Honda Looks to Break Truck Rules

The Wall Street Journal's latest "Eyes on the Road" column, Honda Looks to Break Truck Rules, look at the new Honda truck, the Ridgeline:

Rejecting the norms of conventional pickup construction also allowed Honda to create the Ridgeline's "Wow!" feature: the sizeable trunk space under the floor of the five-foot long pickup bed. Mr. Flint says that when Honda engineers and marketers came up with this idea and showed it to focus groups of consumers "the expression on people's faces was one of shock and awe. The usual comment was, 'Why hadn't somebody done that before?'"

He's right. Show someone the Ridgeline's locking, under-the-bed trunk — big enough for a large cooler, a bunch of groceries, or a couple of golf bags — and eyebrows fly up. I used to own a pickup truck and was constantly frustrated that there was no place to put the kind of stuff I carried around 98% of the time except in the cramped space behind the front seat or under a canvas cover that I bought to cover the unlockable cargo bed.

The Ridgeline won't appeal to a lot of pickup owners. It doesn't offer a V-8 engine. The bed is only five feet long with the tailgate up. Anyone who has a serious load to tow probably won't be satisfied with the Ridgeline's torque, or pulling power, which not surprisingly lags the Ford F-150 5.4 liter V-8, but also falls short of the recently redesigned Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier pickups.

Ayn Rand, Economic/Political General Equilibrium Theorist

Bryan Caplan looks at Ayn Rand, Economic/Political General Equilibrium Theorist:

Atlas came out in 1957, and it's got more about rent-seeking than the next 15 years of public choice scholarship. As I explain in Atlas Shrugged and Public Choice: The Obvious Parallels:

Each piece of legislation [in Atlas] has the following components:

1. A public-interest rationale.
2. Supportive interest groups with a hidden financial agenda.
3. Negative consequences for the general public.

Gay men read maps like women

Despite the headline, Gay men read maps like women, it appears that gay men use both masculine and feminine strategies for navigating:

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women — using landmarks to find their way around — a new study suggests.

But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.

'Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic,' explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. 'It's not simply that lesbians have men's brains and gay men have women's brains.'

The stereotype that women are relatively poor map readers is borne out by a reasonable bulk of scientific literature, notes Rahman. 'Men, particularly, excel at spatial navigation.' The new study might help researchers understand how cognitive differences and sexual orientation develop in the womb, he says.

(Hat tip to GeekPress.)

To Catch a Thief

I've been catching up on my Hitchcock movies, and I just watched To Catch a Thief, which "stars Cary Grant as a former thief suspected of a new series of crimes and Grace Kelly as the woman who romances him." For a thriller, it's not particularly thrilling; the plot's fairly simple, and the tension's never that great.

That said, it's a beautiful film, featuring (1) the French Riviera, and (2) Grace Kelly.

Cary Grant, by the way, is supposed to play the athletic former-acrobat turned cat burglar, but he doesn't do anything particularly acrobatic and, like most leading men in the 1950s, he really doesn't have a very athletic physique. The punch-line: he really was an acrobat in his youth!

Notorious

I just watched Hitchcock's Notorious for the first time. It stars Ingrid Bergman as a "notorious woman of affairs" (a woman who, shudder, drinks and sleeps around) and Cary Grant as an "adventurous man of the world" (a spy). Overall, certainly a good movie, but a few things stood out to me:

Despite the fact that Bergman's character is sent to infiltrate a German spy ring in Brazil, there was no German spoken, next to no Portuguese (just "dois martinis" to the waiter, and "senhor" and "senhora" to locals), and one surprisingly long French monologue (in a party scene).

The kissing scenes seemed really, really awkward and forced.

Oh, and I missed Hitch's cameo during the party scene.

Boy Scouting in America: The First Decade

Many American don't realize that the Boy Scouts were an English invention, and that they started as a more-or-less paramilitary group. From Boy Scouting in America: The First Decade:

"The Boy Scout movement was born at Mafeking,� in 1899, South Africa, during the Boer War. British Lieutenant-General Robert S.S. Baden-Powell, the originator of the Boy Scout idea and known as the �Hero of Mafeking� for the important victory gained there, created the Boy Scouts in order to relieve the fatigued British army. The army needed help if they were going to be victorious, and Baden-Powell struck upon an ingenious plan. Under his direction, Lord Edward Cecil:

collected the boys of Mafeking, talked to them, drilled them, and put them into uniform. They became messengers, carrying dispatches from fort to fort on the lines; they kept a lookout, they acted as orderlies, and so relieved from these duties [those soldiers] who were so badly needed in the firing line.

The �first of the Boy Scouts,� then, were essentially a junior corps of soldiers, used exclusively to aid the army in all its tasks other than combat.

