The Poor May Not Be Getting Richer: But they are living longer, eating better, and learning to read

The Poor May Not Be Getting Richer: But they are living longer, eating better, and learning to read:

To illustrate this point, Kenny compares what has happened to life expectancy in Britain and India. The average age span in both countries was 24 years in the 14th century, but Britain then began a gradual rise, and by 1931 its life expectancy was 60.8 years, compared to just 26.8 for its colony. Since then, though, the numbers have begun to converge — by 1999, Indians lived on average to 63, while Brits nudged upward to 77.

One of the main reasons for the gap-closing is the fall of infant mortality. In 1900 Britain, the infant survival rate was 846 per 1,000 births, compared to 655 in India. Today, 992 British infants out of every 1,000 survive, compared to 920 Indians.
[...]
Kenny notes: "Broadly, the results suggest that it takes one-tenth the income to achieve the same life expectancy in 1999 as it took in 1870.

Why does it take so much less money to get these results than it used to?

Consider the virtuous circle of agricultural improvements, such as the way discovering how to properly use inorganic fertilizers boosted agricultural production, which increased the calories available to families, which in turn meant they didn't need their kids to work the fields full time, thus permitting them to go to school to become literate, which enabled them to more effectively adopt even better farming techniques, and so forth. Literacy makes educating people about the germ theory of disease a lot easier. Once-expensive medicines like penicillin eventually cost only pennies per pill. Although building infrastructure remains relatively expensive, technology can leapfrog entire costly steps, as has been demonstrated by the lightning-fast growth of cellular-telephone adoption from zero to 1.5 billion people.

The world's poor have clearly benefited enormously from spillover knowledge and technologies devised in the rich capitalist countries.

Hiring Someone Else To Potty-Train Your Kids, Teach Them to Ride a Bike

This is what parenting is all about: Hiring Someone Else To Potty-Train Your Kids, Teach Them to Ride a Bike:

It has come to this: It is now possible to outsource most aspects of parenting.

The burgeoning industry of services aimed at harried parents, which began with the likes of birthday-party packages at gyms and pizza shops, has expanded to the point where you can now hire someone to assist with everything from potty-training your toddler to getting your teenage daughter to agree to a passably modest prom dress. 'Fussy baby' services in Chicago, Denver, Brooklyn and Oakland, Calif., help comfort shrieking babies. In the New York suburbs, an entrepreneur has built a flourishing business by taking over one of the most timeless parental rituals of all: For $60 an hour he teaches kids to ride a bike.

'Childwork, as I would call it, is one of our economy's growth industries, as affluent parents try to balance work and family, deal with ever intensifying anxieties, and give their kids a leg up in the race for success,' says Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Houston, who specializes in childhood.

Robotic Death from Above

Robotic Death from Above summarizes the state of aerial drones:

Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV) will make today's piloted planes seem like flying bricks by comparison, with advantages too long to list here. For starters though, no pilot means a lighter, smaller, and cheaper aircraft. Large canopies, pilot displays, and environmental control systems will disappear.

'The UCAV offers new design freedoms that can be exploited to produce a smaller, simpler aircraft, about half the size of a conventional fighter aircraft,' according to the Federation of American Scientists. It would weigh only about one-third to one-fourth as much as a manned plane. Costs will also be slashed. Boeing's X-45 UCAV will probably be a third the price of the forthcoming manned F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, according to the defense policy website GlobalSecurity.org.

Moreover, typically 80 percent of the useful life of today's combat aircraft is devoted to pilot training and proficiency flying. Therefore a UCAV would require a fraction of the maintenance time and spare parts of a manned vehicle.

You can forget about pilot fatigue since controls can easily be handed off to somebody else. Pilot error will be greatly reduced since the controller will never be worrying about losing his own skin.

The Regulatory Roach Motel

The Regulatory Roach Motel present an excellent analogy:

Imagine that our country had a strange law under which foreign citizens were entitled to rent homes here at bargain prices. For a while, our housing market operates relatively well despite this law. While foreign citizens take advantage of it, their numbers are small compared to the masses of Americans who continue to pay market rates, and those rates are high enough to encourage the construction of needed new housing.

But suddenly there's a new development. A quirk is discovered in the law that allows foreigners to sublet their rent-controlled units to Americans. In fact, they can rent and sublet limitless numbers of units in this manner. As these bargains become publicized over the Internet, more and more Americans get their housing by subletting from foreigners. Soon this form of renting takes over the entire rental housing market. At first it seems like a great deal for American tenants, but eventually it does what all price controls do — it destroys the incentive to produce more goods. Housing stocks deteriorate as existing housing falls into disrepair and no new units are constructed. As one economist has pointed out, "rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing."

The drive to legalize drug reimportation is surprisingly similar to the imposition of rent control after World War II. There are currently several proposals to legalize the growing consumer practice of purchasing drugs from abroad at lower prices that what they sell for here. These cheaper prices do not result from lower production costs or economies of scale. They result from the fact that most foreign countries impose price controls on these drugs, and those controls are often backed up by the threat of breaking the drug's patent if its manufacturer objects.

More Gas for Washington

In More Gas for Washington, Arnold Kling presents some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to demonstrate the economics of super-fuel-efficient (500 mpg) cars:

A car's annual fuel cost is ($/gallon) times (gallons/mile) times miles. So, if we drive a car 10,000 miles a year and gas costs $2.50 per gallon, then our annual fuel cost is $25,000 times the gallons per mile. If gallons/mile goes from .04 yesterday (25 miles to the gallon) to .002 'right now,' our fuel bill goes from $1000 to $50 (assuming we do not increase our driving). Converting these annual savings to a present value by multiplying by 10 (corresponding to an interest rate of roughly 10 percent), we would pay $9,500 more for a car that gets 500 miles to a gallon than for a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon.

