frequency and which cannot be picked up if the receiver is slightly mistuned, UWB devices broadcast at very low power over an extremely wide band of frequencies. This has the advantage that UWB signals can be picked up by suitably designed receivers, but resemble background noise to conventional radio receivers, which are listening on one particular frequency. Conventional and UWB radios can therefore coexist. And that is why America's telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ruled in February 2002 that UWB devices could operate across a broad swathe of the radio spectrum, from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz, without requiring spectrum licences.

Move over, Big Brother

Move over, Big Brother looks at the democratization of surveillance:

The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-based cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tennessee, used his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later. Other similar stories abound: in Italy, a shopkeeper sent a picture of two men who were acting suspiciously to the police, who identified them as wanted men and arrested them soon afterwards, while in Sweden, a teenager was photographed while holding up a corner shop, and was apprehended within an hour.

Playing to win

Playing to win looks at video games as training tools, and, as an aside, looks at (American) football as a training tool for war:

Other sports, especially baseball, offer a greater wealth of data. However, no other sport seems to match the set of psychological and physical skills needed on a battlefield so well. Vince Lombardi, probably the most famous coach in American football's history, enjoyed comparing the football field to a battlefield. But the more important comparison is the converse — that a battlefield can seem like a football field, according to Lieutenant-Colonel James Riley, chief of tactics at the Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Indeed, Colonel Riley says his commanding general makes this very analogy constantly. In football, as in infantry combat, a player must be aware of both the wider situation on the field, and the area immediately surrounding him. The situation changes rapidly and the enemy is always adapting his tactics. Physical injuries abound in both places. Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives.

Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives. I love the smell of pigskin in the morning!

Supercharging the brain

Supercharging the brain looks at cognitive enhancers:

For an indication of what might happen if a safe and effective cognitive enhancer were to reach the market, consider the example of modafinil. Manufactured by Cephalon, a biotech company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and sold under the names Provigil and Alertec, the drug is a stimulant that vastly improves alertness in patients with narcolepsy, shift-work sleep disorder and sleep apnea. Since it first reached the market in America in 1999, sales have shot through the roof, reaching $290m in 2003 and expected to grow by at least 30% this year.

Much of the sales growth of modafinil has been driven by its off-label use, which accounts for as much as 90% of consumption. With its amazing safety profile — the side-effects generally do not go beyond mild headache or nausea — the drug is increasingly used to alleviate sleepiness resulting from all sorts of causes, including depression, jet lag or simply working long hours with too little sleep.
[...]
Modafinil has already surfaced in doping scandals. Kelli White, an American sprinter who took first place in the 100-metre and 200-metre competitions at last year's World Championships in Paris, later tested positive for the drug. Initially she insisted that it had been prescribed to treat narcolepsy, but subsequently admitted to using other banned substances as well. As a result, she was forced to return the medals she won last year and, along with a handful of other American athletes, was barred from competitions for two years.

Brain-boosting drugs are hardly new though; in fact, they can be so commonplace we don't even think of them as brain-boosting drugs:

"It's human nature to find things to improve ourselves," he says. Indeed, for thousands of years, people have chewed, brewed or smoked substances in the hopes of boosting their mental abilities as well as their stamina. Since coffee first became popular in the Arab world during the 16th century, the drink has become a widely and cheaply available cognitive enhancer. The average American coffee drinker sips more than three cups a day (and may also consume caffeine-laced soft drinks).

How do Provigil, amphetamines, and caffeine stack up?

Last year, Nancy Jo Wesensten, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, compared the effects of three popular alertness drugs — modafinil, dextroamphetamine and caffeine — head to head, using equally potent doses. Forty-eight subjects received one of the drugs, or a placebo, after being awake for 65 hours. The researchers then administered a battery of tests. All of the drugs did a good job restoring wakefulness for six to eight hours. After that, says Dr Wesensten, the performance of the subjects on caffeine declined because of its short half-life (a fact that could be easily remedied by consuming another dose, she points out). The other two groups reached their operational limit after 20 hours — staying awake for a total of 85 hours.

When the researchers looked at the drugs' effects on higher cognitive functions, such as planning and decision-making, they found each drug showed strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Caffeine was particularly effective in boosting a person's ability to estimate unknown quantities. When asked 20 questions that required a specific numeric answer — such as "how high off a trampoline can a person jump?" — 92% of volunteers on caffeine and 75% on modafinil showed good estimation skills. But only 42% on dextroamphetamine did so — the same proportion as the sleep-deprived subjects who had received a placebo.

Why the future is hybrid

Why the future is hybrid describes the different kinds of hybrid "petrol-electric" car:

The simplest kind is the "stop-start" or "micro" hybrid, which is not generally regarded as a true hybrid because it relies solely on an internal-combustion engine for propulsion. As the "stop-start" name implies, the engine shuts off when the vehicle comes to a halt. An integrated starter-generator restarts the engine instantly when the driver steps on the accelerator. All of this increases fuel efficiency only slightly, typically by around 10%. But few modifications to a conventional design are required, so it costs very little. In Europe, PSA Peugeot Citroën has just introduced a stop-start version of the Citroën C3, which sells for roughly the same price as a similarly equipped conventional C3.

Next come so-called "mild" hybrid designs, such as Honda's Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) — the hybrid configuration found in the Insight, the Civic and the new Accord. In addition to a stop-start function, an electric motor gives the engine a boost during acceleration. During braking, the same motor doubles up as a generator, capturing energy that would otherwise be lost as heat and using it to recharge the car's batteries. Since the electric motor is coupled to the engine, it never drives the wheels by itself. That is why this system is called a mild hybrid, much to Honda's dismay. The design is less expensive than Toyota's more elaborate approach, but can provide many of the same benefits, says Dan Benjamin of ABI Research, a consultancy based in Oyster Bay, New York. The hybrid version of the Civic achieves 48 miles per gallon, a 37% improvement over a comparable conventional Civic.

Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive, a "full" hybrid system, is much more complex. (The Ford Escape hybrid uses a similar system; Ford licenses a number of patents from Toyota.) Using a �power split� device, the output from the petrol engine is divided and used both to drive the wheels directly and to turn the generator, which in turn drives the electric motor and also drives the wheels. The distribution of power is continuously variable, explains David Hermance of Toyota, allowing the engine to run efficiently at all times. When its full power is not needed to drive the wheels, it can spin the generator to recharge the batteries. The batteries also get replenished when the car is coasting or braking. During stop-and-go traffic and at low speeds, when the petrol engine would be most inefficient, it shuts off and the electric motor, powered by the battery, takes over. That explains why the Prius has a better fuel economy rating for urban driving (60 miles per gallon) than for motorway driving (51 miles per gallon) — the opposite of a conventional vehicle.

Gadgets with a sporting chance

Gadgets with a sporting chance reports on some new, high-tech sporting equipment:

Victor Petrenko, an engineer at Dartmouth College's Ice Research Lab in New Hampshire, has invented some smart ski-brakes that, he believes, will increase the popularity of cross-country skiing by making the sport less challenging for beginners. The brakes, currently being tested by a ski manufacturer in the Alps, offer the necessary friction for a bigger "kick-off force" and make the skis less likely to slide backwards in their tracks. To make this happen, an electric current from the bottom of the skis pulses through the ice, melting a thin layer of snow that instantly refreezes and acts as a sort of glue.

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink cites Paul Ekman's work on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS):

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is the most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face. They examined videotapes of facial behavior to identify the specific changes that occurred with muscular contractions and how best to differentiate one from another. They associated the appearance changes with the action of muscles that produced them by studying anatomy, reproducing the appearances, and palpating their faces. Their goal was to create a reliable means for skilled human scorers to determine the category or categories in which to fit each facial behavior. The FACS Manual was first published in a loose-leaf version with video or film supplements in 1978.

A sample page from the manual describes Action Unit 1, the Inner Brow Raiser:

One large muscle in the scalp and forehead raises the eyebrows. It runs vertically from the top of the head to the eyebrows and covers virtually the entire forehead. The medial (or central) portion of this muscle (AU 1) can act separately from the lateral portion of this muscle (AU 2). Figure 2-1 shows that the movement of AU 1 is to pull the medial part of the brow and center of the forehead upwards.

Overcoming the Constraints of Sovereignty

In Overcoming the Constraints of Sovereignty, Sidney Goldberg illustrates the ethical issues involved in sovereignty with a metaphor:

Remember the movies in which a gang of criminals would rob a bank and then outrace the county police to the border of another county, cross the border, and leave the county police fuming in frustration because their authority prevailed only in their own county? I used to think this was the most stupid situation from an ethical point of view, even though the law was being upheld.

Take this hypothetical case: You're walking along the border of a neighboring country and there's nobody in sight on either side, except for a guy who's beating up an old lady in the neighboring country. You're bigger and stronger than that guy and you know you could stop him, but to do so you would have to illegally cross the border. What to do? It's a no-brainer because saving the woman's life is on a much higher ethical plane than abiding by the laws of sovereignty. So you chase off the perpetrator and save the woman's life.

What if two guys with baseball bats are beating up the old lady, who certainly will die from the blows? In this case, you don't go to her help, because they will kill you, too, and there will be two deaths instead of one.

Extrapolating to the big picture, where the United States finds a people who are suffering under the yoke of a tyrant, and it is a tyrant that we can eliminate and thereby ease the suffering, we should go ahead and do it. This would violate the laws of sovereignty in favor of the obligations of ethics. This action should be taken unless it causes even more deaths and suffering than the existing tyranny. In that case we have to put it on a back burner until a better opportunity for change occurs.

Leaving the Brothel Behind

Nicholas D. Kristof opens Leaving the Brothel Behind with a look back:

A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.

Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her.

I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages.

As Alex Tabarrok notes, the following anecdote says "a lot about problems of development that are not much discussed in the literature: short-time horizons, envy, the dragging down of the ambitious and the almost inherent lack of property rights in small communities":

At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. Our plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few months, business boomed.

The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking.

"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."

But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it.

Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten

Ouch. From Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten:

David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon.

"The story is actually fairly gruesome," the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. "It was human error — the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten."

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Paul Graham, author of Hackers & Painters, wrote What You'll Wish You'd Known as a talk for a high school, but the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite him:

If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.

When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.

Officials Struggle With Reintroduction

Another protected species is getting out of control. From Officials Struggle With Reintroduction:

The river otter, that wily and playful critter adored by the public, is overrunning Ohio.

Now, wildlife officials there are finding themselves in the same predicament as their counterparts in other states: killing a species once on the verge of vanishing.

In Florida and New Jersey, it's the black bear. The Rockies and Alaska have the gray wolf. Nearly everywhere else, it's the white-tailed deer and Canada goose.