It quickly became a popular means of teaching character:

Just before Mafeking, Baden-Powell had written a book entitled Aids to Scouting intended for young soldiers who, as he had discovered in his military experience, did not have the skills of outdoor living and self-reliance that were necessary for military life. In 1903, when Baden-Powell returned to England, he discovered that boys there were using his book for fun in the out of doors. At the request of schoolteachers, Baden-Powell began working on a book suited particularly to boys, and in 1906 the fruits of his work were published in a pamphlet called, �Boy Scouts - A Suggestion.� In this pamphlet, Baden-Powell declared that the plan of the Boy Scouts was �to help in making the rising generation, of whatever class or creed, into good citizens at home or in the colonies.� One year later, in 1907, Baden-Powell held a camp from July 29th to August 9th at Brownsea Island in Poole Harbor, with 21 boys. Unlike at Mafeking, where the Scouts were enlisted principally to help the army, at Brownsea Island �the idea was to lead boys, by attractive practices called Scouting, to teach themselves character.� It was believed by Baden-Powell that, by engaging in outdoor activities stressing such qualities as attention and self-reliance, the Scouts would become better boys. The activities during this week-long excursion included: �instruction in camp skills, observation and tracking, woodcraft and nature lore, life-saving and first aid, and the virtues of honor, chivalry, and good citizenship.� Divided into four patrols, �they lived in Army tents and were fed by Army cooks.� Soon after the camp at Brownsea Island, Baden-Powell published the first Boy Scout handbook, Scouting for Boys, inspired by his own experiences, and largely by the works of two Americans — Ernest Thompson Seton (naturalist and founder of the Woodcraft Indians) and Daniel Carter Beard (illustrator and founder of the Sons of Daniel Boone). Boy Scouting became an overnight success, and by the beginning of 1910 — less than three years after its founding — there were more than 200,000 Scouts in Britain.

There's a famous story about how the scouts came to America:

In 1910, the Boy Scout movement officially came to America, organized by a newspaper man from Chicago named W. D. Boyce. Mr. Boyce had visited England in 1909 where, losing his way in a London fog, he came upon a lad with a lantern who offered to take him to his destination. When Boyce tried to tip the boy for his kindness, the boy refused: �No sir, I am a Scout,� he said, �Scouts do not accept tips for courtesies or Good Turns.� After Mr. Boyce completed the business to which he had to attend, the boy led him to a nearby Scout office, where he learned more about the movement. Deeply impressed, upon his return to America in 1910 he decided to establish the Boy Scouts of America, and succeeded, with the help of Edgar M. Robinson of the Y.M.C.A and Ernest Thompson Seton, in having them incorporated by Congress in February of that year. [...] With credit from Baden-Powell as the originators of the Boy Scout idea, both Seton and Beard added considerable prestige to the Boy Scouts of America, but not nearly so much as the Honorary President and Vice-President — William Howard Taft and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, respectively.

Why on earth the scouts needed to be incorporated by Congress, I'll never know. Oh, and don't challenge the honorary president to a s'mores-eating contest.

How Paris Got Hacked?

I didn't realize this is what really happened. From How Paris Got Hacked?:

Like many online service providers, T-Mobile.com requires users to answer a 'secret question' if they forget their passwords. For Hilton's account, the secret question was 'What is your favorite pet's name?'

Naturally, you can find all of the photos from her Sidekick on-line.

(Hat tip to my buddy, Dan.)

Schwarzenegger Says 'No Regrets' on Steroid Use

Schwarzenegger Says 'No Regrets' on Steroid Use:

"I have no regrets about it," the seven-time Mr. Olympia told ABC News in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday. "Because at the time, it was something new that came on the market, and we went to the doctor and did it under doctors' supervision."

Our Godless Constitution

Brooke Allen pulls no punches in Our Godless Constitution:

It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best — and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him — is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

The town of the talk

The town of the talk shares a number of factoids about the Big Apple:

In the 1990s, immigrants flooded into New York in greater numbers and from more countries than ever before. The city's population has reached an all-time high of 8.1m, and a higher proportion of its people — over 36% — are foreign-born than at any time since the 1920s. Los Angeles and Miami have an even larger proportion of immigrants, but New York's are far more diverse. Over half of Miami's new arrivals are Cuban, and over 40% of Los Angeles' are Mexican. In New York, the Dominican Republic provides the biggest chunk of immigrants, with a share of 13%. China comes next with 9%, then Jamaica with 6%. No other country has more than 5%.

Amusing:

"Sex and the City" stars four young career women and is ostensibly about the difficulties of finding a man in New York. It has a point. According to an analysis for The Economist, there are 93 men to every 100 women among single New Yorkers aged 20-44. In the country as a whole, and in most other big cities, there are more young single men than young single women.

(As someone else pointed out, far from all of those 93 men are even interested in women...)

When I think New York, I don't typically think safe and healthy, but I should:

New York is a strikingly healthy place to live, and was so long before Mr Bloomberg began to wage a war on smoking in 2002. Partly because there is no room for many cars — so New Yorkers are highly unlikely to be killed by them, and take more exercise — New York has the lowest mortality rate of all but three of America' s 46 biggest cities.
[...]
Leave out the passengers and crew on the aeroplanes that were flown into the World Trade Centre, and about 2,600 people were killed in New York on September 11th 2001. Put that tragic number in perspective, and you can perhaps see how it is possible for New York to be a powerful magnet for talent, youth and energy once more. In 1990 there were 2,290 murders in the city; last year there were 566. Thus even if a September 11th were to occur every other year, the city would by one measure be quite a lot safer than it would be with crime at its 1990 level and no terrorism.

Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving - Features

New Scientist magazine's Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving traces the study of mind-altering drugs to their modern resurgence:

Scientists first became interested in psychedelic drugs — also called hallucinogens because of their profound effect on perception — after Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, accidentally swallowed LSD in 1943. Hofmann's description of his experience, which he found both enchanting and terrifying, spurred scientific interest in LSD as well as naturally occurring compounds with similar effects: mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus; psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms; and DMT, from the Amazonian shamans' brew ayahuasca.

At first, many scientists called these drugs 'psychotomimetics' because their effects appeared to mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. However, many users rhapsodised about the life-changing insights they achieved during their experiences, so much so that in 1957, British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond proposed that the compounds be renamed 'psychedelic', from the Greek for 'mind-revealing'. The term caught on, and psychiatrists started experimenting with the drugs as treatments for mental illness. By the mid-1960s, more than 1000 peer-reviewed papers had been published describing the treatment of more than 40,000 patients for schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism and other disorders.

A prominent member of this movement was Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, who among other things tested whether psilocybin and LSD could be used to treat alcoholism and rehabilitate convicts. Although his studies were initially well received, Leary eventually lost his reputation — and his job — after he began touting psychedelics as a hotline to spiritual enlightenment. Leary's antics helped trigger a backlash, and by the late 1960s psychedelics had been outlawed in the US, Canada and Europe. Unsurprisingly, clinical research ground to a halt, partly because obtaining the necessary permits became much more difficult, but also because few researchers were willing to risk their reputations studying demonised substances.

Outsourcing War

P. W. Singer opens Outsourcing War with stories from the world of Private Military Firms (PMFs):

The tales of war, profit, honor, and greed that emerge from the private military industry often read like something out of a Hollywood screenplay. They range from action-packed stories of guns-for-hire fighting off swarms of insurgents in Iraq to the sad account of a private military air crew languishing in captivity in Colombia, abandoned by their corporate bosses in the United States. A recent African "rent-a-coup" scandal involved the son of a former British prime minister, and accusations of war profiteering have reached into the halls of the White House itself.

The Struggle to Transform the Military

In The Struggle to Transform the Military, Max Boot cites the British example of how to run an empire:

Whether or not the United States is an "empire" today, it is a country with interests to protect and enemies to fight all over the world. There is no finer example of how to do this cheaply and effectively than the British Empire. In 1898, it maintained only 331,000 soldiers and sailors and spent only 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, considerably less than the 3.9 percent the United States spends today. This puny investment was enough to safeguard an empire that covered 25 percent of the globe.

How to Get More Female Scientists

Virginia Postrel on How to Get More Female Scientists:

Biology has its own rules, which culture and technology can change only so much. One of those rules is that it's really hard to get pregnant if you're 40 but pretty easy to father a child at that age. Men postpone child rearing into their 40s with little consequence. Women cannot. That's a problem for professional women in general, but it's a much bigger problem for women on a tenure clock. And the later that tenure clock starts, the bigger a problem it is. That's why an amibitous female scientist faces problems that an ambitious female lawyer doesn't. Law school takes only three years; you're out at 25, and only 27 if you spend a couple of years clerking for judges. Work like a dog for seven years, postponing any thought of kids, and you're just 34. Your biological clock hasn't yet run down.

If, however, you spend six years in grad school and another two as a postdoc, you'll be 30 when you get your first tenure-track post--and that's assuming you don't work between college and grad school. I don't have the numbers, but science training is notorious for stretching out the doctoral/postdoc process, in part because the researchers heading labs benefit from having all that cheap, talented help. Female scientists who want kids are in trouble, even assuming they have husbands who'll take on the bulk of family responsibilities.

So, if a university like Harvard wants to foster the careers of female scientists, this is my advice: Speed up the training process so people get their first professorial jobs as early as possible--ideally, by 25 or 26. Accelerate undergraduate and graduate education; summer breaks are great for students who want to travel or take professional internships, but maybe science students should spend them in school. Penalize senior researchers whose grad students take forever to finish their Ph.D.s. Spend more of those huge endowments on reducing (or eliminating) teaching assistant loads and other distractions from a grad student's own research and training. If you want more female scientists, ceteris paribus (as the economists say), stop extending academic adolescence.

Some Economists Say the President of Harvard Talks Just Like Them

In Some Economists Say the President of Harvard Talks Just Like Them, Virginia Postrel explains that "the habits of mind that made [Summers] a successful researcher — including the style and rhetoric that economists use when they talk to each other — help explain why he is now embroiled in controversy as president of Harvard":

In lambasting his nonjudgmental, empirical approach to the question, opponents are not merely challenging Dr. Summers's brash manner or his evaluation of the data. They are attacking the very method economists use to address social policy questions. And, not surprisingly, some of his most outspoken supporters are fellow economists.
[...]
Dispassionate hypothesis testing is particularly important for practical questions, because different explanations may imply different solutions. Take Dr. Summers's argument that the primary barrier to women in science, as in other high-powered jobs, is that employers demand single-minded dedication to work. "They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect — and this is harder to measure — but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place."

Married women, he argued, especially those with children, are far less likely than married men to put up with such demands.

For universities, this suggests the tenure clock for junior professors may hurt women who have young children in the same years they are expected to "publish or perish."