The auto companies sell 15 million vehicles a year. If they could get $10,000 more per car, that would be $150 billion more per year in revenue. If the economics of the fuel-efficient car do not work for $150 billion per year, then a $12 billion subsidy spread over several years is not going to make much difference.

Meanwhile, sending more money to Washington is like sending more coal to Newcastle.

The Man Who Shot Sin City

The Man Who Shot Sin City explains how Robert Rodriguez earned Frank Miller's trust:

Rodriguez made Miller a simple offer: Come to Texas and shoot with me for a day. If you like what you see, we'll make a deal. If not, the short film is yours to keep. Miller accepted and flew to Rodriguez's digital back lot outside of Austin. Inside a massive soundstage outfitted with a 30-foot-tall green screen and the latest Sony hi-def cameras, Miller watched as actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton performed a scene lifted straight from 'The Customer Is Always Right,' a decade-old short story in the Sin City series. After the shoot, Rodriguez cut the footage in his editing bay, laid down a few special effects, and added music — all that same day.

Rodriguez uses new technology to work outside the system — not unlike Lucas:

With his own Sony HD cameras, a Discreet visual effects system, four Avid digital editing machines, and XSI animation modeling software, Rodriguez can make truly independent films — and for less money than traditional Hollywood directors. "It's like going back to the old video days," Rodriguez says, "when you could run around in your backyard and shoot a movie."

The directors' guild wouldn't let Rodriguez list Miller as his co-director:

A week before Sin City began shooting, the Directors Guild of America called to inform Rodriguez that he and Miller couldn't be listed as codirectors in the movie's credits. It would be a violation of DGA rules. (This reg doesn't apply to the Wachowski or Hughes brothers, who are granted DGA waivers for being "bona fide teams.") Rodriguez was stunned when the DGA threatened to shut down production. Rather than dump Miller, Rodriguez resigned from the guild. "Down here in Texas, it's like those rules don't apply," he says. "So if I leave, I can do anything I want and don't have to worry about someone coming up behind me who's still in the dinosaur age, saying, Hey, you can't do that; you can't make movies like that."

I've been waiting to see Burroughs' A Princess of Mars on the big screen for a long, long time:

Paramount Pictures had slated Rodriguez to helm the $100 million sci-fi epic A Princess of Mars, the first book in a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which Tinseltown thinks could be the next megafranchise. But as a DGA signatory, Paramount can't hire a nonunion director. Execs gave the film to guild director Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow).

Filming a graphic novel can be a technical challenge:

"This movie wouldn't even be possible if I shot it on film," Rodriguez says, explaining how difficult it is to capture pure black and white on camera. His workaround: Shoot the actors against a green screen and add most of the backgrounds digitally in postproduction ("All of the guns and cars are real," Miller points out). Even small details like Sin City's signature "white blood" proved to be an effects challenge. Regular movie blood didn't cut it. Instead, the crew used fluorescent red liquid and hit it with a black light. This allowed Rodriguez to turn the blood "white" in postproduction. Likewise, the novel's few splashes of color proved troublesome. Yellow and green react with green screens, causing color to spill into the background and making them impossible to separate. So during shooting Rodriguez painted the villain, Yellow Bastard, blue — and then colored him yellow in post.

Teacher Frees Leg From Shark's Jaw

From Teacher Frees Leg From Shark's Jaw:

A British surfer attacked by a great white shark described Wednesday how he kicked and lashed out wildly to free his leg from the shark's jaws, which sliced his flesh "like a knife through butter."

Chris Sullivan was surfing with friends Monday when the 13-foot shark attacked.

"It came up slow and I saw its eyes and it looked really dark gray," said Sullivan, sitting in a wheelchair at a clinic. "I turned and I saw the underneath of its belly. Then I saw its mouth. Then it grabbed hold of my leg."

"I started lashing out, hitting it. I think I kicked it. I pulled the leg out. It felt like a knife through butter and I thought 'oops,'" said the school teacher who has traveled the world in pursuit of his surfing passion.

Sullivan, 32, said he managed to stay on his surf board and catch a wave back to shore, where a local veterinary surgeon who had also been surfing applied an emergency tourniquet to his leg.

Sullivan needed 200 stitches in his calf.

Sounds like it turned out pretty well. It could have, of course, gone much worse:

The attack at Nordhoek on a stunning stretch of beach about 12 miles from Cape Town occurred at the same point where a bodyboarder was killed 18 months ago.

A great white bit off the leg of a teenage surfer one year ago nearby, and a 77-year-old swimmer was eaten by a great white in nearby Fish Hoek last October.

Clive Mortimer, the station commander of the National Sea Rescue Institute, said Sullivan was "extremely lucky," to have escaped alive.

Sullivan's no Ahab:

Sullivan dismissed suggestions that sharks deemed to be a threat should be culled.

"I haven't got a problem with the shark," he said. "I was in its water and I was stupid enough to go surfing where there was a lot of sharks."

A Unified Theory of VC Suckage

Paul Graham proposes A Unified Theory of VC Suckage:

But lately I've been learning more about how the VC world works, and a few days ago it hit me that there's a reason VCs are the way they are. It's not so much that the business attracts jerks, or even that the power they wield corrupts them. The real problem is the way they're paid.