Some stats:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wildlife causes $1 billion in crop and livestock damage each year, while deer collisions injure about 29,000 motorists a year and cost another $1 billion. Bird collisions cost the aviation industry $740 million annually.

Rats 'Born to Run' Show How Fitness Extends Life

Rats 'Born to Run' Show How Fitness Extends Life:

Britton and colleagues bred rats for 11 generations to be good or poor runners.

Then they tested their ability to exercise, without training them first, so that differences could not be attributed to practice.

Their high-capacity runners can exercise on a little rodent treadmill for 42 minutes on average before becoming exhausted, while the low-capacity runners average only 14 minutes. It is a 347 percent difference in capacity, they report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Selective breeding had quite an effect on performance — and health:

"We found that rats with low aerobic capacity scored higher on risk factors linked to cardiovascular disease — including high blood pressure and vascular dysfunction," said Ulrik Wisloff, a professor of exercise physiology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
[...]
"Rats with low aerobic capacity also had higher levels of blood fat disorders (such as high cholesterol), insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic condition) and more abdominal fat than high-capacity rats," added Sonia Najjar, of the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo.

Battlestar Galactica Blog

On his new Battlestar Galactica Blog, writer Ron Moore answers fan questions, including "Why is everything so low tech when clearly these humans are so advanced?":

The plot explanation is that following the Cylon Uprising 40 years ago, Colonial society took a giant step backwards to protect itself from the technological nightmare it had unleashed. With their enemies able to hack into virtually any network, the Colonials had to rely on stand-alone technologies that we not connected to other components. Ships like the Galactica were designed with this in mind, as well as the old military philosophy of building equipment that will function even in the most dire of circumstances. You don't want to be using cordless phones when the ship is hit by a nuke and power is disrupted to say the least. You want something reliable and solid and preferably with a cord.

The creative explanation is that high-tech ships with touch screens and computers that talk has been done to death in my opinion. Also, having magical technology that does all the work for you tends to take the human beings out of the dramatic equation. I wanted a lower-tech Galactica so that we could put people back into scifi. This show is about our characters, not about the magical technology that they use.

Ultimate Fighter Bios

SpikeTV's Ultimate Fighter Bios include some unusual individuals vying for a chance (via reality TV show) to compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship:

Christopher
This 36 year-old is the oldest member of 'Ultimate Fighter' and graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in Economics and a minor in Japanese. Born in Boston, Christopher currently lives and trains in the San Francisco area and works in internet security. Proficient in boxing and Muay Thai, Chjristopher enjoys traveling, cooking, and visiting museums.

Jason
An alternate on the 1988 Canadian Olympics Gymnastics team, Jason lives in rural British Columbia in the small town of Whonnuck. A Vancouver Film School graduate, he has worked as an animation animator for the past six years and has worked on projects for high profile clients such as Disney and Pokemon. A lifelong fan of Bruce Lee, this 29 year-old was a county champion wrestler in high school in the 170 lb. class.

Kenny
The Boston native works in financial translation service for the Spanish and Portugese communities. The 28 year-old is a graduate of Boston College with a degree in Communications. An all-state soccer player, Kenny roots for both the World Champion Red Sox and Patriots. An avid chess player interested in Buddhism, Kenny has traveled extensively and once lived in Brazil.

Sam
An avid chess player who freely quotes Socrates and Nietzsche, he is a graduate of LSU with two Political Science degrees (Theory and Government) and is currently studying for his MBA at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa. Born in Louisiana, Sam has lived in Germany, Panama, and eventually Eagle River, Alaska where he attended Chugaik High School. Sam, a 24 year-old aspiring lawyer began practicing karate at six years old and currently trains Brazilian Jujitsu in Anchorage. He was also the founder of the Brazilian Jujitsu Club at LSU.

Do You Want to Live Forever?

Do You Want to Live Forever? looks at Cambridge computer scientist (and self-taught biologist) Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, who "is convinced that he has formulated the theoretical means by which human beings might live thousands of years — indefinitely, in fact":

For reasons that his memory cannot now retrieve, de Grey has been convinced since childhood that aging is, in his words, �something we need to fix.� Having become interested in biology after marrying a geneticist in 1991, he began poring over texts, and autodidacted until he had mastered the subject. The more he learned, the more he became convinced that the postponement of death was a problem that could very well have real solutions and that he might be just the person to find them. As he reviewed the possible reasons why so little progress had been made in spite of the remarkable molecular and cellular discoveries of recent decades, he came to the conclusion that the problem might be far less difficult to solve than some thought; it seemed to him related to a factor too often brushed under the table when the motivations of scientists are discussed, namely the small likelihood of achieving promising results within the �period required for academic advancement — careerism, in a word. As he puts it, �High-risk fields are not the most conducive to getting promoted quickly.�

De Grey began reading the relevant literature in late 1995 and after only a few months had learned so much that he was able to explain previously unidentified �influences affecting mutations in mitochondria, the intracellular structures that release energy from certain chemical processes necessary to cell function. Having contacted an expert in this area of research who told him that he had indeed made a new discovery, he published his first biological research paper in 1997, in the peer-reviewed journal BioEssays (�A Proposed Refinement of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,� de Grey, ADNJ, BioEssays 19(2)161�166, 1997). By July 2000, further assiduous application had brought him to what some have called his �eureka moment,� the insight he speaks of as his realization that �aging could be �described as a reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair.� This concept became the theme of all the theoretical investigation he would do from that moment on; it became the leitmotif of his life. He determined to approach longevity as what can only be called a problem in engineering. If it is possible to know all the components of the variety of processes that cause animal tissues to age, he reasoned, it might also be possible to design remedies for each of them.

All along the way, de Grey would be continually surprised at the relative ease with which the necessary knowledge could be mastered — or at least, the ease with which he himself could master it.

Six Tsunamis

Six Tsunamis presents the metaphor du jour:

Imagine that every year the world suffered from six or more tsunamis producing the horrific death toll recently experienced. That's how many people die every year from malaria alone, and the tsunami may contribute to even higher rates this year. That disaster has created new habitat suitable for the proliferation of malaria and other disease-carrying mosquitoes.

The solution? DDT, of course

DDT has a proven record of effectiveness. Many nations, including the United States, eradicated malaria-carrying mosquitoes using DDT. South Africa nearly did the same, but it stopped using DDT under political pressure. After halting DDT use, cases rose from about 4,100 in 1995 to more than 27,000 by 1999, according to a study conducted by researchers Amir Attaran and Rajendra Maharaj. In recent years, South Africa resumed DDT use, and cases have dropped 85 percent according to Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria.

Interestingly, DDT has not been shown to have any adverse impacts on human health:

If the huge amounts of DDT used are taken into account, the safety record for human beings is extremely good. In the 1940s many people were deliberately exposed to high concentrations of DDT through dusting programmes or impregnation of clothes, without any apparent ill effect.

The wherefores and whys of women in science

Jane Galt comments on The wherefores and whys of women in science:

People who are arguing that it's stupid to generalise from means or distributions to individuals are stupid are right, but only in a trivial, irrelevant way. The particular discussion at hand revolves around the fact that there are fewer women than men in many scientific disciplines, particularly, it seems to me from the outside, the ones that involve a great deal of rather abstruse math. We are looking at a population, not an individual, and it is entirely proper — nay, necessary — to discuss group averages. That we cannot divine any individual's ability from those averages is true, but irrelevant; we're looking at the group.

Look at it this way: I am 6'2 (1.88 metres), which puts me four standard deviations from the mean height of American women — approximately one tenth of one percent of American women will be as tall as, or taller than, I am.

Could we use the average of the female population to predict that I am not 6'2? No! I am 6'2. We would get the answer wrong if we tried to use the average predictively.

Could we use the average to bet, sight unseen, on whether or not I am taller than 6'1? Yes! Only 0.3% of the female population is taller than 6'1. If you had to bet, you'd bet against it. Of course, in my case you'd be wrong — but it would still be the right way to bet.

But do we need to bet? No! We can measure me. Similarly, physicists considering female candidates have lots of other means to assess their physics ability. They don't need to look at whether or not she's female.

But if we were looking at an organisation that only hired people who were taller than 6 feet because they needed them to reach very tall shelves, most of the employees would be men. We might infer discrimination, but we'd be wrong. It's just that innate differences would produce differing results for men and women. And if I showed up and they refused to hire me because I'm a women, and women have a very low probability of being that tall, that would be discrimination, because they can look right at me and see that despite being a member of a group with a lower mean height, I myself am in fact configured like a beanstalk.

Congo Police, Army Accused of Elephant Poaching

Congo Police, Army Accused of Elephant Poaching:

The investigation by the Congolese Institute for Conservation of Nature estimates 17 tons of elephant ivory was smuggled out of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve (OWR) in the volatile Ituri district during the last six months of 2004 alone.

"Although a significant number of people are implicated in the trade, our investigations have identified just 12 people who played the role of main poachers ... they are all linked to the military and the national police," said the report, seen by Reuters.

How many elephants do you need to kill to gather 17 tons of ivory?

Dubai Tries to Find Its Place in the World In the Record Books

According to Dubai Tries to Find Its Place in the World In the Record Books, "as Dubai's wealth grew in recent years, so did the world's biggest Napoleon complex":

Not far from the world's biggest man-made island and the world's tallest hotel here is a luxury apartment building that will be topped by the world's highest and largest sundial.

A few minutes down the road, construction has begun on the world's tallest building, to be flanked by the world's most spacious shopping mall, housing the world's largest indoor aquarium. Each March, the nearby racetrack runs the world's richest horse race, with a $6 million purse.

"All over Dubai, you have so many world records," says Bevis Douyers, restaurant manager at the Ramada Dubai Hotel. "This one's old — almost 25 years," he says, gazing up the hotel's 12-story atrium at the world's largest stained-glass mural.

Dubai, a city-state in the United Arab Emirates with a population of a little more than one million, would rank as one of the world's smallest countries on its own. Helped by the draw of year-round sun and desert-sand beaches, it boasts one of the world's fastest-growing economies. But until a few years ago, it was one of the world's least-known destinations.

To grab a place on the world map, locals turned to the Guinness Book of World Records, with stunts like building the world's longest sofa (100 feet), lighting the largest number of candles on a cake (2,100) and creating the world's largest incense burner (10 feet tall). In a sign of its global perspective, Dubai in 1998 financed the world's first cross between an Arabian camel and an Andean llama, dubbed a cama.

Hybrid History

Hybrid History notes that "conceptually speaking, there is little really new under the automotive sun":

In 1900, a Belgian maker, Pieper, introduced a 3-1/2 horsepower "voiturette" in which the small gasoline engine was mated to an electric motor under the seat. When the car was "cruising," its electric motor was in effect a generator, recharging the batteries. But when the car was climbing a grade, the electric motor, mounted coaxially with the gas engine, gave it a boost. It was a crude but uncanny anticipation of the new Honda hybrid's "integrated motor assist" (IMA) system.