Virginia Postrel uses the extra space provided by her own site to expand on how non-economists don't understand how economists speak:

People with an emotional stake and without the disciplinary habits of separating "is" from "ought" get pissed. But there's more to the story.

Take Summers's use of the word "marginal," a concept so central to modern economics that economists can hardly think without it. Even as a journalist who tries hard to avoid jargon, I know from personal experience that if you slip and say "marginal" rather than "additional" or "incremental" — the economic meaning — people will think you mean "unimportant," "wasteful," "worthless," or just plain bad. If misunderstandings can happen in a speech on the economic importance of aesthetics as the absolutely critical "marginal value" that determines whether a good or service succeeds, imagine what happens when you're talking about affirmative action.

Prehistoric "Bear-Dog" Fossil Unearthed

Ooh. Prehistoric "Bear-Dog" Fossil Unearthed:

Scientists are marveling at a fossil find in California's San Joaquin Valley that has produced the remains of a never-before-seen badger-like creature and a monstrous predator that looks like a cross between a bear and a pit bull.

Rifts and the Right

Rifts and the Right addresses the (growing) rift between libertarians and conversatives:

Libertarians should realize that it is not, by definition, a contradiction of limited government principles to suggest that the erosion of traditional values has had adverse effects on American society. In fact, the existence of a culture that fosters shared values is essential to a free society.

BowGo

Those wacky engineers at Carnegie Mellon have created a new, improved pogo stick, the BowGo:

The BOWGO (patented) is a new kind of pogo stick that bounces higher, farther and more efficiently than conventional devices. The BOWGO is a product of the Toy Robots Initiative and is a scaled-up, human-sized version of the Bow Leg. The Bow Leg is a highly resilient leg being developed for running robots at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. The key technology is the fiber-reinforced composite (FRC) spring that bends like a bow to store elastic energy. Compared to the steel coil spring used in a conventional pogo stick, the bow spring stores 2-5 times as much energy per unit mass, and precludes the sliding friction that results when long coil springs buckle sideways. The BOWGO also uses rollers to guide the plunger, in place of the usual plastic guide bushings, providing smooth, almost frictionless motion. The force/deflection characteristic of the bow spring is tailored to provide high-energy storage with minimal shock at ground contact. A large, rubber-padded foot allows the BOWGO to be used on relatively soft surfaces such as grass, sand and gravel.

Can Terrorists Build the Bomb?

Can Terrorists Build the Bomb? provides "an examination of each step a terrorist organization would need to take to pull off a nuclear attack, and what is being done to raise the hurdles." Step One is acquiring the raw materials:

All the next Mohammed Atta would need to make a bomb big enough to instantly obliterate everything within a third of a mile is about 100 pounds of uranium enriched to 90 percent: a lump about the size of a bowling ball, or a bigger lump if the enrichment level is lower. It takes even less plutonium, which is far more fissile than uranium, to build an equally destructive bomb: about 35 pounds, a grapefruit-size hunk.

Sod Off, Swampy!

Sod Off, Swampy! explains what happened when environmentalists stormed London's International Petroleum Exchange:

But London traders, just after lunch, are more likely to be powered by two or three pints of strong ale than the milk of human kindness.

The trespassers were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. "They were kicking and punching men and women," said a photographer, according to The Times of London. "It was really ugly. They followed the [Greenpeace] guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement."

"The violence was instant," reported one aggrieved recipient of a rain of blows to the head. "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view."

"Sod off, Swampy!" shouted one tardy trader, steadying himself against the railings of the balcony of the pub across the street as his colleagues threw the protesters bodily onto the sidewalk. (Swampy was an enviro-protester who gained fame by living unbathed in a tunnel for eight months.)

Meanwhile, other traders inside the building were punching and felling men and women with a politically correct lack of sexual discrimination. Those who had already been punched onto the floor were shocked to look up and see traders trying to overturn heavy filing cabinets onto them.

A laconic spokesman for the IPE said, "We are dealing with the situation."

The protesters who had violently breached private premises and attempted to halt a legitimate activity expressed themselves aggrieved with the rules of engagement. One of them told The Times, "I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot. They were Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs."

Nude Man Steals, Wrecks Philly Police Car

From Nude Man Steals, Wrecks Philly Police Car:

The episode unfolded at around 1:30 a.m. when police were called to a block in North Philadelphia to investigate complaints about a person screaming in the street. Officers arriving on the scene said they found a man running about in his bathrobe in the freshly fallen snow.

The officers gave chase. The man shed his robe, then allegedly bit a female officer on the arm, climbed into her patrol car and hit the gas. He drove only a few blocks before crashing, police said.

Is this the beginning of the zombie apocalypse?

California Storms Spur Tornadoes; Six Dead

It rarely rains in California, but when it rains, it pours. From California Storms Spur Tornadoes; Six Dead:

And in Orange County's rural Silverado Canyon area east of Irvine, boulders crashed into an apartment and crushed a 16-year-old girl, Caitlin Oto.

"If you saw the damage up there, it almost looks like the houses exploded, the way it went completely through the homes," said Capt. Stephen Miller of the Orange County Fire Authority.

Leader to Police: Toughen Up!

From Leader to Police: Toughen Up!:

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged police Tuesday to toughen up after a television news report showed two police officers fleeing from a man brandishing what appeared to be a baseball bat.