The problem with VC funds is that they're funds. Like the managers of mutual funds or hedge funds, VCs get paid a percentage of the money they manage. Usually about 2% a year. So they want the fund to be huge: hundreds of millions of dollars, if possible. But that means each partner ends up being responsible for investing a lot of money. And since one person can only manage so many deals, each deal has to be for multiple millions of dollars.

This turns out to explain nearly all the characteristics of VCs that founders hate.

Return of the Mac

Hacker (and painter) Paul Graham hails the Return of the Mac:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it's not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker's computer.

New Has-Beens to Live the 'Surreal Life'

There's a never-ending pool of has-beens out there. From New Has-Beens to Live the 'Surreal Life':

The new cast includes "America's Next Top Model" judge Janice Dickinson, former slugger Jose Canseco, Sandi "Pepa" Denton of all-gal rap outfit Salt-n-Pepa, Bronson Pinchot from "Perfect Strangers," Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth from the first season of "The Apprentice," British model Caprice and motorcrosser Carey Hart.

Balki!

Grover and the Silver Bullet

From Arnold Kling's Grover and the Silver Bullet:

When my kids were younger, one of my favorite bedtime stories for them was a Sesame Street book called "Grover�s Resting Places." The most adorable scene is where Grover starts rummaging through a toy box looking for something. After he has strewn most of the contents of the box all over his room, he pauses and says, "Uh-oh. I had better be careful, or I will make a mess."

Software almost always has a similar phase in the actual development lifecycle. Some time after the system has been in production, the business needs will tend to evolve in such a way that developers are forced to stretch it and modify it, piling up ad hoc code. Then, like Grover, the developers may pause and raise a concern that they might create a mess — when in fact the mess already is at hand.

The Fossil Fallacy

Scientific American's The Fossil Fallacy notes that creationists' demand for fossils that represent "missing links" reveals a deep misunderstanding of science:

Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all."

The Feynman-Tufte Principle

Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, was willing to speak to the Skeptics Society at Caltech in return for an unusual honorarium: the opportunity to see Feynman's van. From The Feynman-Tufte Principle -- A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van:

Richard Feynman, the late Caltech physicist, is famous for working on the atomic bomb, winning a Nobel Prize in Physics, cracking safes, playing drums and driving a 1975 Dodge Maxivan adorned with squiggly lines on the side panels. Most people who saw it gazed in puzzlement, but once in a while someone would ask the driver why he had Feynman diagrams all over his van, only to be told, 'Because I'm Richard Feynman!'

Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu

From Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu:

The wreckage of a large World War II-era Japanese submarine has been found by researchers in waters off Hawaii.

A research team from the University of Hawaii discovered the I-401 submarine Thursday during test dives off Oahu.
[...]
The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s.

They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled.
[...]
An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

Their mission was to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

The unsung role of Kung Fu in the Kyrgyz revolution

The unsung role of Kung Fu in the Kyrgyz revolution:

Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters.
[...]
Erkinbayev is the wealthy playboy head of the Palvan Corporation, who led 2,000 fighters trained in Alysh, Kyrgyzstan's answer to Kung Fu, to protests launched after the first round of a parliamentary election on February 27.

Kyrgyzstan is adjacent to China, to the west.

Mobile PC - Features - The Birth of the Notebook

The Birth of the Notebook is chock-full of amusing computer history:

Inspired by the IBM 5100 and Xerox's Notetaker — a 48-pound machine with a keyboard that folded over the display — Osborne's eponymous computer was cobbled together from the cheapest parts he could find. The Osborne 1 hit the market at $1,795, with dual floppy drives and a 5-inch CRT. Flip the keyboard over the front, latch it on, and your 24.5-pound computer was ready to go wherever you needed it. Osborne had amazing success with the product, but it was fatally crushed by the birth of Compaq in 1983, which copied the Osborne carefully while adding one killer feature: IBM compatibility.

I didn't realize the Compaq got its start creating compact computers.

The origin of the laptop:

Epson's HX-20 , introduced in 1982, was the first computer described as a "laptop." These were tiny machines designed to be propped in your lap instead of used on a desk. The HX-20 tipped the scales at barely 3 pounds, and it included a built-in tape drive and a tiny printer. Best of all, unlike its bigger forebears, this machine could run on batteries: The HX-20 had an impressive 50 hours of life on its rechargeable nickel-cadmium cells.

The success of products like the HX-20 and the TRS-80 Model 100, which followed in 1983, was phenomenal. Epson sold a quarter million HX-20s, and the laptop moniker stuck in many circles, even after the industry had long since abandoned this limited form factor.

How can you mention the TRS-80 without referencing its infamous nickname — the Trash-80?

Anyway, there's lot of history in there. Read the whole article.

jacksonpublick: Team Venture is Go.

Venture Bros. fans will be happy to know that Team Venture is Go. According to Jackson Publick:

I have just returned home from the Adult Swim 'Upfronts' (and the ensuing bar crawls and requisite, hangover-preventing pizza parlor visit) and so it is official...The Venture Bros. has been picked up for another season of 13 episodes!

One final victim of the Rape of Nanking?

The headline, One final victim of the Rape of Nanking?, refers to Iris Chang, the young historian who killed herself after earning fame writing about the atrocities. And they were atrocities:

The Rape of Nanking in 1937 began with the march of invading Japanese soldiers up the Yangtse River. They occupied the Chinese capital of the time and soon conquest was followed by bloodlust. Soldiers slaughtered between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians sheltering in a few city blocks. Slowly.