Ferdinand Porsche took the next step:

Hired by an Austrian carmaker, Jacob Lohner, Porsche at first developed a then-sensational system whereby two electric motors, attached directly to the front wheels, powered the car.

These very fast "Lohner-Porsches" won many auto races. But their practical use was hampered by the same shortcomings that have haunted pure electric cars to this day - batteries that weighed too much and stored too little electricity, restricting cruising range.

Porsche solved that problem, with his own mixte system, "mixing" an internal combustion engine with electric motors that improved on the scheme of the Krieger cars. His solution was elegant — the internal combustion engine (ICE) powered a dynamo, which sent its current directly to the electric motors at the car's wheels. The driveshaft was eliminated.

The cars were sensational performers and the young Porsche loved to race them. He soon built a Lohner mixte with electric motors on all four wheels. These cars achieved speeds of 70 miles an hour, which in 1903 was a more than head-turning speed.

Modern technology has finally made the hybrid workable:

Without getting into technical details, the Prius is a rolling clinic on what can happen when advances in know-how and materials catch up with elegant ideas and daring dreams. The small, powerful, reliable electric motors designed and built today are a far cry from the wheel motors on Porsche's mixte cars, which weighed almost 250 pounds each. And early 20th Century engineers could not conceive of the role advanced electronics and microprocessors would play in managing, monitoring and switching power between the ICE and the electric motor.

The New Yorker: Renaissance Man

In Renaissance Man, Adam Gopnik reviews a pair of new books on Leonarda da Vinci:

Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it. He put wings on pet lizards and called them dragons; scribbled pyramidal parachutes in the margins of manuscripts which, more than five hundred years later, turn out to work perfectly; dashed off a letter to the Ottoman sultan offering to design a bridge that would span the Golden Horn (and the bridge he sketched, built elsewhere a few years ago, in a scaled-down version, not only is perfectly engineered but anticipates the look of Eero Saarinen�s T.W.A. terminal). He drew the Deluge, imagined the modern mortar, and fixed a half smile in the world�s imagination, and there was no one else around doing anything like it.

The Man Who Framed Himself

George Lakoff is a "progressive" professor of cognitive linguistics who sees conservatives as holding a "strict father" model of morality and liberals ("progressives") as holding a "nurturing parent" model. From The Man Who Framed Himself:

For now, we're left with an elaborate variation on the ancient libertarian joke that Republicans want the government to be your father, Democrats want the government to be your mother, and libertarians want to treat you as an adult.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | In thrall to ratdom

Christopher Priest opens his review of Rober Sullivan's Rats: A Year with New York's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, In thrall to ratdom, with a short description of a recent BBC documentary:

A few years ago the BBC wildlife department broadcast a documentary about the common rat: rattus rattus (black rat) or rattus norvegicus (brown, or Norway rat). The intention was avowedly to study the animal as wildlife, as if rats were the same kind of entity as meerkats or penguins or sea cucumbers or chipmunks. The programme contained the usual breathtaking close-up shots we are now so used to in TV wildlife films: habitat, feeding, mating, reproduction, rearing the young, and so on.

The trouble was that this time the programme was about rats. In spite of one's valiant efforts to try to see the rodents as ordinary animals with, so to speak, a point of view, it remained inescapable that a rat's habitat is in drains, cellars and burrows, his food is our leftovers, and he and his mate's reproduction is, well, fast and furious.

Some rat facts:

We are right to be fearful of rats, because they are verminous. They urinate and defecate in places where we keep food and clothes. They go out when it's dark. They swarm. They gnaw through electric mains cables and gas-pipes, usually with disastrous consequences for themselves, but if they do it beneath your house they put your property and life at risk. As many as a quarter of all fires of unknown origin are thought to be caused by rats. The teeth of a brown rat are stronger, harder, than aluminium, copper, lead and iron. (They also grow prodigiously: a rat's incisors grow five inches every year, so they don't worry too much about chipping and breaking their teeth.)

Rats are known carriers of diseases that kill mankind: bubonic plague, famously, but also typhus, rabies, trichinosis, tularaemia and the horrific leptospirosis. They carry bacteria, mites, fleas, lice and ticks.

They have sex-lives at which some of us can only marvel. "If you are in New York while you are reading this sentence," Sullivan says, "or even in any other major city... then you are in proximity to two or more rats having sex." Male rats can mate with 20 females in a few hours; the gestation period is just three weeks; the average litter is up to 20 pups.

An In With the In Crowd, for a Fee

For a fee, the hipsters at PartyBuddys.com will make you a VIP for the night. From An In With the In Crowd, for a Fee:

Its night-out package includes a guide (the party buddy) to usher clients "through crowds of jealous bystanders," limousine service, complimentary drinks and V.I.P. treatment at six Manhattan clubs (Cielo, Plaid, Webster Hall, Copacabana, Spirit and China Club).

Fees for the night start at $350 a person; full rock-star treatment is available for $1,200.

Mr. King and Mr. Roefaro, who operate the business out of Mr. Roefaro's late grandmother's brick house in Union City, estimate that at least 60 percent of their clients are middle-aged professionals from out of town who have never visited a New York nightclub.

For Thai Survivors, The Dead Live On In Ghost Sightings

From For Thai Survivors, The Dead Live On In Ghost Sightings:

As Thai people grapple with the physical aftereffects of December's natural disaster, they are also dealing with another serious problem: Ghosts.

For many Thais, steeped in Buddhist teachings of rebirth and even older animistic beliefs in spirits, ghosts are very real. When people die suddenly and violently, as they did in the December waves, spirits cling to their bodies and to familiar places, unsure of how to cross from the world of the living to the world of the dead, many here believe.

I remember reading, years ago, that the movie Ghost did particularly well in Thailand, because most of the population found the story plausible.

Indian Country

In Indian Country, Robert D. Kaplan explains that large military units that attract attention from Washington and the media can't get their job done:

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation. One good soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat — regardless of one's position on the war.

Bobbitt on "Seeing the Futures" in the New York Times

In Seeing the Futures, Philip Bobbitt explains how the government's decision-makers need to move from straightforward strategic planning to scenario planning:

For nearly 50 years, American decision-makers could rely on forms of "strategic planning" — a method that begins with choosing a desired result and then plotting the decisions that will have to be made to reach that goal. Strategic planning worked well in the two-power world because we were able to extrapolate from a relatively stable and familiar security environment, relying on more or less agreed-upon intelligence estimates.
[...]
In this new era of uncertainty, not only must we must accept that simple forecasting is not going to be very useful to us, we must sharpen our skills of forethought. One way will be to augment traditional strategic planning with "scenario planning," a strategy that has long been a staple at the largest multinational corporations. Scenario planning involves the creation of alternative narratives about the future based on different decisions — by many players — as each scenario progresses.

Some examples of scenario planning:

Scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell, where I am a senior adviser, helped the corporation become one of the most profitable oil conglomerates. In the early 1970's, its scenario planners worked on hypothetical futures involving an oil boycott against the West; when political events finally brought about the Arab oil crisis, the company not only wasn't taken by surprise, it was in a position to capitalize. In the 1990's Shell analysts were scenario-planning a potential backlash against global companies, long before the antiglobalization movement took off. Thus, while most companies reacted to the new movement with corporate disdain, Shell was courting nongovernmental groups and decentralizing its global operations so that decisions in foreign divisions could be made by people living in and sensitive to the countries affected.

Scenario planning requires a change of culture:

Getting the government to emphasize scenario planning will not be easy. To be successful, the approach depends on well-organized dialogue between decision makers at many levels, which would be culture shock for the rigidly hierarchical executive branch. [...] Also, scenario planning requires a political culture that is tolerant of uncertainty. Contingencies of uncertain probability tend to be of little interest to politicians, who are confident they know the future. Similarly, competing scenarios are anathema to bureaucrats whose careers are threatened by answering questions like, "What would it take for this estimate to be dramatically wrong?" — which translates to, "What arguments can you give me that undermine your own recommendations?"

Killology Research Group

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of the Pulitzer-nominated On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, has dubbed his field of study Killology: the study of the destructive act. It's a hokey name, but the material's fascinating.

Most humans, even when facing an aggressive enemy, display A Resistance to Killing:

Based on his postcombat interviews, Marshall concluded in his landmark book, Men Against Fire, that only 15 to 20% of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Specialized weapons, such as a flame-thrower, usually were fired. Crew-served weapons, such as a machine gun, almost always were fired. And firing would increase greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when left to their own devices, the great majority of individual combatants throughout history appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.

In response to this research, the Army replaced bull's-eye targets with realistic, man-shaped, pop-up targets that fall when hit:

The application and perfection of these basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire from near 20% in World War II to approximately 55% in Korea and around 95% in Vietnam.

Other factors in Overcoming the Resistance to Killing include proximity and respect of authority (e.g., your commanding officer grabs you, points at a target, and demands that you shoot him), physical and emotional distance to target (e.g., it's easier to kill indirectly via artillery), and group absolution (e.g., being one member of a firing squad).

The continuous warfare of the 20th century led to mass psychiatric casualties — shell shock. From Psychiatric Casualties in War:

Swank and Marchand's World War II study of US Army combatants on the beaches of Normandy found that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98% of the surviving soldiers had become psychiatric casualties. And the remaining 2% were identified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities."

The Long Tail: Long Tail TV: Conclusion

In Long Tail TV: Conclusion, Chris Anderson shares examples of "content that is not available through traditional distribution channels but could nevertheless find an audience":

1) TV shows that are made but not broadcast in your area:

• Channels your cable provider doesn't carry
• Foreign TV
• Local sports and events from places you aren't

2) Old TV shows:

• TV from the archives, from ancient to relatively recent
• Current shows that you missed and forgot to record

3) Video of any sort that is made but not broadcast (the video found on the Internet Archive's moving image collections, which ranges from the Prelinger Archives to SIGGRAPH animations, is a great example.)

• Independent films
• Commercials (which are broadcast but not scheduled and findable)
• Amateur video, including news
• Commercial/corporate video intended for targeted audiences

4) Video that could and would be made if only there were a good way to find an audience for it. (Steve Rosenbaum is blogging on this, too). The best sense of what that might be can be found by looking at the online video that's been made since the broadband web became a reality.

• Political video mashups from MoveOn. Skateboarders taping and distributing their stunts and spills. Any number of witness videos. Amateur porn. Videogame machinima. Etc...
• The sort of thing this article about JibJab Media (home of South Park-like fare such as "This Land") celebrates. Such web video, the article says, is "spawning a cottage industry of digital movie Fellinis hoping to make their mark in the nascent world of online short films."
• Endless numbers of reality shows.