By the way, Tokyo's elite riot police are trained in aikido.

Hedge funds

According to The Economist, Hedge funds are the "latest thing":

Some hedge funds actually hedge, meaning they attempt to invest in a manner that offsets adverse market movements. But since they also want to capture returns, the hedge is never complete and many funds do not even bother (see chart 2). Responding to institutional demand, notes Greenwich Associates, some new hedge funds restrict themselves to holding long positions in common stocks, just like ordinary mutual funds or, for that matter, traditional accounts managed by brokers on behalf of clients.

Hedge funds have some common characteristics. They are usually pooled investments (like mutual funds) structured as private partnerships (unlike mutual funds). Many carry substantial leverage and are quite rigid about the flow of money from clients. Initial �lock-ups� for as long as four or five years are not uncommon; rarely is money allowed to come in or go out more than monthly. This restriction allows hedge funds to take positions in the most illiquid corners of the market including options, futures, derivatives, and unusually structured securities.

The part that kills me: some hedge funds actually hedge.

Ego, Testosterone, and the Academy

In Ego, Testosterone, and the Academy, Arnold Kling describes Summers' talk as "as near a perfect example of judicious, thoughtful speculation as any imperfect human being might produce":

Summers argues that to be a professor at a top university is to be at the very top of one's profession, just as a corporate CEO is at the top of a firm. He says that to reach the top of a profession, one must dedicate an inordinate amount of time. He says that this need for professional dedication conflicts with family responsibilities for both men and women, but this tends to take more of a toll on women.

Summers' other point concerns statistical distributions. On a variety of attributes, statistical measures show that men have higher variance than women. Thus, if you look at the very top or at the very bottom of the distribution, you will find a larger share of men, while if you look in the middle, you will find a slightly larger share of women. He conjectures that this difference at the extremes exists for some attribute that is important in math and some branches of science. If to be at the top of one of those fields you need a genetic trait that is found only once in every 5000 or 10,000 people, and if rare genetic traits are more often found in men, then when you look at the top of those fields you will see more men.

The Way We Live Now: Unintelligent Design

The Way We Live Now: Unintelligent Design explains, in a nutshell, why no scientist can take "intelligent design" seriously:

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims — that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

What kind of intelligent designer makes bad designs?

Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

Colleges: An Endangered Species?

Colleges: An Endangered Species? describes how American higher education has changed over the years:

Until about fifty years ago, our most prestigious academic institutions were pretty much the domain of well-born prep school boys. In 1912, Owen Johnson's enduringly popular novel (most recently reprinted in 2003) Stover at Yale gave a picture of Ivy life as a gladiatorial contest among alpha males who, by beating out their rivals for a spot on the team or in the club, learned to achieve 'victory...on the broken hopes of a comrade,' and went on to rule the nation. In 1920, Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton '17) called Stover at Yale the 'textbook' for his generation.
[...]
At the turn of the century, when Stover was prepping for Yale, fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college. By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million. In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population. Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.

Of course, the schools themselves have changed dramatically. Before the Civil War, most schools were centers of moral learning, closely tied to a particularly church. This changed with the introduction of the land-grant system:

By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges "where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." Eventually these "land-grant" colleges evolved into the system of state universities.

Incidentally, Cornell is both a private university and a land-grant school:

In 1895, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, whose private endowment was augmented by land granted to New York State under the Morrill Act, looked back at the godly era and declared himself well rid of "a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged."

'Gonzo' Godfather Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

It was only a matter of time — and, frankly, he lasted longer than the oddsmakers predicted. From 'Gonzo' Godfather Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself:

Hunter S. Thompson, a renegade journalist whose 'gonzo' style threw out any pretense at objectivity and established the hard-living writer as a counter-culture icon, fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.

NPR : Death Highlights Dangers of Laser Hair Removal

This headline, Death Highlights Dangers of Laser Hair Removal, paints a very different picture from what actually happened. No one was burned to death by a laser. A North Carolina college student died from an overdose of the prescription topical anesthetic cream they gave her (without a prescription) to apply before her laser treatment. She was in her car, on the way to the treatment, when she started to have seizures.

Naturally, "Some doctors say the death illustrates the need for greater regulation of the industry." In fact, those doctors seem to think that such treatments should only be applied under a doctor's supervision...

NPR : Monty Python's Eric Idle

NPR interviews Monty Python's Eric Idle:

His Beatles-parody mockumentary The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch comes out on DVD next month. He's also written the book for the Monty Python farce Spamalot on Broadway.

The Millionaire Next Door vs. the Politician in Washington

In The Millionaire Next Door vs. the Politician in Washington, Arnold Kling cites Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel's work and contrasts the attitudes of Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAWs) and Power-Intoxicated Washington (PIWs):

In 1875, food/clothing/shelter accounted for 74 percent of total consumption (including leisure). In 1995, they accounted for just 13 percent of total consumption. For material goods, productivity tends to grow faster than demand, so that a smaller fraction of resources is devoted to them. We see that in the ever-declining proportion of the work force engaged in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.

On the other hand, the demand for leisure tends to rise with income, and demand grows faster than productivity in health care and education. Fundamentally, leisure-time activities, education, and health care are the sectors of the economy you want to gravitate toward if you want to go where spending is going to increase.