Over a six-week period, up to 80,000 women were raped. But it wasn�t so much the sheer numbers as the details that shock — fathers forced at gunpoint to rape daughters, stakes driven through vaginas, women nailed to trees, tied-up prisoners used for bayonet practice, breasts sliced off the living, speed decapitation contests.

2blowhards.com: Donald Pittenger on Illustration

In Donald Pittenger on Illustration, he cites some "official" support for his belief that illustration and fine art aren't all that different:

Although I have held these views for many years, I was pleased to have them corroborated by Burton Silverman in biographical notes to the exhibition catalog Sight and Insight: the Art of Burton Silverman (New York: Madison Square Press, 1998). On page 38 he recalls from childhood that "It also seems quite interesting to me now that, as a nine-year-old, I could not very well distinguish qualitative differences between Edward Burne-Jones�s and N.C. Wyeth�s pictures. Howard Pyle�s richly graphic drawings of King Arthur�s Knights seemed not far from an Albrecht Durer or Peter Breughel drawing. All of them presented an astounding ability to re-create the world with astonishing veracity, and so I did not discriminate between fine art and illustration".

Let Them Get Roommates

In Let Them Get Roommates, Bryan Caplan makes a Non-Bleeding Heart Libertarian argument:

A fun fact about the U.S. versus Europe is that [the] poorest 25% of Americans have more living space than the average European. But some Americans have been left behind. Our most deprived citizens often sleep three to a room, eat prison-grade food, and share bathroom facilities with dozens of unhygenic strangers. They are known as... college students.
[...]
Why aren't (relatively) poor Americans expected to live like college students?

OpinionJournal - Europe vs. America

Europe vs. America sarcastically points out that Germany is edging out Arkansas in per capita GDP and follows up with some equality stats too:

Well, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered 'low income,' meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden — the very model of a modern welfare state — were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low-income.

In other words poverty is relative, and in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the 'poor' own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.

Lawrence Summers as Martin Luther

In Lawrence Summers as Martin Luther, Arnold Kling compares modern academia to the Catholic Church prior to Reformation:

When the Harvard Faculty conducted its Diet of Worms and voted "no confidence" in its President, Lawrence Summers, perhaps this was equivalent to excommunicating Martin Luther.

The Catholic Church in 1500 was a debased, corrupt monopoly. It collected onerous taxes, which people paid because they believed that there was no alternative if they wanted a decent afterlife. However, inwardly people seethed at the amount that the clergy extracted and the debauched uses to which the funds were put.

Colleges and universities are in a similar position today. They may not use "a thousand cunning devices," but they certainly extract onerous tuitions, taxpayer support, and alumni contributions. Parents pay because they fear that to do otherwise would condemn their children to a hell of low-status occupations and spouses.

New Holocaust Book, New Theory

I'm not sure why this is considered a radical new theory. From New Holocaust Book, New Theory:

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.

Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.

Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich."

Instead, Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people — fat with bounty — kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. "No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election," Aly says.

Likewise, in the 1940s, soldiers on the front were instructed to ravage conquered lands for raw materials, industrial goods and food for Germans. Aly cites secret Nazi files showing that from 1941-1943 Germans robbed enough food and supplies from the Soviet Union to care for 21 million people. Meanwhile, he insists, Soviet war prisoners were systematically starved. German soldiers were also encouraged to send care packages home to their families to boost the morale of their wives and children. In the first three months of 1943, German soldiers on the Leningrad front sent more than 3 million packages stuffed with artifacts, art, valuables and food home, Aly says.

"About 95 percent of the German population benefited financially from the National Socialist system. The Nazis' unprecedented killing machine maintained its momentum by robbing from others. ... Millions of people were killed — the Jews were gassed, 2 million Soviet war prisoners were starved to death ... so that the German people could maintain their good mood."

Fast Talk: Screen Gems

Screen Gems shares some tidbits about the film industry, including this bit from Celine Rattray, co-CEO of Plum Pictures, a small production company:

After graduating from Oxford, I worked for McKinsey doing strategic projects for media and entertainment companies and later, for HBO. I've always wanted to work in film, but I never had the experience. So a year and a half ago, I persuaded two friends to help me found our production company, Plum Pictures. We each bring different skills to the partnership. One is good with the creative process, the other is good with production. My strength is the business perspective.

You have so little leverage when you're a small company. No one likes to work for low pay, so the challenge is to motivate people. On a small-budget film, you offer typecasted actors different roles. You offer crew members a position above what they're used to doing — the makeup assistant might be the lead makeup artist. And we compensate writers by including them more in the production. We paid nothing for one script; a studio might have paid $10,000. The writer is helping choose a director and cast. It's an exchange.

This bit from Michael London, producer of Sideways, doesn't surprise me at all:

There were many battles over the casting of Sideways. All three of the leads — Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, and Virginia Madsen — were seen as wildly unlikely choices, but our director felt these were the right actors for the roles. I'm the one who had to deliver the bad news to agents, financiers, and studio executives who kept pushing me to change his mind.

Hybrid Locomotive Gains Traction

From Hybrid Locomotive Gains Traction:

Hybrid cars, trucks and buses have already hit the road. Now, make way for the Green Goat, the world's biggest hybrid. It's a 2,000-horsepower locomotive that radically reduces fuel consumption and emissions of pollutants.

The Green Goat is a diesel-electric hybrid in which the normal massive diesel locomotive engine is replaced by a 290-horsepower inline 6-cylinder diesel truck engine and a 600-volt battery bank. The batteries supply the power needed to drive the electric traction motors on the wheels of this 280,000-pound "goat."