Wired News: Cell-Phone Shushing Gets Creative

From Wired News: Cell-Phone Shushing Gets Creative:

It's a familiar issue: You're stuck somewhere with a nearby stranger yapping on a cell phone, but you're unwilling to say anything about it. In December, designers Jim Coudal of Chicago's Coudal Partners and Aaron Draplin of Portland, Oregon-based Draplindustries Design drafted a solution that's been gaining buzz across the blogosphere.

Following an idea initiated by Coudal's wife, Heidi, Coudal and Draplin put together a series of free, downloadable cards, with messages like, 'Just so you know: Everyone around you is being forced to listen to yer conversation' and 'The world is a noisy place. You aren't helping things.' Cards are attributed to the Society for HandHeld Hushing, or SHHH.

At last check, the file (.pdf) had been downloaded a quarter of a million times, Coudal said, though he doesn't know of anybody who has actually passed out the cards.

Together in electric dreams

Together in electric dreams describes a piece of software that can predict whether a song will become a hit:

The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can 'predict' the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years' worth of Billboard hit singles — 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

HSS has a track record:

HSS confidently predicted Norah Jones's meteoric success (tipping no less than 10 songs on her debut album Come Away with Me) well in advance of her chart-topping appearances and in the face of an industry unconvinced she would have any commercial impact. HSS also picked out all the Maroon 5 hits, including both This Love and She Will be Loved.

Of course, my first questions was, What does it take to go from recognizing hits via software to generating them?

50 Cent Makes Pitch to Get 2006 Charger

American cars are getting hip again. From 50 Cent Makes Pitch to Get 2006 Charger:

"I need to know what I gotta do to get that Dodge Charger first. I need that," 50 Cent told Myles Kovacs, publisher of auto customizing publication Dub Magazine, in a telephone message last week made available to The Detroit News.

Chrysler is rushing to get 50 Cent what he wants, as it did last summer when rapper Snoop Dogg asked Chrysler division chief executive Dieter Zetsche for a Chrysler 300 sedan. The Snoop Dogg connection brought the automaker welcome cachet in the youth market.

I'm not sure that the 2006 Dodge Charger captures the spirit of the original.

In Divided U.S., A Big Question: Who Gets the Kids?

Just what the country needs — partisan children's books. From In Divided U.S., A Big Question: Who Gets the Kids?:

There's even a niche market in politically abrasive children's literature. One new book is titled "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!" It tells the fictional tale of two boys who try to run a lemonade stand, while liberals keep showing up, taking half their money in taxes, and forcing them to remove the photo of Jesus that hangs on the stand.

The book is written under a pen name because the author says she fears for her children's safety. In Fort Mill, S.C., 10-year-old Abbey Kirrane received the book from her mom. "If you listen to liberals," she says, "they take away your dreams and hopes for the future." Abbey believes the book accurately describes liberals. "They can be pushy. They tell you what to do."

The book, which is sold in some bookstores and online, is the first in a series by World Ahead Publishing, of Gardena, Calif. Up next: "Help! Mom! Hollywood is in my Hamper!"

A left-leaning children's book "No, George, No!" depicts a "Truth Fairy" showing a cartoon Mr. Bush the errors of his ways on issues from the Iraq war to the environment. The book is designed to teach children "to be people of integrity, unlike our president," says author Kathy Eder, who self-published it and says she has sold about 1,000 copies. Brian Henson, 11, of Orinda, Calif., received a copy as a gift from his grandmother. "The book made things clear for me," he says.

Electronics With Borders: Some Work Only in the U.S.

Consumer-electronics companies have learned that arbitrage cuts into their ability to price-discriminate. From Electronics With Borders: Some Work Only in the U.S.:

Some consumer-electronics companies are designing products so they will work only in the U.S. For example, some of the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard Co. refuse to print if they aren't fed ink cartridges bought in the same region of the world as the printer. Nintendo Co.'s latest hand-held game machines are sold in the U.S. with power adaptors that don't work in Europe.

Such measures prevent thrifty foreign consumers and gray marketers — traders who sell goods through channels that haven't been authorized by the manufacturer — from taking advantage of the decline of the dollar against the world's major currencies to buy lower-price products in the U.S.

The New York Times > Magazine > Re-Evaluation: The First Hijackers

The New York Times > Re-Evaluation: The First Hijackers summarizes the history of airplane hijacking:

[Samuel Byck] was shot in 1974 while trying to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House. As spectacular as it might have been, Byck's plan to turn an airplane into a weapon was neither the first nor the most significant in the annals of domestic hijacking. Two years before Byck, on Jan. 29, 1972, a T.W.A. Boeing 707 bound from Los Angeles to New York was hijacked by Garrett B. Trapnell, who was shot and wounded by an F.B.I. agent after the plane landed and was sitting on the tarmac at J.F.K. Trapnell had threatened to ram the jetliner into the T.W.A. terminal unless he was provided a ransom of $306,800, won the release of the black militant Angela Davis and was granted a conversation with President Nixon. Trapnell's subsequent trial and the measures adopted by the Nixon administration to prevent similar escapades foreshadowed much of what we have come to think of as particular to a post-9/11 world.
[...]
By the end of 1972, more than 150 American aircraft had been successfully hijacked — by escaped convicts, fugitives and the occasional Black Panther, the majority to Cuba. Hijackings to Cuba became so routine that U.S. airliners began carrying approach plans for the Havana airport.

The Age of Egocasting

The Age of Egocasting notes that television remotes go way, way back:

A 1955 version of the remote, called the "Flash-Matic," was wireless, using a beam of light aimed at photocells in the corners of the television set to change channels and adjust volume. Advertisements for the Flash-Matic pictured a woman, transfixed before the television, her right hand clutching a remote control that is directing a sci-fi laser beam at the TV. Unfortunately, the supposedly sophisticated photo cells on the television were unable to distinguish the remote control's beams from sunlight, and frustrated Flash-Matic owners found their television tuners oscillating to nature's rhythms rather than their own.

In 1956, a Zenith engineer named Robert Adler solved this problem by using ultra-sonic technology to create the Space Command 400 Remote Control. This remote, which Adler patented, used aluminum rods and tiny hammers to create the pitched sounds that the television set interpreted as "off" or "on" or "channel up" or "channel down." The sounds emitted were inaudible to humans (although not to dogs, which were known to howl painfully as the Space Command went about its business) and the device itself required no batteries.

It took a long, long time for remotes to become common though:

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, it was 1985 before more televisions were sold with remotes than without. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, 99 percent of all television sets and 100 percent of all VCRs sold in the United States came with remote control devices, and infrared and digital technology had replaced Adler's miniature ultrasonics. In 2000, the average household contained four remote controls.

One reason remotes didn't catch on was that there were so few channels:

The original purpose of the remote control, as Zenith's president put it at the time of its creation, was to "tune out annoying commercials." But it was a federal regulation many years later that made the remote control the indispensable household object that it is today. The Federal Communications Commission�s 1972 "Open Skies" decision deregulating satellite communications allowed cable television to become a popular reality in the U.S., as it rapidly did. As one observer noted, "the only people who had an inarguable, demonstrable need for an RCD for their television before the 1970s were the debilitated." But with the rapid increase in television channel offerings, we all needed the remote simply to navigate television's many new options. Cable television dramatically increased the range of choices, but it was the remote control, according to James Walker and Robert Bellamy, which "made it easier for viewers to be choosy."

Do Hybrids Have Legs?

Do Hybrids Have Legs? looks at Honda's new Accord Hybrid:

No backdoor effort to give Honda more "eco-cover," the Accord Hybrid is, in fact, Honda's fastest, most powerful production car, combining its superb 3-liter, 240 horsepower V-6 with a12-kilowatt electric motor. Unlike the Prius, in which the gasoline engine and the electric motor more or less share tasks, the Accord employs the electric motor mainly to enhance the gas engine's performance. Honda calls this IMA or "integrated motor assist," boosting the car up to 255 horsepower.

Although the hybrid's $30,000 base price is $3,000 more than the standard Accord V-6, the car is loaded with goodies like leather seats and XM satellite radio mated to a 120-watt sound system.

Honda claims 37 miles per gallon on the highway and 30 mpg in city driving — whopping 38 and 23 percent improvements over the regular Accord V-6. The economy is delivered not just from the electric motor but from the use of "variable cylinder management," Honda's name for a system that shuts down three of the Accord's cylinders at cruising speeds

Many-to-Many: Wikipedia: The nature of authority, and a LazyWeb request...

From Clay Shirky's Many-to-Many: Wikipedia: The nature of authority, and a LazyWeb request...:

Wikipedia is not a product, it is a system. The collection of mass intelligence that I value unfolds over time, necessarily. Like democracy, it is messier than planned systems at any given point in time, but it is not just self-healing, it is self-improving. Any given version of Britannica gets worse over time, as it gets stale. The Wikipedia, by contrast, whose version is always the Wiki Now, gets better over time as it gets refreshed. This improvement is not monotonic, but it is steady.

After "Titanic," Director Visits Ocean Depths

James Cameron's next movie is a 3D IMAX documentary, Aliens of the Deep, that examines life miles below the ocean's surface. His next movie, Battle Angel, based on the Japanese manga, will use the same camera technology. From After 'Titanic,' Director Visits Ocean Depths:

"If I never touch film again, I'd be happy. Filmmaking is not about film, not about sprockets. It's about ideas, it's about images, it's about imagination, it's about storytelling," he said, adding, "If I had the cameras I'm using now when I was shooting 'Titanic,' I would have shot 'Titanic' using them."

His next project will be shot with a new generation of the Cameron/Pace Reality System 3D camera. The film, "Battle Angel," is based on a series of Japanese graphic novels.

"It takes place in the 26th century, and it's the story of a young girl who has an organic human brain and an entirely synthetic body," he said. "She's a cyborg warrior, it turns out, although she doesn't know that initially, due to amnesia. It's a hero's journey, ultimately."

Cameron has conceived "Battle Angel" as the first of a three-part series. "If we're successful, we'll make the other films. If we're not, we won't."

Most science fiction, says the director, has wandered away from its roots ever since "Star Wars."

"As much as I love 'Star Wars,' and as much as it's really revolutionized the imaging business, it went off the rails in the sense that science fiction, historically, was a science fiction of ideas. It was thematic fiction. It stopped being that and became just pure eye candy and pure entertainment."

"And I miss that. With 'Battle Angel,' I'm going to flirt with that darker, dystopian message as much as I can, without making it an art film," he said.