Politicians, along with their allies who value paternalism and redistribution, understand the trends, too. Many on the left are willing to allow the market to operate in the ever-declining portion of the economy that produces material goods. However, they insist that education, health care, and retirement are too important and complex to be left to the private sector. The Washington power-lusters are as savvy as any businessman in gravitating toward the growth industries.

Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce

Please enjoy the opening to Lawrence H. Summers' Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce:

I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard's policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn't feel like doing the first.

I think he met his provocation goal.

Looney Tune-Ups

According to Looney Tune-Ups, Warner Brothers is "reimagining" its most famous characters (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc.) for a new show, Loonatics:

For "Loonatics," the six characters are being projected 700 years into the future, given superpowers, and outfitted in tight-fitting, slenderizing space gear.

No thanks.

Range of New Stoves Use Magnetic Energy, Not Flames or Coils

From Range of New Stoves Use Magnetic Energy, Not Flames or Coils:

Induction burners tend to cook food faster than traditional stovetops, and advocates of the technology point out that kitchen cleanup is simpler since the glass top can easily be wiped down. But convenience comes at a price. Not only do induction cooktops cost up to twice as much as regular cooktops, but they also work only with pots and pans that have magnetic qualities — no aluminum or Pyrex. Stylish and expensive copper-bottom pans are no good with induction cooktops, either. (The test: If a magnet won't stick to it, the pan won't work.)
[...]
The induction devices work like this: Electricity passes through magnetic coils in the cooktop, producing a rapidly fluctuating magnetic field above the burner. That magnetic field forces the molecules in a metal pot to rapidly vibrate — generating friction that heats the pot and ultimately, the food.
[...]
Manufacturers estimate that only 50% or so of the heat generated through electric coils or gas flames on stoves actually gets into the pan to heat up food, the rest of the heat is released into the room. Induction burners, by contrast, are about 90% efficient, manufacturers say.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

In 'The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick': The Grift of the Magi, Teller, the shorter, quieter half of Penn and Teller, tells the story of one of the most famous magic tricks that never existed:

When John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.
[...]
In 1890 The Chicago Tribune was competing in a cutthroat newspaper market by publishing sensational fiction as fact. The Rope Trick — as Lamont's detective work reveals — was one of those fictions. The trick made its debut on Aug. 8, 1890, on the front page of The Tribune's second section. An anonymous, illustrated article told of two Yale graduates, an artist and a photographer, on a visit to India. They saw a street fakir, who took out a ball of gray twine, held the loose end in his teeth and tossed the ball upwards where it unrolled until the other end was out of sight. A small boy, "about 6 years old," then climbed the twine and, when he was 30 or 40 feet in the air, vanished. The artist made a sketch of the event. The photographer took snapshots. When the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, just the fakir sitting on the ground. "Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn't hypnotize the camera," the writer concluded.

Baby Name Wizard

GeekPress pointed me to a fascinating on-line tool, the Baby Name Wizard, which tells you how popular a particular first name has been over the decades, with these instructions:

Try "Caitlyn" vs. "Adolph" to see some dramatic examples.

It's a pretty jazzy Java applet. Check it out.

Capitalism and Human Nature

Will Wilkinson explains evolutionary psychology's take on free markets in Capitalism and Human Nature:

What evolutionary psychology really helps us to appreciate is just what an unlikely achievement complex, liberal, market-based societies really are. It helps us to get a better grip on why relatively free and fabulously wealthy societies like ours are so rare and, possibly, so fragile. Evolutionary psychology helps us to understand that successful market liberal societies require the cultivation of certain psychological tendencies that are weak in Stone Age minds and the suppression or sublimation of other tendencies that are strong. Free, capitalist societies, where they can be made to work, work with human nature. But it turns out that human nature is not easy material to work with.

The main points:

• We are Coalitional
• We are Hierarchical
• We are Envious Zero-sum Thinkers
• Property Rights are Natural
• Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural

(Interestingly, despite the fact that we're envious zero-sum thinkers, we're wired for mutually beneficial exchange.)

F. A. Hayek anticipated evolutionary psychology's analysis, noting that we live within two worlds, the "macro-cosmos" of society at large and the "micro-cosmos" of our friends and family:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.

Immanuel Kant remarked, "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." Denis Dutton noted:

It is not . . . that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material.

Origins and evolution of the Western diet

Origins and evolution of the Western diet (Cordain et al. 81 (2): 341 -- American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) steps through the many ways our modern Western diet differs from that of our primitive ancestors:

In particular, food staples and food-processing procedures introduced during the Neolithic and Industrial Periods have fundamentally altered 7 crucial nutritional characteristics of ancestral hominin diets: 1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content. The evolutionary collision of our ancient genome with the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods may underlie many of the chronic diseases of Western civilization.

India's Deadly Lies

India's Deadly Lies shares a little know fact:

[M]ost of the medicines that WHO terms "essential" in developing countries are no longer patented — fully 98% of them are off patent.