Goat is railroad lingo for the smaller locomotives used for moving rail cars around over short distances.

RailPower Technologies, developer of the Green Goat, believes the hybrid locomotive is an ideal way to reduce fuel costs and air pollution in switching yards, said Simon Clarke, executive vice president of the Canadian company. RailPower says the Green Goat uses 40 percent to 60 percent less fuel and emits 80 percent to 90 percent fewer pollutants than conventional train engines.

To build the hybrids, the company strips older locomotives of their engine and cab but keeps the same frame, fuel tank, brakes and electric traction motors. Then it slaps in the long-life lead-acid battery bank. RailPower Technologies says the added weight of the batteries actually helps improve the Green Goat's pulling power, which is rated at 2,000 horsepower — enough to pull 88 rail cars.

The hybrid is mostly an electric locomotive; the diesel engine only operates to keep the batteries at their optimum level of charge.

A day in the life of a typical railroad goat involves pushing heavy loads short distances at low speeds, making frequent stops and sitting in idle mode 70 percent of the time waiting for someone to sort out which rail car goes next. With 10,000 to 15,000 switch locomotives currently active in North America, millions of gallons of fuel are wasted, literally going up in toxic smoke, Clarke said. Burning diesel produces nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a major contributor to air pollution.

I find this odd:

Although the newer generation of diesel locomotives is more fuel-efficient than its predecessors, the Green Goat tops them and costs just $750,000, compared with $1 million to $1.5 million for the diesels.

The hybrid is more fuel-efficient and costs less? Why didn't anyone give hybrid technology a try much, much earlier then?

Hospitals Aim to Curb Injuries From Falling; Risk for Young Patients

From Hospitals Aim to Curb Injuries From Falling; Risk for Young Patients:

Hospitals are taking a series of steps to prevent one of the most surprising and dangerous hazards facing patients: falls that can lead to severe injury or even death.

There are more than one million falls among hospital patients annually, researchers estimate, with 30% or more resulting in moderate to severe injuries such as hip fractures and head injuries that can be life-threatening. And while falls have long been considered a problem primarily for elderly patients in nursing homes, recent studies show that virtually every hospitalized patient is at risk, including younger, healthier people.
[...]
Patients left in certain positions for surgery have fallen off tables onto their heads, resulting in brain injury, she adds, and patients may also try to get up and walk after surgery before they are steady on their feet.

Drugs such as hypnotics, sedatives, analgesics, anti-hypertensives, laxatives and diuretics increase the risk of falling; if patients are on several drugs at once, the risk of falling is even more severe. Patients are also at higher risk if they try to move when attached to equipment such as IV tubes, or if they suffer from "postural hypotension," a sudden drop in blood pressure when they rise quickly to a standing position. Otherwise healthy patients may also be at risk for falling for short periods of time, such as right after returning to the hospital bed from physical therapy.

Iraqi Commandos Take Rebel Base, Kill 84 Militants

Some aspects of Iraqification seem to be working. From Iraqi Commandos Take Rebel Base, Kill 84 Militants:

"Special forces in the Interior Ministry attacked a training center ... and had a fierce battle with the terrorists, killing 84 of them," Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman at the Interior Ministry told Reuters.

"Among the dead are Arab and foreign fighters, including Sudanese, Algerians and Moroccans, as well as other nationalities.

Baghdad Shopkeepers Kill Three Militants

A feel-good story coming out of Iraq? Baghdad Shopkeepers Kill Three Militants:

Shopkeepers and residents on one of Baghdad's main streets pulled out their own guns Tuesday and killed three insurgents when hooded men began shooting at passers-by, giving a rare victory to civilians increasingly frustrated by the violence bleeding Iraq.

The Election Past, President's Message Gets a New Accent

It looks like the president's communication coaches are doing their work. From The Election Past, President's Message Gets a New Accent:

At a late-afternoon Paris news conference in May 2002, a jet-lagged President Bush rushed through sentences, mangled some words and teased an American journalist for asking President Jacques Chirac a question in French. Asked about street demonstrations protesting his presence, Mr. Bush drawled: "The only thing I know to do is speak my mind.... A lotta people on the Continent o' Europe appreciate that."

Last month, addressing European leaders in Brussels, Mr. Bush spoke precisely, with only traces of his twang. He paid homage to the Continent's political legacy, such as the Magna Carta, and flawlessly pronounced the name of Albert Camus.

Linguists and longtime watchers of Mr. Bush say it is evidence of a subtle but unmistakable change the 43rd president has undergone in speaking style. He is enunciating more clearly and dotting his remarks with more literary references. Gone is much of the verbal swagger, which produced such memorable first-term phrases as "bring 'em on" (said of Iraqi insurgents) and "dead or alive" (said of catching Osama bin Laden). Some linguists even say they detect a dialing-down of Mr. Bush's Texas accent, at least in his formal speeches.

The more careful speaking style also has meant fewer verbal slip-ups. Jacob Weisberg, who filled four books, numerous Web entries and a calendar series with Bush malapropisms, says his supply of new material has slowed to a trickle. "In a press conference in his first year I might get five" bloopers, says Mr. Weisberg, who is editor of Slate, the online magazine. "Now I'm pretty lucky if I get one or two."

A Stun-Gun Maker Struggles To Shake Off Safety Concerns

I did not know this bit of trivia from A Stun-Gun Maker Struggles To Shake Off Safety Concerns:

The Taser was invented in the late 1960s by Jack Cover, an advocate of alternatives to handguns. The name is an acronym for the Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, in honor of a series of science-fiction books about a teenage inventor.