The Australian: Mark Steyn: Coalition of the giving [January 10, 2005]

Mark Steyn's Coalition of the giving presents a biting look at tsunami aid:

[Leonardo DiCaprio is] believed to have given $US1 million ($1.32 million) to disaster relief, as has Sandra Bullock. Michael Schumacher has given $US10 million.

For purposes of comparison, Herr Schumacher's donation is the same as that of oil-rich Kuwait. As for even oil-richer Iran, its Government has earmarked $US627,000 for disaster relief.

For purposes of further comparison, that's barely a twentieth of what was raised at the Sydney Opera House concert this weekend. Today's all-star cricket match between a World XI and an Asian XI at the MCG will do more for the beleaguered Muslims of Banda Aceh than Libya, Syria and Egypt combined.

In fairness to the Saudis, they've just upped their pledge to $US30 million. But for purposes of one final comparison, consider this: a single Saudi telethon in 2002 managed to raise $US56 million. That was for widows and orphans of Palestinian suicide bombers, those deceased as well as those yet to blow. It seems nothing gets the wealthy elite of Riyadh and Jeddah adding the zeroes to the cheques like self-detonating on an Israeli bus.

Dissent Magazine - How Sweden Tweaked the Washington Consensus

Daniel Brook's How Sweden Tweaked the Washington Consensus notes that the Swedes wholeheartedly embrace the one aspect of "neoliberalism" that Americans are most ambivalent about: free trade:

It is no surprise that the libertarian right in Sweden backs free trade. What is surprising is the support on the left; the near-universal unionization rates in Sweden make the country's trade policy less protectionist, not more. In the United States, it is often labor unions that call for tariffs and subsidies to protect unionized industries. Not so in Sweden. 'We don't want to sell T-shirts made in Sweden because people can't live on those wages. It's good that those industries have moved away,' explained Social Democratic Parliament member Mikael Damberg, sounding very unlike an American congressmember of either party.

In Sweden, where equitable distribution of corporate profits is assumed, the focus can be on growing those profits even if it means economic dislocation for some in the short-run.

Dynamist Blog: The High Cost of Political Posturing

Virginia Postrel discusses The High Cost of Political Posturing:

Taxes and spending get most of the attention, but regulations can be just as expensive and far more wasteful. Take the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed in the post-Enron panic as a demonstration that Congress and the administration cared and were doing something. Compliance costs a fortune, siphoning funds from productive investments (including hiring); that the law took effect in the middle of a recession didn't help the economic recovery. More significant is the long-term effect. The law threatens to block smaller firms from going public, cutting them off from a major source of capital. That effect will filter backward, making venture capital funding more difficult by eliminating one way VCs get their money out.

City Journal Winter 2005 | New York Crime Hits a Tipping Point by E. J. McMahon

E. J. McMahon opens New York Crime Hits a Tipping Point with some intriguing stats:

Reinforcing New York City�s improved policing strategies in the 1990s were tougher sentencing laws and a significant expansion of the city and state correctional systems. Would-be criminals in the Big Apple came to realize that they were not only more likely to get caught, but more likely to end up serving hard time.

The results have been nothing less than spectacular: by one key measure, serious crime in the city has dropped 70 percent over the past 15 years.

But that success is also yielding another, less widely noticed, dividend: with felony arrests dropping as a result of the falling crime rate, New York�s once-swollen city jails and state prisons are becoming less crowded. This has begun to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings for state and city taxpayers.

City Journal Winter 2005 | Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power by Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills

Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power, by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills, is exactly what it sounds like:

Think of our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps — that�s the national per-capita average demand for electric power from homes, factories, businesses, the lot. Our average citizen burns about twice as bright at 4 pm in August, and a lot dimmer at 4 am in December; grown-ups burn more than kids, the rich more than the poor; but it all averages out: 14 floor lamps per person, lit round the clock. Convert this same number back into a utility�s supply-side jargon, and a million people need roughly 1.4 �gigs� of power — 1.4 gigawatts (GW). Running at peak power, Entergy�s two nuclear units at Indian Point generate just under 2 GW. So just four Indian Points could take care of New York City�s 7-GW round-the-clock average. Six could handle its peak load of about 11.5 GW. And if we had all-electric engines, machines, and heaters out at the receiving end, another ten or so could power all the cars, ovens, furnaces — everything else in the city that oil or gas currently fuels.

Capitalists on Steroids

Kay Hymowitz's Capitalists on Steroids looks at the modern hyper-Darwinist world of business depicted in The Apprentice:

Yet one of the central messages of The Apprentice is precisely the opposite of what the show's critics have argued: toughness doesn't excuse incivility, nor is steroidal capitalism for the uncouth. Any lout can swim 60 laps, jump out of airplanes, and shout down an opponent, but only the truly superior competitor can apply the same self-discipline he brings to his physical exertions to controlling his emotions and molding his personality. Trump, whose gilded excesses once earned him the sobriquet of the "short-fingered vulgarian," makes an unlikely teacher of self-discipline. Nevertheless, he plays the wise mentor for the young, lone, battle-ready global contender who also needs to learn the etiquette of a team-playing, corporate sophisticate. "You should never lose your cool unless it's an act," Trump warns. Contestants who are quick to anger, who wear their will to power on their sleeves, who don't listen, who speak rudely, or who are just plain obnoxious get the pink slip no matter how cutthroat they are. The two finalists of the first season, Bill Rancic and Kwami Jackson, were both mild-mannered men; and in the boardroom the Donald himself is surprisingly down-to-earth and soft-spoken. If he doesn't actually like most of his apprentices, then he's a better actor than most prime-time stars. For all his egotistical mugging to the camera, Trump also teaches that courtesy, not just steely resolve, is part of the art of the deal.

An interesting observation:

At first glance, it may seem surprising that the gentler sex has the harder time learning these lessons, but it shouldn't be. Women are in a tricky position in the world of steroid capitalism. They may have an edge when it comes to manners, or what human-resources managers call "people skills." But unlike men, who have had to keep their combative instincts in check since they were little boys, women have trouble combining aggression with the courtesy owed an opponent. The Apprentice's women, especially in the second season, give the impression that they�'ve been shipped over from the set of Mean Girls. When they lose, the men shake hands, but the women gossip, bicker, cry, and roll their eyes.

How to Interrogate Terrorists

In How to Interrogate Terrorists, Heather MacDonald explains the futility of the 16 approved interrogation approaches (e.g., Pride and Ego Down and Fear Up Harsh):

But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. �Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,� writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors �not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.�

Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture — a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.

One "stress technique" is to make a detainee stand. The interrogator simply reads a book until he's willing to talk:

The prisoner starts to fall; the guards stand him back up. If he falls again, and can�t get back up, Martin can do nothing further. �I have no rack,� he says matter-of-factly. The interrogator�s power is an illusion; if a detainee refuses to obey a stress order, an American interrogator has no recourse.

Martin risks a final display of his imaginary authority. �I get in his face, �What do you think I will do next?� � he barks. In the captive�s mind, days have passed, and he has no idea what awaits him. He discloses where he planted bombs on a road and where to find his associate. �The price?� Martin asks. �I made a man stand up. Is this unlawful coercion?�

Beautycheck

Beautycheck summarizes the results of a large research project on "facial attractiveness":

Additional surveys showed that attractive female faces are narrower than unattractive ones, and that they possess a brown skin and full, well looked-after lips. The distance between the eyes is larger, eyelids are thinner, there are more, longer and darker eyelashes, darker and narrower eyebrows, higher cheekbones, and the nose is narrower than in less attractive female faces. Surprisingly, more or less the same is the case for attractive male faces: they, too, have a browner skin, a narrower face, fuller lips, thinner eyelids, more and darker eyelashes, darker eyebrows, and higher cheekbones than the less attractive ones. Attractive male faces can furthermore be characterized by a more prominent lower jaw and chin.

The study tested several hypotheses on human facial attractiveness: the attractiveness is averageness hypothesis, the symmetry hypothesis, and the theory of multidimensional beauty perception. Compound (morphed) faces were more attractive than the original faces, but the attractiveness of the compound did depend on the attractiveness of the starting faces. Symmetry showed a clear but weak relationship to beauty; very asymmetrical faces are unattractive, but unattractive faces don't need to be asymmetrical. The process of morphing faces smooths out skin imperfections, and this process, separate from blending facial shape, can improve attractiveness. The researchers' summary:

To sum up, our study shows clearly that the most attractive faces do not exist in reality, they are morphs, i.e. computer-created compound images you would never find in everyday live. These virtual faces showed characteristics that are unreachable for average human beings.

Postmodern War

From Postmodern War by Victor Davis Hanson:

Modern Western man is faced with this awful dilemma, from which he recoils: real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree that an enemy is humiliatingly defeated and so acknowledges it—the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been. To that end, absolute victory may encompass everything from Hiroshima to bombing downtown Belgrade as the price for tranquillity and a democratic and humane postbellum Japan and the Balkans. Not finishing off a defeated Republican Guard in 1991 or sparing looters in April 2003 or breaking off the siege of Fallujah in April 2004 only ensures that more corpses will pile up later. President Bush’s so-called Axis of Evil in 2002—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—all had in common unfinished business with the U.S. military that had led to a bellum interruptum of sorts. In contrast, the Grenada communists, Noriega, Milošević , and the Taliban were all defeated, and only after that were their societies rebuilt—and thus Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan now do not belong to the axis of anything. Perhaps for all the debate over how to fight irregular wars in an age of global terrorism, we would do best to recall the realistic, if inelegant, words of the owner of the Oakland Raiders, the infamous Al Davis: “Just win, baby.”

A Murderess's Tale

In A Murderess's Tale, Theodore Dalrymple describes the English legal system's concept of diminished responsibility, which leads to leniency in the case of a personality disorder — "or what used to be called a bad character":

The use of personality disorder in such cases seems to me to be little else than a thin or even frivolous pretext for leniency, for if the argument were taken seriously it would lead to more severe punishment rather than less. If a man kills as a result of a momentary but understandable lapse, in unusual circumstances, he is guilty of murder but is unlikely to kill again; if a man kills because his character is deficient, and it is therefore the kind of thing he does, he is guilty of manslaughter but, ex hypothesi, is likely to do it again.

Dalrymple has some terrible stories to tell:

Not long ago, I testified in a case in which personality disorder served as an illogical pretext for leniency. A woman in her early forties, an alcoholic, had married another alcoholic and had a child by him. The father subsequently gave up drinking, separated from his wife — who continued to drink — and came to the conclusion that she was not a suitable mother for his child. He was in the process of applying for custody.

By now, the child was two years old. One day, the mother — probably drunk — dissolved the contents of her antidepressant capsules in some cough medicine and injected the solution into the child�s mouth with a syringe. The child died as a result.

Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom - How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism. By Christopher Hitchens

In Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom - How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism, Christopher Hitchens explains how Afghanistan's economy has changed over the years:

Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge?