The Greeks Had a Word for It: Hegemony vs. Empire

In The Greeks Had a Word for It: Hegemony vs. Empire, Lee Harris explains where the word "hegemony" comes from:

The word is Greek: it means the leadership of a coalition or an alliance, and it was used in this sense by the Greek historian Herodotus and Thucydides. But since English has a number of perfectly good words to indicate leadership, such as chief, head, principal, boss, manager, organizer, general director, and so forth, few users of the English language felt any need to rescue this word from its moldy niche in the Greek lexicon until the mid 1840's when the English radical and banker George Grote began publishing his monumental History of Greece, a work of immense scholarship that is still wonderfully fascinating.

Curiously enough, in light of its current usage, the reason Grote decided to revive the Greek word hegemony was in order to distinguish it sharply from the Latin-derived word with which it has now become inextricably muddled, namely, the word empire.

Athenian hegemony eventally devolved into empire, but only after a successful run:

Athenian hegemony had first emerged in the aftermath of the Persian wars — wars in which the colossus of the Persian empire had tried to transform the various independent Greek city-states into tribute-paying colonies, using a combination of bribery, diplomacy, and overwhelming military force. In the course of the struggle against Oriental imperialism, Athens, with its great naval power, had ended up as the Greek city-state that was in the best position to defend against further Persian invasions — an indisputable fact that became the basis of a post-war defensive coalition developed by Athens and its allies in order to afford protection for the various Greek city-states spread across the Aegean Sea, on islands such as Samos, Chios, and Lesbos, as well as along the Ionian mainland — all of which had been targets of the previous Persian invasions, and could easily become targets once again.

This defensive confederation was called the Delian League, after the island of Delos where it was first headquartered. Originally devised to keep the Persian Empire at bay, its initial role was not terribly different from the role that NATO played vis-�-vis the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Furthermore, like NATO, the Delian League worked: during its existence, the Greek city-states that were its members were free both from Persian invasion and tribute obligations. Indeed, thanks to Athenian naval supremacy during this period, the Aegean Sea was even freed from the eternal maritime pestilence known as piracy.

In the beginning, the members of the Delian League were required to produce ships and sailors capable of rallying to the defense of the Greeks against Persian assault, but over time the various city-states under the protective umbrella of Athens began simply to pay Athens for the services rendered by its huge and extraordinarily competent navy. Athens did not make this happen — it was the will of the various commerce-minded city-states whose prosperity was more important to them than their ability to defend themselves with their own fleet and crew.

Unfortunately, the payment of money from the confederates gradually came to be seen as a kind of imperial tribute — analogous to the tribute money that the Persian Empire itself exacted from the various regions over which it governed, and soon what had started out as a coalition under the leadership of Athens became a maritime empire that was operated by the Athenians solely for the profit of the Athenians. Indeed, the day would come when the rule of Athens would become as brutal, if not more so, than the rule of the Persian empire, and city-states that had once been the allies of Athens would revolt from its rule, seeking to regain the autonomy that they had lost. Though the Persian forces of Darius and Xerxes had been repelled, the poison of Oriental despotism had begun to corrupt the egalitarian ethos of the Greeks. The Persian King owed his vast wealth to the huge amount of tribute that he could force his satrapies, or colonies, to pay him. Why couldn't Athens play the same game?

Car Bombs vs. Human Beings

Car Bombs vs. Human Beings explains the realities of this terrorist weapon:

Most of us have only seen explosions in movies where slow-motion photography or the use of low velocity explosions with lots of smoke and flame create spectacular, lingering visual effects. Real bombs, using a high order of explosives, go off in a millisecond flash doing huge damage in a literal instant. There is little for the eye to linger upon. One moment everything is normal. Then a supersonic boom. Then destruction.
[...]
The human body contains two principal air-filled spaces — the lungs and the nasal cavity and attached sinuses. A human subjected to a bomb blast wave instantly has hundreds and perhaps thousands psi of pressure pushing on these cavities. A mere 15 psi above normal is considered the threshold for possible lung injury, so imagine what happens to those near the epicenter of a bomb blast.

The chest caves in. The lungs inside it are compressed violently in on themselves — so violently that the entire network of pulmonary vessels connecting them to the heart and the rest of the body are sheared off.

When the instant of blast overpressure passes, the lungs suddenly re-expand, like a crushed rubber ball rebounding in the hand of a strong man. But now they are filled with a huge volume of blood, blood that should be flowing to the heart and other parts of the body.

Blood that would normally return to the heart through the left ventrical has now overwhelmed the lungs. No blood in the left ventrical equals no blood in the heart equals no pulmonary output to the body. Blood pressure — zero. The body is instantly starved.

Up above, in the skull, at the same instant, the overpressure works in another way. The nasal and sinus cavities implode. That part of the skull called the cribiform plate ruptures, snaps and may be thrust upward into the base of the brain.

Kind of academic, isn't it? You can die so many ways in the space of a few seconds in a bomb blast.

Will Blogs Produce a Chilling Effect?

Will Blogs Produce a Chilling Effect? opens with a thought experiment:

Imagine that mind reading were suddenly imposed on humanity automatically transmitting all our thoughts to those around us. Involuntary telepathy would destroy countless marriages as wives learned of their husbands perverse fantasies. Bosses would fire millions after they found out what their employees really thought of them. Police would be inundated with reports of ordinary citizens contemplating hideous crimes. But eventually we would realize that all humans harbor evil thoughts and an equilibrium would emerge in which we forgave bad thoughts that didn't lead to terrible deeds.