I thought I'd cleverly make up a book title like Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle — but it's a real book!

The Nature of Normal Human Variety

Armand Leroi discusses The Nature of Normal Human Variety:

After the Second World War, when the enormities of Nazi science really hit home — which were in turn the consequence of a much larger racial science, not just in Germany, but everywhere — all right-thinking scientists made a resolute effort to ensure that science would not be bent to such evil purposes again. They were determined that science would never again be used to make invidious discriminations among people. The immediate result of this was the UNESCO Declaration on Race in 1950, fronted by Ashley Montagu and backed up by geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky which affirmed the equality of races. Then, in the 1960s, Dick Lewontin and others discovered that gel electrophoresis could be used to survey genetic variation among proteins. These studies showed that humans have a huge amount of concealed genetic variation. What is more, most of that genetic variation existed within continents or even countries rather than among them. UNESCO said races were equal; the new genetics said they didn't exist. Finally, moving a few decades on, the Out-of-Africa hypothesis of the origin of Homo sapiens comes to the fore, and multi-regionalism falls from fashion as it becomes clear that humans are not only a single species — something which we've known since Linnaeus' day — but a single species that has only diverged into sub-populations very recently.

The result of this history — which has been partly driven by data, and partly by ideology — is that these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that's a fine thing. But I suggest that it's time that we grew up. I would like to suggest that actually by emphasizing the similarities but ignoring the differences, we are turning away from one of the most beautiful problems that modern biology has left: namely, what is the genetic basis of the normal variety of differences between us? What gives a Han Chinese child the curve of her eye? The curve I read once described by an eminent Sinologist as the purest of all curves. What is the source of that curve? And what gives a Solomon Islander his black-verging-on-purple skin?
[...]
The reason I love the problem of normal human variety is because, almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street.

What Steroids and Schiavo Have in Common

What Steroids and Schiavo Have in Common:

When you're a lawmaker, apparently, every problem seems to cry out for a law.

The Myth of Massive Health Care Waste

In The Myth of Massive Health Care Waste, Arnold Kling rounds up "the usual suspects" for high health care spending (in the US):

• spending in the last year of life
• drug company profits and advertising
• administrative overhead

The first point seemed perfectly plausible to me, but it's not a large effect:

An urban legend has it that close to half of all health care spending comes in the last year of life. The facts are somewhat different. The most thorough study, by Donald Hoover, et al, finds that 27 percent of Medicare spending takes place during the last year of life.

Overall, 22 percent of health care spending on people over 65 takes place in the last year of life. However, only 1/3 of U.S. health care spending is for people 65 and older. Thus, as a percentage of overall U.S. health care spending, spending on the last year of life amounts to about 7 percent. That is high, but not staggering.

Big Pharma isn't to blame either:

Another usual suspect is the evil pharmaceutical industry. However, total profits of pharmaceutical companies are about one-half of one percent of GDP. In the short run, stringent price regulation could reduce health care spending by perhaps one or two tenths of one percent of GDP. The long run effects of reducing the incentive to develop pharmaceuticals could be adverse, because pharmaceuticals often substitute for more expensive therapies.

An economist's point of view on why Canadian health care spends less on administration:

In a fee-for-service system as in the United States, physicians have an incentive to spend their time doing procedures. They will want to off-load as much paperwork as possible to clerical staff. In a different health care system, where physicians are paid something more like a flat salary, two factors are at play. One is that there is less paperwork, which is good. The other factor, however, is that physicians have less incentive to offload paperwork, because spending time doing administrative work themselves will not lower their incomes. More administrative workers could be a symptom of more paperwork, or a more efficient system for handling paperwork, or both.

The real culprits, according to Kling, are physician compensation and the utilization of high-tech procedures, both of which are higher in the US than elsewhere — and both of which likely bring benefits, not just costs.

Give nukes a chance

From Give nukes a chance:

''The only thing a country can do with nuclear weapons is use them for a deterrent,'' Waltz told me. ''And that makes for internal stability, that makes for peace, and that makes for cautious behavior.''

Especially in a unipolar world, argues Waltz, the possession of nuclear deterrents by smaller nations can check the disruptive ambitions of a reckless superpower. As a result, in words Waltz wrote 10 years ago and has been reiterating ever since, ''The gradual spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared.''

Waltz is not a crank. He is not a member of an apocalyptic death cult. He is perhaps the leading living theorist of the foreign policy realists, a school that sees world politics as an unending, amoral contest between states driven by the will to power. His 1959 book, ''Man, the State, and War,'' remains one of the most influential 20th-century works on international relations.

The Failure of the War on Drugs

Gary Becker discusses The Failure of the War on Drugs:

After totaling all spending, a study by Kevin Murphy, Steve Cicala, and myself estimates that the war on drugs is costing the US one way or another well over $100 billion per year. These estimates do not include important intangible costs, such as the destructive effects on many inner city neighborhoods, the use of the American military to fight drug lords and farmers in Colombia and other nations, or the corrupting influence of drugs on many governments.

Assuming an interest in reducing drug consumption — I will pay little attention here to whether that is a good goal — is there a better way to do that than by these unsuccessful wars? Our study suggests that legalization of drugs combined with an excise tax on consumption would be a far cheaper and more effective way to reduce drug use. Instead of a war, one could have, for example, a 200% tax on the legal use of drugs by all adults — consumption by say persons under age 18 would still be illegal. That would reduce consumption in the same way as the present war, and would also increase total spending on drugs, as in the current system.