The primary effect of the War on Drugs is, of course, to move a lot of trade into the black market:

Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

When The Fog of War came out in theaters, it was presented as Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, speaks out against the war. Frankly, that facile, nutshell description does not do the film justice. Here's how it came about:

McNamara originally agreed to an hour-long interview for the Errol Morris PBS series, "First Person" (2000). The interview lasted eight hours and McNamara stayed for a second day of interviewing. He also returned months later, for two more days of interviews. Morris found himself with more than enough material for a feature-length documentary.

During WWII, McNamara worked in an early think tank within the Army Air Corps:

McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in his [General Curtis LeMays'] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.
Interviewer: Were you aware this was going to happen?
McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.

The biographical details are fascinating. McNamara mentions that he went to an unimpressive elementary school, but he had an excellent teacher who seated the class by how well each student had performed the previous week. The class was primarily WASPs, but his competition for the first desk came from Asians and Jews (who went to their own ethnic schools in addition to the public school).

He couldn't afford to go to Stanford (during the Depression), so he went to Berkeley (for $52 a year), where he was invited to join Phi Beta Kappa. After graduate school, he became the youngest assistant professor ever at Harvard Business School.

After WWII, he and his wife both became sick with polio. To pay the bills, he took a job at Ford, where modern managerial methods were novel — "Of the top 1000 executives at Ford Motor Company, I don't believe there were 10 college graduates." — and became the first nonfamily member at Ford to become president of the company. He only kept the job for five weeks before he was offered the position of Secretary of the Treasury. When he turned that down, he was offered Secretary of Defense.

Here are the 11 lessons:

1. Empathize with your enemy.
2. Rationality will not save us.
3. There's something beyond oneself.
4. Maximize efficiency.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6. Get the data.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10. Never say never.
11. You can't change human nature.

Wired 12.12: Dive! Dive! Dive!

While reading Dive! Dive! Dive!, Wired magazine's recent list of "milestones on the voyage to the bottom of the sea," I came across what looked like a mistake:

5,187 feet: Maximum diving depth of the elephant seal.

Here are a few facts (from the same list) that put it into perspective:

660 feet: Maximum diving depth of the Pacific white-sided dolphin.

1,010 feet: Scuba-diving record set by Brit diver John Bennett in 2001.

1,640 feet: Maximum diving depth of the blue whale.

1,969 feet: Maximum diving depth of nuclear-powered attack subs.

3,281 feet: Maximum diving depth of the sperm whale. To navigate in the darkness, these whales emit high pitched sounds and use echoes to determine the location of prey.

Sealexperience.com, "the comprehensive website for the Northern Elephant Seal," more-or-less corroborates that diving depth — and shares a few more factoids:

• Elephant seals are big. The largest known Elephant seal is 18 feet (about 2 car lengths), weighing 6000 pounds (2 large trucks). They are the largest pinniped in the world, even bigger than the walrus.
• Elephant seals are the most sexually dimorphic of all mammals. An alpha bull will mate with up to 50 females.
• Elephant Seals will go without food for three months during the mating season.
• Elephant Seals migrate further than any other mammal in the world, traveling over 6000 miles.
• Elephant Seals are pelagic, they spend 80-90% of their time underwater.
• Elephant Seals are amazing divers. They are the deepest divers in the ocean, with a maximum depth recorded at 5,015 feet.
• Elephant Seals can hold their breath longer than any other mammal. They typically dive up to 20 minutes, but can stay underwater for more than 80 minutes. That's a record for mammals.

You Can Judge This Book by Its Cover - January 11, 2005 - The New York Sun

Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, reviews Gladwell's Blink in You Can Judge This Book by Its Cover — and shares a few factoids about "intuition":

Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor's effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. The same effect can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried 'speed dating' (a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple 'dates' in one evening lasts only six minutes).

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive 'feel' in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour.

Project Pluto

Project Pluto was the late-1950s-early-1960s project to create a nuclear ramjet cruise missile:

In the movie Dr. Strangelove, the pilot of a low-flying B-52 assures his crew that 'they might harpoon us, but they dang sure ain't going to spot us on no radar screen.' Pluto would operate on the same strategic principle. In order to reach ramjet speed, it would be launched from the ground by a cluster of conventional rocket boosters. Not until it was at cruising altitude and far away from populated areas would the nuclear reactor be turned on. Since nuclear power gave it almost unlimited range, the missile could cruise in circles over the ocean until ordered 'down to the deck' for its supersonic dash to targets in the Soviet Union. Relying upon the same terrain comparison guidance system (TERCOM) used by modern cruise missiles, Pluto would come in below enemy defenses to hit its targets with pinpoint accuracy. Unlike modern cruise missiles, however, one SLAM would be able to strike up to a dozen widely separated targets.

Because of its combination of high speed and low altitude, Pluto promised to get through to targets that manned bombers and even ballistic missiles might not be able to reach. What weaponeers call 'robustness' was another important advantage. 'Pluto was about as durable as a bucket of rocks,' says one who worked on the project. It was because of the missile's low complexity and high durability that physicist Ted Merkle, the project's director, called it 'the flying crowbar.'

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

A Minister-Free Health Care System

A Minister-Free Health Care System opens with a startling analogy:

Imagine an economist taking the place of a surgeon at an operating table. Such an inhumane experiment would undoubtedly result in a serious bodily harm for the patient. Now let us picture another experiment: a Ministry of Health managed by a physician. What would be the difference? The extent of the death toll. An economist at an operating-table would never be able to cause as many premature deaths as a doctor trying to handle the funding of health care without a basic knowledge of how markets work.

For Some Co-Workers, Bringing Fido to Office Has Become Pet Peeve

There are a number of reasons not to allow pets in the workplace. From For Some Co-Workers, Bringing Fido to Office Has Become Pet Peeve:

Allergies are high on his list. Several years ago, he says, a client company installed a $2,500 air-filtration system after an employee complained to the California office of OSHA about a pet-dander allergy, but the system didn't stop the staffer's sneezing.
[...]
For Anna Pamula, owner of Renu Day Spa in Deerfield, Ill., this meant no longer taking Beaujolais, her Cavalier King Charles spaniel, to the office after he placed his jaws on the face of a customer's child. The child wasn't harmed, but the incident gave everyone a scare. "I learned my lesson," says Ms. Pamula. Now, she just takes Philip, a "very overweight, very passive" pug, and she keeps a close eye on him.

Pets can also embarrass their owners in other ways. John O. Morisano, a principal of Sunshine, a small New York investment company, recalls a breakfast meeting attended by Milton, his partner's now-deceased husky. When a visiting executive denied the dog a bagel at the boardroom table, the dog walked over to a row of briefcases, sniffed out the offending executive's and relieved himself.

A Key to Animal Behavior

NPR's Fresh Air interviews Temple Grandin, one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She has a unique insight into animal thinking: she's autistic. "In her 1995 book Thinking in Pictures, she described how her inner-autistic world led her to develop an empathy for how animals cope." Her new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Online NewsHour: Tsunami Aftermath -- How Disasters Affect Societies -- January 7, 2005

The recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean followed in the footsteps of the famous Krakatoa volcano's explosive eruption, which killed a then-record 40,000 people, darkened the sky for miles, and created the loudest noise ever, heard around the world. Tsunami Aftermath -- How Disasters Affect Societies discusses the non-physical effects of Krakatoa:

Well, the extraordinary thing that happened, specifically in Java and Sumatra, is that this event was immediately picked up by the religious leaders, who in those days were Muslims. The area was rapidly being converted from Hinduism to Islam. There were a lot of Arabs there who were priests or mullahs, and they said within a matter of days of the devastation, that this was clearly a sign from Allah — Allah, who was annoyed, specifically angered by the fact that the Javanese and the Sumatrans were allowing themselves to be ruled by white, western, infidel Dutch imperialists.

"Rise up and kill them: is essentially what the mullahs said, and sure enough, within a matter of days, there was a degree of killing of Dutch soldiers and bureaucrats. Then the mullahs said, "No, no, no, don't do this in a piecemeal fashion, do it in an organized fashion." And sure enough over the next few years, careful planning went underway, triggered by Krakatoa, and five years later there was a massive rebellion, which was the beginning, one might say, of the end of Dutch rule in Java and Sumatra and the beginning of the creation of what is now the most populous Islamic state on Earth, Indonesia.

M.B.A.s Get Lessons In Spirituality, Too

I'm sure a 4-unit course in ethics and spiritual values would have averted the Enron debacle. Right? From M.B.A.s Get Lessons In Spirituality, Too:

M.B.A.s learn plenty about quantitative values. Now, more students are getting lessons in spiritual values, as well.

Business schools aren't trying to inculcate religious beliefs or encourage students to proselytize on the job. But more schools are offering courses dealing with spirituality and personal fulfillment in the workplace. What they want to teach students is the importance of remaining true to their convictions — whether rooted in organized religion or personal morality — amid the conflicting demands and temptations they will likely confront during their careers.

The New Yorker: Battle Lessons

The New Yorker's Battle Lessons examines organizational learning within the Army. Some elements are specific to the Army's culture:

For efficiency of conversation, Army officers are tough to beat. Trained to convey critical information under stress, they enunciate like radio announcers, in complete, unhesitating sentences. Moreover, they tend to be good listeners, with a refreshing ability — and willingness — to get to the nub of a difficult issue. Ask an Army officer a painful question and he or she will answer it, provided it doesn�t involve secrets, with a kind of Boy Scout candor all but unknown in, say, the corporate or political realm.

Some are more universal:

I asked Saul what lessons the Army has learned in Iraq, and he said, �Not much, because lessons learned, in past tense, means you�ve modified behavior. Until you demonstrate changed behavior, you haven�t learned a lesson.�

Until you demonstrate changed behavior, you haven�t learned a lesson. The same can be said of communication in general: if you haven't changed the audience's behavior, have you communicated anything?

Aside: The Rule of 150 (popularized in Gladwell's Tipping Point) keeps popping up. An Army company comprises approximately 150 soldiers:

Commanding a company is often described as the best job in the Army; a company is big enough to be powerful and small enough to be intimate.

In the past, the Army interviewed soldiers for lessons learned, compiled those lessons into small booklets, and then distributed those booklets to soldiers in the field. After the botched invasion of Grenada, the Army instituted its Center for Army Lessons Learned — but that was still highly centralized. In 2000, a few company commanders took the initiative to start Companycommand.com, a message board for company commanders. A year later they started Platoonleader.org for lieutenants.

Organizational-learning experts within the Army decried the lack of official interpretation (by them), but the message boards meant that the officers could quickly and easily share information. With the boards, no one had to wait for the official answer — and after two years, West Point adopted the sites and put them on its own servers.