James D. Miller contends that blogs have a similar effect:

I fear that blogs may soon make many Americans afraid to speak their minds. Imagine you're a manager of a company. Your new blog nightmare is that you will say something stupid in a meeting and this will be reported in a blog. Other blogs will report the initial comment and soon whatever group you have offended will pressure your company to fire you. Or perhaps your distasteful remark will go unreported until you're promoted to CEO. Then your employees, while blogging about what kind of boss you are, will literally tell the world about your past unfortunate utterance.

Human Artillery Shells

In discussing "the basic Islamofascist 'artillery shell' [which] is a young 'martyr' with clothing or backpack stuffed full of explosives," Human Artillery Shells mentions a surprising fact about body armor and explosives:

Kevlar vests, such as our soldiers routinely wear, actually "reflect" the blast wave into the wearer's body at eight to nine times the original force. This is true, as well, of so-called "bomb suits" worn by ordnance disposal technicians. These garments do protect against the deadly effects of shrapnel, but they actually predispose the wearer to severe internal blast injuries.

Red for Romance

I always found the red-state/blue-state color scheme counter-intuitive. In Red for Romance, Dan Klein explains why:

[T]he new U.S. political chromatics is just wrong. It emerged during the 2000 election and has stuck. The Democrats, however, should be red, not blue. And for the Republicans, blue is perhaps fitting enough.

Red is a warm color. It is emotional, even sensual. Red is the natural color of romance.
[...]
The added factor is the yearning not only that sentiment be shared, but shared by all. A key aspect of the Left is the appeal of an encompassing sharing of sentiment. The appeal of the Left is The People's Romance.
[...]
The Left is about collective romance. Read Marx closely, and at heart you will find the aspiration for encompassing sentiment. In Marx and the Leftist train, the collectivity is a vehicle of fulfillment and liberation. In collectivism we escape alienation, which Marx closely identified with the division of labor. In collectivism we achieve our humanness.

It is no accident, then, that red has been the color of the Left. The Left is romantic politics. In Europe, the Left parties are still red. In Europe, the First of May is celebrated as worker solidarity day. It is a day of Leftist parades, a sea of red, nowadays with a splash of green.

On blue:

Blue is cool and dispassionate. In Sweden, where my Valentine's Day cards will arrive, the conservative party, the Moderates, take the color blue.

The true blues strive to resist any impulse to view government as romantic force. They believe George Washington's claim: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master."

Government is no means of fulfillment. It is no expression of becoming. It is a dangerous power, often even brutal. We must coolly account for every action. We must girdle it with icy blue.

Malcolm Gladwell's Advice to the Eagles

ESPN.com interviewed Malcolm Gladwell and asked him (hypothetically) to advise the Eagles (before the Super Bowl). He fell back on one of Blink's anecdotes, about the military's wargames going into Iraq:

Van Riper, in a sense, went to the 'no-huddle' against his much more formidable opponent. And his experience shows that being good at deliberate, conscious decision-making doesn't make you good at instinctive decisions.

That's why I've always been so surprised that more NFL teams don't use the no-huddle. It's not just that it forces your opponent to keep a specific defense on the field. It's that it shifts the game cognitively: it forces coaches and defensive captains to think and react entirely in the instinctive 'blink' mode — and when teams aren't prepared for that kind of fast-paced thinking crazy things happen, like Iraq beating the U.S. Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the game — to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone.

I had a self-defense (not martial arts, self-defense) instructor who shared deBecker's philosophy:

DeBecker talked a lot about how rigorously he trains his people [at his personal security agency]. If the quality of our coordination and instinctive reactions breaks down when our heart rate gets above 145, he wants to expose his people to stressful situations over and over and over again until they can face them at 130, 110 or 90.

So he fires bullets at people, and does these utterly terrifying exercises involving angry pit bulls. The first and second and third and fourth time you run through one of deBecker's training sessions you basically lose control of your bowels and take off like a scalded cat. By the fifth time, essential bodily functions start to return. By the 10th time, you can function as a normal human being.

This, by the way, is why police officers will tell you that you must practice dialing 911 at least once a week. Because if you don't, when a burglar is actually in the next room, believe it or not you won't be able to dial 911: you'll forget the number, or you'll have lost so many motor skills under the stress of the moment that your fingers won't be able to pick out the buttons on the phone.

So I'd run quarterbacks who don't do well under pressure through deBecker's gauntlet — or any other kind of similar exercise so they have a sense of what REAL life-threatening stress feels like. I'd run them through a live-fire exercise at Quantico. I'd have them spend the offseason working with a trauma team in south-central L.A. It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers.

A genius explains

From A genius explains:

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't "calculating": there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."

Tammet is a "savant", an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population — and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population — have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do," says Snyder. "It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone."

Daniel Tammet recently met Kim Peek, the real-life Rain Man:

Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read.

One Dragon Martial Arts

When I see the Play as the Way video (and its sequel), I want to (1) have kids, then (2) move to Florida to enroll them in One Dragon Martial Arts at the Straight Blast Gym:

What you are sure to find at One Dragon Martial Arts:

• Alive, adaptable and functional training in a performance oriented, challe