But the similarities end at that point. The tax revenue from drugs would accrue to state and federal authorities, rather than being dissipated into the real cost involving police, imprisonment, dangerous qualities, and the like. Instead of drug cartels, there would be legal companies involved in production and distribution of drugs of reliable quality, as happened after the prohibition of alcohol ended. There would be no destruction of poor neighborhoods — so no material for "the Wire" HBO series, or the movie "Traffic" — no corruption of Afghani or Columbian governments, and no large scale imprisonment of African-American and other drug suppliers. The tax revenue to various governments hopefully would substitute for other taxes, or would be used for educating young people about any dangersous effects of drugs.

As Arnold Kling points out in his EconLog, "a tariff creates revenue for the government, while a quota creates rents for sellers."

The poor are not the problem but the solution - an exclusive interview with Hernando de Soto

In The poor are not the problem but the solution, Hernando de Soto explains that much of the economy in non-Western societies is extralegal:

When I was working in the Middle East, there was an entrepreneur that I got to known so well that I could ask him about corruption and pay-offs — �baksheesh� is the local word. He explained: �I love baksheesh because it gives me certainty and predictability.� They change the law continually. We have calculated that the government brings out about 30.000 new rules every year. None of these is enacted in a transparent manner, with public participation. The result is that the law is totally unpredictable and only serves the powerful and those who have the means to remain informed. So, from this point of view, �baksheesh� gives a kind of predictability. All the entrepreneur had to do was pay-off five key policemen either near his workplace, or where he made his transactions. And he knew what his outcome would be.

Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games

Will Wright is famous for creating The Sims and, before that, SimCity. His experience with The Sims has led him to move toward user-created content. From Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games:

Wright opened his presentation by explaining how he's seeing firsthand how budgets are going up. For Sims 2, the characters had over 22,000 separate animations. All of those were done by hand by an army of animators. Modern games demand more and more content.

At the same time, what he calls the 'value to gamers' levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn't twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience. By way of example, he put up a slide showing his Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas character -- who wore a fedora and red-heart boxer shorts. His character was ridiculous-looking, but it made the experience custom for him. Players get a huge value out of content they make for themselves.

'Owning' the content in this way means that all the stories that the gamer creates are much more meaningful.

Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user's contribution.

I'd never heard of this "demo scene":

For inspiration, Wright looked to the "demo scene," a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc. "I just found this incredibly exciting," Wright confesses, describing the kinds of work that he saw come out of the demo scene.

His Spore game concept sounds a lot like an idea I was playing with (but did nothing about) maybe ten years ago:

Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to "evolve" with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren't hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.

The New York Times > Toward a Unified Theory of Black America

Toward a Unified Theory of Black America tells the story of Roland G. Fryer Jr., a 27-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard — who happens to be black. Naturally, this allows him the liberty to tackle racial issues — including some unusual theories:

Fryer's notion that there might be a genetic predisposition at work was heightened when he came across a period illustration that seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave. The ocean voyage from Africa to America was so gruesome that as many as 15 percent of the Africans died en route, mainly from illnesses that led to dehydration. A person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving.

So it may have been that a slave trader would try to select, with a lick to the cheek, the ''saltier'' Africans. Whether selected by the slavers or by nature, the Africans who did manage to survive the voyage — and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans — may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension.

Boing Boing: Web Zen: Toy Zen: My Borg Pony

Boing Boing points to a number of peculiar toys, including My Borg Pony.

Certainly, My Borg Pony is funny, but I also enjoyed The Cubes: Create a corporate labyrinth!

Things are changing in upper management. There's a new boss in charge: you. That means you control the fate of Bob. Will you make his job satisfying, boring or unbearable? Will he be your lackey, your fall guy or your best pal? It's all up to you, because in this office, you're the boss. Each set has one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters. Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee.

Capitalism & slavery - PittsburghLIVE.com

Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, opens Capitalism & slavery with a few economic fallacies:

Wrongheaded notions about the economy are always in high supply. Most calamitous was the idea that central planning outperforms the market. The pulverizing poverty and tyranny of the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and similar Workers' Paradises have ended that particular illusion.

Other less disastrous but equally mistaken notions about the economy remain on the loose — for example, that tariffs promote prosperity.

But the most far-fetched myth that I've encountered recently is that the wealth of the modern Western world, especially that of the United States, is the product of slavery.

His story:

I first encountered this notion during a talk I gave in Toronto. I explained to the college-age audience how extraordinarily wealthy all of us are today compared to our preindustrial ancestors. I wanted them to understand the great benefits of capitalism. During the Q-&-A session, a young woman informed me that the wealth we enjoy today is the product of slavery.

At first I thought she was speaking figuratively, as in "workers under capitalism really are slaves." Having heard such an argument before, I was half-expecting it. But no. What she meant is that the modern world's prosperity is the product of the pre-20th-century enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

"But slavery ended in the United States in 1863!" I responded. "Look at all the wealth produced since then — telephones, automobiles, antibiotics, computers. None was built with slave labor."

She anticipated my response. "Not directly. But the capital that made these innovations possible was extracted from slave labor. The wealth accumulated by slaveholders is what financed the industrialization that makes today's wealth possible."

I looked at her in raw disbelief. (Not a good strategy, by the way, for a public speaker.)

Collecting my thoughts, I pointed out that slavery had been an ever-present institution throughout human history until just about 200 years ago. Why didn't slaveholders of 2,000 years ago in Europe or 500 years ago in Asia accumulate wealth that triggered economic growth comparable to ours? Why is Latin America so much poorer today than the United States, given that the Spaniards and Portuguese who settled that part of the world were enthusiastic slavers? Indeed, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil — in 1888, a quarter-century after U.S. abolition. By American and western European standards, Brazil remains impoverished.