CTV.ca | New plastic can better convert solar energy

New plastic can better convert solar energy reports on an incredible breakthrough in solar power:

Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an infrared-sensitive material that's five times more efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical energy than current methods.

The Little Prince

The Little Prince looks at Hans Christian Andersen — and rumors that he was the illegitimate son of future king, Christian Frederik:

Andersen was born in 1805. At this time, Denmark was still an absolute monarchy. Society was rigidly stratified, and there was little social mobility. A few managed, by hard work or exceptional talent, to climb the social ladder. One such was Andersen's friend, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. But a pauper boy stood little chance of escaping his class. As the heedless aristocratic children say in his story Kids' Talk (given a sprightly new translation in the Franks' The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen): "Those people whose names end with sen, they can never, ever become anything in the world!"

Those people whose names end with sen, they can never, ever become anything in the world! That sounds like a good reason to cross the Atlantic for America.

Japan's Economic Comeback?

From Japan's Economic Comeback?:

In 1986-87 the Japanese Central Bank lowered its official interest rates in several successive steps. This triggered an unprecedented boom in the stock and property markets. The Nikkei rose from 10,000 in 1985 to 40,000 in 1990 (today, January 2005, the Nikkei is at 11,500). Consequently, the Japanese not only began to spend more on consumption, they also started to invest more, which led to overinvestment. In the first quarter of 1991 the bubble burst and the Japanese economy crashed. It was a classical example of man-made economic disaster as a result of the application of Keynesian recipes.
[...]
Some years before, after the collapse of the Soviet Union with its command economy in 1989, Japanese economists joked that Japan was still the only successful socialist economy in the world. What was meant to be humour at that time subsequently got an ominous ring.

Rats Can Tell Human Languages Apart,

Rats Can Tell Human Languages Apart:

Rats can use the rhythm of human language to tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, researchers in Spain reported Sunday.

Their study suggests that animals, especially mammals, evolved some of the skills underlying the use and development of language long before language itself ever evolved, the researchers said.

It is the first time an animal other than a human or monkey has been shown to have this skill.

NPR : Spider-Man, Swinging Through India

NPR's Fresh Air interviews Sharad Devarajan, CEO of Gotham Entertainment Group, in Spider-Man, Swinging Through India. Their first publication is Spider-Man India, featuring Pavitr Prabhakar (Peter Parker).

Unlike his American counterpart, Pavitr isn't unpopular because he's a good student — working hard is hardly unpopular in India. Instead, he's a traditional village boy with traditional values, not up on the latest trends in Mumbai (Bombay).

Also, his powers aren't a result of science; they're bestowed upon him by a mystic yogi. The villains have mystical origins too. The Green Goblin is a reincarnated rakshasa (demon), and Doc Ock doesn't have mechanical arms; he's a typical multi-armed Indian mythological character.

Rocket Man

Rocket Man looks at the history of rockets (as artillery), and points out that rockets were fairly advanced in India in the last half of the 18th century:

The Muslim ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, had an established rocket corps in his army when it faced the British. His rockets were not just overgrown fireworks, but quite sophisticated for their day, with iron casings, well-packed black powder propellant and a range of almost a mile.

Tipu Sultan's rocket units even had a wheeled cart from which three or four rockets could be fired almost simultaneously, dramatically anticipating the multiple launchers used in World War II.

One British commander whose troops were put to flight by Tipu Sultan's rockets in a chaotic night engagement was a certain Col. Arthur Wellesley, who would later become the Duke of Wellington and the victor over Napoleon at Waterloo.

Wellesley would later prevail, conquering Mysore, but he was shaken by the rockets' effect on his troops. Some of these rockets were returned to England after the war and taken to the famed Royal Woolwich Arsenal for examination. It was William Congreve, son of the arsenal's commandant, who led the meticulous study of the Indian weapons.

Is Anything Mightier Than This Sword?

Is Anything Mightier Than This Sword? compares the new armed robot (really a tracked drone), the Sword, against flesh-and-blood soldiers. In addition to providing a stable firing platform, the high-tech Sword is oddly cheap:

The Sword has many advantages over a soldier. It might get shot up but will never come home to grieving parents in a flag-draped casket. Even in cold economic terms it could be better to lose a Sword considering that the cost of simply training a soldier to get him to his first duty station is an estimated $50,000. A sergeant might represent an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ironmen

The Tetsujin (Iron Man) competition at RoboNexus takes powerlifting's "supersuits" to their logical extreme — only the lifters inside these robotic exoskeletons are pencil-necked geeks, and their contraptions generally aren't as strong as a guy named Magnus. From Ironmen:

Dan Rupert crouches inside a 180-pound frame of chrome-myolybdenum steel alloy like a man wearing the bones of a robot gorilla. Metal bars cantilever over his shoulders and down along his arms, terminating in menacing, knuckle-dragging hooks. At his feet, an industrial screw drive - a machine for turning torque into up-and-down force - hums quietly. Rupert, a high school engineering teacher from San Diego, isn't trying to look like a supervillain. He is trying to lift a 650-pound barbell in front of a crowd of several hundred people. The exoskeleton — nicknamed Technotrousers — is supposed to make it happen.

Rupert stoops and grasps the bar. He begins to straighten, the screw drive hissing. Man and machine together hoist the weight. But something's wrong. Rupert feels it almost immediately: a slight imbalance, a tiny wobble that his partner, engineer Don Engh, can see from the wings. As Rupert lifts the bar higher, Technotrousers starts to tilt forward. Halfway through the lift, just about every spectator lets out a gasp � and man and machine together tumble forward into a heap at the foot of the stage. "Even as I was toppling over, I had my hands on the triggers," Rupert says later, nursing a minor cut on his arm. "We were lifting right up until the end."

Mohammed Enters List of Favorite UK Boys' Names

Mohammed Enters List of Favorite UK Boys' Names:

Mohammed has joined perennial favorites Jack and Joshua as one of the most popular names given to British boys in 2004, a sign of the country's growing ethnic diversity and a legacy of Muslim immigration decades ago.

The Office of National Statistics said on Thursday Mohammed — meaning variously "one who is praiseworthy" or "exalted" — had moved up two places to enter the top 20 for the first time.

Stone Surprised by Poor Response to Epic

From what I've read, Oliver Stone made a bad movie. But that's not how he sees it. From Stone Surprised by Poor Response to Epic:

Director Oliver Stone said he was surprised by the critical reaction to his historical epic "Alexander" — and put the blame on the fundamentalist morality in some parts of the United States.
[...]
"From day one audiences didn't show up," he said. "They didn't even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words, `Alex the gay.' As a result you can bet that they thought, `We're not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him.'"

911 Is a Joke... or Is It? Let's Find Out

From 911 Is a Joke... or Is It? Let's Find Out:

A major new report by National Academies of Science concludes that there is not enough empirical data to determine whether gun control enhances public safety, or whether gun ownership deters crime. The report calls for further data-gathering on firearms injuries. We suggest that gathering a type of related data is equally critical: how often 911 calls result in the interruption of a crime.
[...]
For a disarmed victim, the police response to 911 can literally be a matter of life or death. If the data show that 911 won't save your life when you're attacked by a criminal, then it would be difficult for government to claim the moral authority to disarm victims.

Here's where it gets darkly amusing:

We looked through the vast wealth of criminological information at the U.S. Department of Justice website, and we looked through print-based resources. Not finding any statistics anywhere on violent crime interruption by the police, we asked the statisticians at the Department of Justice directly.

One day later, we received the following answer from the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics: "I'm sorry but the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does not collect data on law enforcement intervening or preventing crimes that are in progress."

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does not collect data on law enforcement intervening or preventing crimes that are in progress.

Islands in the Universe

From Islands in the Universe:

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands of the Indian Ocean are among the most isolated places on Earth, and their inhabitants include several aboriginal tribes that have varying degrees of interaction with the outside world. In the aftermath of the tsunami, which swept across and even reshaped the islands, there was pressing concern about the fate of these tribes.

It was an odd bit of good news, therefore, when an Indian coast guard helicopter that was delivering aid in the islands recently came under attack. The attackers were of the Sentinelese tribe, the most isolated of the aboriginal groups, who used bows and arrows to ward off the helicopter. The reason this is good news is that it showed that the Sentinelese, who number only in the dozens, had survived. Moreover, they evidently were well enough to maintain their usual practice of rejecting approaches by outsiders.

Aid Effort in Indonesia Could Lift U.S. Image in Eyes of Muslims

From Aid Effort in Indonesia Could Lift U.S. Image in Eyes of Muslims:

U.S. foreign assistance has only a mixed record in winning friends for Washington. Massive American aid to Germany and Japan after World War II created lasting alliances. But the U.S. saw no warming in bilateral relations with Iran, a country it considers a sponsor of terrorism, after it provided $5.7 million in medical aid, search-and-rescue support, blankets and other supplies for the victims of the Bam earthquake in December 2003. American food aid to North Korea during floods and famine there in 1997 came at a time when bilateral relations were the least frosty in decades, but the detente didn't last far into the Bush administration.

Nor is it a sure thing that a surge in pro-American sentiments will stick once the relief work is done, any more than pro-American sympathies lasted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Suspicion of the U.S. remains high among some Indonesian Muslim leaders. And progress in Indonesia might be difficult to translate into improved perceptions among Muslims in the broader Arab world. Arab newspapers have devoted little space to the disaster overall, and even less to the Western-led aid efforts.

The U.S. has offered $350 million in aid:

The U.S. isn't the only country that could gain more influence through its largesse. Japan, for one, has offered as much as $500 million in aid and has sent ships to assist in relief efforts in Indonesia and Thailand. Substantial sums have been pledged by the United Kingdom, Sweden and Spain, among others.

Still, the biggest nation in the region, China, has pledged only $60 million in aid despite its regional ambitions, in addition to sending a few medical teams to several of the battered countries. And oil-rich Arab countries haven't jumped in strongly so far, though Saudi Arabia yesterday boosted an initial pledge of $10 million to $30 million, and said officials would sponsor a fund-raising telethon on Saudi television tomorrow.

As Europe Seeks A Stronger Voice, Words Get in Way

The European Union recently expanded from 15 countries to 25, and this has brought quite a few headaches, because the EU uses each of the 20 languages spoken by member countries. That practice that will cost it nearly $1.6 billion this year. From As Europe Seeks A Stronger Voice, Words Get in Way:

The EU's language task is enormous — and gets tougher with the addition of each new country. At the 192-member United Nations, representatives speak in their own languages, but their words are interpreted into a core of six languages. The EU attempts something far more difficult: two-way simultaneous interpretation among all 20 of the officially recognized tongues. At the moment, that means 380 possible two-language combinations. Anticipated new members over the next several years will push the number above 500.