Felonious Funk

According to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, we're in a Felonious Funk:

Felonies were once a fairly rare class of crime, a class that generally carried capital punishment as a more-than-theoretical possibility. A felon was, by virtue of his heinous acts, an outcast from society. Even if permitted to live, he was expected to bear the mark of his iniquity for life, in the form of lost civil rights like the right to vote and the right to bear arms. To be a felon was to be a permanent outcast within one's own society.

But felonies aren't so few anymore. New felonies are being created all the time, often for activity that seems, morally, not terribly awful. [...] Where once "felony" meant things like murder, rape, or armed robbery, now it includes things like music piracy, or filling in potholes that turn out to be "wetlands." As the title to a recent book edited by Gene Healy notes, we've achieved the criminalization of almost everything.

Which means, in fact, the criminalization of almost everyone, too — if you haven't been convicted of some felony or other, it's probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven't committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not.

Fighting Crime the 11th Century Way....

This would be bad satire if it weren't true. From Fighting Crime the 11th Century Way....:

Tighter gun ownership laws are pushing South Africans to buy crossbows, spears, swords, knives and pepper sprays to protect themselves from violent crime.

'We've had to build an entirely new shop because the demand from people is so great,' Justin Willmers, owner of Durban Guns and Ammo, told Reuters. 'It can be anything from a Zulu fighting spear, battle axes, swords, crossbows.'

Hit by iPod and Satellite, Radio Tries New Tune: Play More Songs

From Hit by iPod and Satellite, Radio Tries New Tune: Play More Songs:

Previously, like most stations, 105.1 let computer scheduling programs pick the songs from a library of 300-400 titles, with the same 30-40 songs playing most of the time. Now the station is going against the grain of the past two decades in radio, more than tripling the number of song titles played on any given day. With more than 1,200 songs on the playlist, most songs get played only once every few days, rather than several times a day. Program director Mike O'Reilly and his assistants handpick the music and the order in which they are played.

'It's all about train wrecks,' Mr. O'Reilly says, using radio terminology for two unlikely songs played back-to-back. 'If you hear MC Hammer go into the Steve Miller Band, I've done my job.' Indeed, the station boasts that it might play a grunge rock anthem by Nirvana alongside a disco hit by K.C. and the Sunshine Band — the kind of serendipitous combination offered by an iPod.

So, they're moving away from computerized scheduling to hand-picked playlists in order to emulate the randomness of an iPod. Fortunately, my ironometer goes to 11.

A little history:

Doomsayers predicted radio's demise back in the 1950s, when television became widely available and long-playing records made listening to music on record players easy. But the industry adapted to competition from television dramas by cutting many of its own dramas and playing more music. And it turned out people who bought LPs didn't stop listening to radio broadcasts. Once the 1960s hit and the invention of the transistor made receivers small and portable, radio boomed again.

When FM and stereo sound started to take off in the 1970s, conventional wisdom held that AM radio was finished. Instead, it became the home for talk radio, while music stations migrated to the FM dial. Radio overcame another perceived threat in the 1980s, when Sony Inc.'s popular Walkman became the first device to make custom-selected music truly portable.

Failed Test

ETS has revamped the SAT by removing analogies and introducing an essay. From Failed Test:

If the SAT can train 3,000 scorers to judge essays with something resembling consistent criteria, Kaplan can train tens of thousands of college-bound teens to reproduce those criteria.

This criticism is flawed:

The company's own studies show the SAT to predict a paltry 16 percent of the variance in first-year grades.

If students get into schools based on SAT scores and other factors, then the lower-scoring students who get into a school obviously have other qualities that predict success. (At least if we ignore the admissions office's other goals...)

The Morale of the Story

The Morale of the Story lists ways to keep team morale up in a business setting. Communication combats helplessness:

When a Boston design firm went through some tough times a few years ago, resentment between the management and the workforce grew. At a board meeting, executives expressed their frustration that no one was staying late and making that extra effort to do projects better, faster, cheaper.

But management had never spelled out the peril the company was in or revealed a plan for dealing with it. They didn't want to frighten employees. In the absence of information, employees thought either that their managers couldn't see the writing on the wall (so they were stupid) or that they did see it and were making secret plans for dealing with it (so they were sinister). Another mutually assured stalemate.

By contrast, the CEO of a furniture company successfully steered his employees through the trauma of being acquired with weekly, sometimes even twice weekly, updates. He'd gather everyone in the lunchroom and simply explain, this is where we are in the negotiations and this is where we're going. Why was he so successful? Because what he said would happen did happen. Each time he outlined a future that came true, he demonstrated his own competence and reinforced trust.

Building A Better Skunk Works

In 1999, IBM realized that it was killing off promising young projects to focus on the bottom line. Things have changed. From Building A Better Skunk Works:

Adkins was a guinea pig for developing what IBM calls 'emerging-business opportunities,' or EBOs. The mission is to find areas that are entirely new to IBM and can grow into profitable billion-dollar-plus businesses in five to seven years. So far the program has been an extraordinary success.
[...]
Harreld, who runs the program, promised the board that EBOs alone would produce two percentage points of growth for IBM. Given Big Blue's awesome size, that ain't hay: It means about $2 billion of new revenue every year. The actual results have wildly surpassed all expectations. Since the program's inception in 200