"Finding a translator who can translate from Finnish to Maltese right now is like finding gold dust," says David Earnshaw, a project manager with EU translation contractor Bowne Global Solutions, a unit of New York-based Bowne & Co., a printing and document-management company.

American RadioWorks - The Surprising Legacy of Y2K

American RadioWorks looks at The Surprising Legacy of Y2K:

Five years after the hoopla and warnings about Y2K, many dismiss it as a hoax, scam, or non-event. Not only was Y2K a real threat narrowly averted, but it is still having major effects on the economy.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

Beatles plan for Rings film

I'm having trouble believing this. It looks like the Beatles wanted to do a Lord of the Rings movie back in the 1960's, but Tolkien, who was still alive and still held the film rights, nixed the idea. From Beatles plan for Rings film:

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, who was to play the hero Frodo in the movie, told Jackson about the plans at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the Post reported.

'It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage but he didn't like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it,' Jackson told the newspaper.

George Harrison was to play the wise wizard Gandalf who advises the hobbit Frodo in his quest to destroy the evil golden ring at the center of the epic tale of good versus evil, one of the most popular books of the 20th century.

Ringo Starr was to play Frodo's devoted sidekick Sam, while Lennon would take the part of the hobbit-like creature that tracks the heroes throughout the story, trying to get his hands on the powerful ring.

"There probably would've been some good songs coming off the album," Jackson said of the Beatles' plan.

12-Foot, 400-Pound Gator Captured in Miami

A typical gator is six feet long and 50 pounds, but they can get bigger — much, much bigger. From 12-Foot, 400-Pound Gator Captured in Miami:

A 12-foot alligator weighing more than 400 pounds and described as among the largest ever caught near downtown Miami was hoisted from a creek Monday by a firetruck.
[...]
Hardwick and others wrapped a rope around the middle of the gator and attached the other end to a ladder fire truck, which hoisted the reptile out of the water, over a 4-foot fence and a row of parked cars.

How did the gator get downtown, and how did it get so big?

The alligator likely swam downtown years ago, when it was smaller, and lived the canal system draining the Miami Civic Center, emerging only to snatch raccoons and opossums from the bank, Hardwick said.

But most of the food was delivered straight to the gator. Hardwick said the reptile likely grew fat on carcasses of animals tossed into the creek as religious sacrifices.

"They farm-raised this big boy on Santeria and voodoo," Hardwick said.

They farm-raised this big boy on Santeria and voodoo.

You're not studying. You're just playing that Sims game of yours.

You're not studying. You're just playing that Sims game of yours. explains what happens when a geek would rather play (and hack) the Sims than do his German homework:

In playing the English version of the game, I noticed the vocabulary for the tasks contained many of the same words as the German homework I should have been studying instead. Finding that the language of the game could be changed to German simply by switching a single registry setting, I placed a laptop with a translation tool beside my main computer and continued playing the game in German. When the vocabulary items then came up in class, I was already familiar with them and could recall the relevant associated contexts and animations used in the game.

Capitalism Without Capital

In Capitalism Without Capital, Arnold Kling explains that "[t]he most fundamental fact about the Internet is that it facilitates capitalism without capital":

As observers from John Kenneth Galbraith to Amar Bhide have pointed out, corporate bureaucracy emerges to regulate risk-taking in an environment in which new projects are very expensive. Think of a new airplane or a new fabrication plant for computer chips.

When a new project can be hatched in a basement on a small budget, fast failure is more efficient than organized planning.

Fast failure is more efficient than organized planning.

Look back at Weimar -- and start to worry about Russia

Look back at Weimar — and start to worry about Russia, Niall Ferguson says:

Born in 1919 in the wake of Germany's humiliating defeat in the First World War, the Weimar Republic suffered hyperinflation, an illusory boom, a slump and then, starting in 1930, a slide into authoritarian rule, culminating in 1933 with Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Total life: slightly less than 14 years.

Born in 1991 in the wake of the Soviet Union's humiliating defeat in the Cold War, today's Russian Federation has suffered a slump, hyperinflation and is currently enjoying a boom on the back of high oil prices. Its slide into authoritarian rule has been gradual since Putin came to power in 1999. Is it going to culminate — 14 years on — in a full-scale dictatorship in 2005? That is beginning to look more and more likely.

Hitler's power was consolidated after 1933 by the emasculation of both parliamentary and federal institutions. Putin has already done much to weaken the Duma. His latest scheme is to replace elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees.

Hitler's regime also rested on the propaganda churned out by state-run media; Putin already controls Russia's three principal television channels. And Hitler believed firmly in the primacy of the state over the economy. The Kremlin's systematic destruction of the country's biggest oil company, Yukos — like its effective renationalisation of the entire energy sector — suggests that Putin takes the same view and that, like Hitler, he regards both private property rights and the rule of law with contempt.

The Command Post - Iraq - Booby Trapped Body Kills Policeman

How gruesome is this? From The Command Post - Iraq - Booby Trapped Body Kills Policeman:

A Policeman has been killed and two others wounded when a booby-trapped beheaded corpse exploded in a town in northern Iraq.

History Spinoff Set for Launch

From History Spinoff Set for Launch:

The History Channel has drafted plans for a new network dedicated to programming that focuses on military history.

Wasn't the History Channel already the Military History Channel?

Anyway, Discovery's getting in on the act too:

Next week, Discovery Wings Channel is being relaunched as the Military Channel, focusing on all aspects of the armed forces, military strategies and personnel throughout the ages.

It looks like we have bitter blue-staters being asked to produce red-state material:

Titles in the network's preview [...] include "Hispanics and the Medal of Honor," "America's Black Warriors" and "Women Combat Pilots" as well as "Battle History" themed programming that looks at the history of each of the U.S. armed forces and Coast Guard.

Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth

A recent Belmont Club article, Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth, examines the blogging phenomenon:

Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was "instant punditry", which was nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject — politics, culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective fields.

When I saw the article's title, I assumed it was a reference to something I should know, and I was right. It's the title to a short story, written in 1910 by Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), one of the very first modern fantasy writers.

The connection to "blogging versus the mainstream media" isn't particularly direct.

The New York Times > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When?

From The New York Times > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When?:

An asteroid colliding with the earth could cause the extinction of our species. Is this a risk worth worrying about? More important, is it a risk worth doing something about? Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who produces more books in his leisure hours than most authors do working full time, thinks it is.
[...]
When a catastrophe is really catastrophic — and Posner, it should be emphasized, isn't writing about ''minor'' disasters like the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — it can have a significant expected cost, even if the event is extremely improbable. Consider, for example, the risk that a high-energy particle accelerator will produce a ''strange matter'' disaster. The official risk-assessment team for one of these accelerators, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, offered a series of estimates, one of which puts the annual risk of a disaster at one in five million. That seems a very small risk. But since the disaster would kill six billion people, that estimate gives it an expected cost of 1,200 lives per year.

The Ring of Gyges

While reading a not-particularly-noteworthy article on leadership (How to Inspire Your Team), I came across a reference to The Ring of Gyges, mentioned in Plato's Republic:

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result — when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.

Progress

Jesse Walker points out the Progress we've made when it comes to news:

I was in southern Mexico when the tsunami struck, with virtually no Internet access. On the other hand, my hotel had cable. It was the first time in a long while that I was largely dependent on CNN for information about a major breaking story.

It's one thing to know intellectually the limitations of TV news. It's another to see those limits so starkly after being used to the depth of the Net. Few things are as frustrating as watching something go by on that news scroll, wanting to click through for more information, and suddenly remembering that you can't — that you're stuck listening to what the newscasters want to tell you, even if it's the exact same thing they told you 10 minutes before.

What was really astonishing was to remember that 14 years earlier, when the first Gulf War was underway, CNN was the amazing new innovation, not the dinosaur in the rear-view mirror.

The Accidental Guru

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, has a new book coming out, Blink, about how we make snap judgments. Tyler Cowen describes Malcolm Gladwell as "one of the most influential economic (and social) journalists today" and points us toward this profile, The Accidental Guru:

The impetus for Blink started with Gladwell's hair (as did his brief splash in the gossip pages when he got 'a little too close to some candles' and it ignited during a recent literary event, according to the New York Post's Page Six). For most of his adult life, he had worn it closely cropped, but several years ago decided to let it grow out into a woolly Afro. 'The first thing that started happening was I started getting speeding tickets. . . . I wasn't driving any faster than I was before, I was just getting pulled over way more.' Then there was the day Gladwell was walking around New York and cops surrounded him, mistaking him for a rape suspect. 'I'm exactly the same person I was before,' recalls Gladwell, who's half black (his mother, a therapist, is Jamaican). 'But I just altered the way someone makes up very superficial, rapid judgments about me.' Rather than merely grouse — legitimately enough — about prejudice, Gladwell, who has the tendency to look in on his own life as a case study, was inspired to try to understand what happens beneath the surface of rapidly made decisions. 'The idea that something that is extraordinarily harmful in society could be exactly the same in its form as something that's incredibly useful is really interesting to me.'

Army Medics Receive Intense Training

Even the medics need to fight in a counterinsurgency. From Army Medics Receive Intense Training:

As the insurgents in Iraq step up their attacks, the Army has increased the intensity of its training of battlefield medics. That has meant moving the training from classrooms to more realistic settings and teaching medics to keep fighting the enemy — even if it means sometimes delaying treatment of the wounded.

"One medic on his weapon returning fire can make the difference between the enemy staying and continuing to fire on us, or saying `Whoa, I got to go,'" said Capt. Brad Tibbetts, the officer in charge of the Alfred V. Rascon School of Combat Medicine at Fort Campbell. "That's one thing we teach them — when to delay and when you can't."

This sure beats that "Annie" mannequin from CPR class:

Much of the training at the Fort Campbell school is conducted using strikingly lifelike dummies controlled by computers. The dummies "bleed," breathe, blink and have a pulse.

This final exam sounds like it came out of an action story:

Fort Campbell started holding the final test for the class in a dark room after 101st Airborne Division medics returning from Afghanistan said they were not prepared to treat the wounded without light.

In a recent test, an out-of-breath Pfc. Merinda Karn rushed to the scene with aid bag in hand for a test of her medic skills.

The 20-year-old Karn, who weighs about 140 pounds, was out of breath when she ran in to take the test because she had run six miles that morning and then dragged a 185-pound soldier about 200 yards before dashing into the room.

She flunked the test because in the dark she failed to feel an exit wound in the back of her "casualty," and it "died."

Afterward, the lights came on in the room and taps played. An instructor discussed what she did wrong.

"I just wasn't as thorough as I should've been," Karn said, before leaving the room to write a letter to the "casualty's" parents, also part of the medic training.