Great Dane

Harold Bloom considers Hans Christian Andersen to be a Great Dane:

I myself see no distinction between children's literature and good or great writing for extremely intelligent children of all ages. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers, appropriate titans of our new Dark Age of the Screens: computer, motion pictures, TV. One goes on urging children of all ages to read and reread Andersen and Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, rather than Ms. Rowling and Mr. King. Sometimes when I say that in public I am asked: Is it not better to read Ms. Rowling and Mr. King, and then go on to Andersen, Dickens, Carroll and Lear? The answer is pragmatic: Our time here is limited. You necessarily read and reread at the expense of other books.

Staples Desk Apprentice

According to Staples:

Everyone wants a Staples Desk Apprentice� — so much so, we've sold out!

Due to high demand, we've run out of the new Staples Desk Apprentice. We are producing more and we'll be in stock in about 6 to 8 weeks.

There's no end to The Donald's marketing power.

Girl Sticks Schoolmates With Used Needle

Girl Sticks Schoolmates With Used Needle:

A third-grader stuck 19 schoolmates with her mother's diabetes blood-testing needle this week, and one pricked student tested positive for HIV on a preliminary test, officials said.

Health officials said the virus could not have been contracted from the needle stick, and they noted that preliminary tests can yield false positives. The risk to students who were stuck after the possibly infected child depends on factors including the depth of the stick, health officials said.

The 8-year-old stuck her Taylor Elementary schoolmates Wednesday at the school's breakfast, at lunch and in the classroom, using a needle that was about one-third of an inch long, on the end of a device that looks like a pen, school officials said. They were unsure why the girl did it.

The school district' idea of solving the problem:

She was suspended and will probably be moved to another school, said Paul Vallas, the school district's chief executive.

This stat needs to be qualified a bit more:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of HIV infection after a needle stick is low, with an average of one in 300 cases leading to infection.

I assume that 1-in-300 chance is if you're stuck with a needle that has HIV on it.

FDA OKs Lizard-Derived Shot for Diabetes

FDA OKs Lizard-Derived Shot for Diabetes:

Type 2 diabetics got a new option to help control their blood sugar Friday, a drug derived from the saliva of the Gila monster — but one that must be injected twice a day.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Byetta, known chemically as exenatide, the first in a new class of medications for Type 2 diabetes — but for now, it's supposed to be used together with older diabetes drugs, not alone.
[...]
The most common, drugs called sulfonylureas, spur the body to produce more insulin.

When those drugs fail, adding Byetta to them offers patients a new option to try before resorting to injections of insulin.

Byetta is the first so-called "incretin mimetic," meaning it mimics action of a hormone called GLP-1 that's secreted by the gut to spur insulin production after a meal — but only when blood sugar is high.

That's important, noted FDA metabolic drugs chief Dr. David Orloff, because other diabetes drugs spur insulin secretion even if blood sugar already is low, leading to the risk of hypoglycemia.

Byetta is a synthetic version of a protein found in the saliva of the Gila monster that works similarly to the human GLP-1.

No mention of Dr. Curtis Connors...

Economist.com | Bat and Ball

From Bat and Ball:

One industry is competitive, globalised and financially self-sufficient. The other is monopolistic, inward-looking and accustomed to handouts from the taxpayer. Now, here's a puzzle. One of these industries is based in America, while the other was founded in northern Britain in the late 19th century. Which is which?

Oddly, the more energetic of these two industries is British. Football, or soccer, is one of the world's most competitive businesses. As Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist, two economists of sport, explain, that is because most football teams are organised into hierarchical national leagues linked by promotion and relegation. Anyone who can assemble a squad of good players can start competing. If the team keeps winning it will rise to the top of the domestic leagues, at which point it can compete against foreign clubs. A squad that keeps losing will move just as rapidly in the opposite direction, shedding supporters and revenue as it goes.

Not so baseball teams. America's favourite summer sport is played by a 30-team cartel that is specifically exempt from antitrust laws. No club is in danger of being demoted from the major leagues except through a kind of administrative fatwa, which is not exercised very often. As in football, winning games means more money for a team�but so does losing, thanks to a system in which the richest baseball clubs pay millions of dollars to the poorest. Most outrageous is the fact that local taxpayers often end up subsidising the construction of new stadiums. Since the supply of teams is deliberately held below the level of demand, owners can hold cities to ransom, threatening to move if the public coffers are not opened.

An NBA Team's 12th Man Is a Star in Blogging World

An NBA Team's 12th Man Is a Star in Blogging World offers some amusing tidbits from Paul Shirley's Road Ramblings, a blog by a middle-class white guy who plays (occasionally) for the NBA's Phoenix Suns:

My duties: I play for (I use the term loosely; play for/cheer for — same thing) arguably the best basketball team in the world. My responsibilities include: 1. Showing up for buses, practices, games, etc. on time. 2. Refraining from causing undue stress to anyone by misbehaving on road trips or wading into the stands to attack fans. 3. Practicing hard when given the opportunity. 4. Entering games when my team is up by an insurmountable margin and attempting to break the shots-per-minute record. It is not a difficult job, really, and I can find very little to complain about, especially tonight.

Team introductions: Here's the deal: When, after 60 games, the team being announced has a winning percentage hovering around the same area as most pitchers' batting averages, it loses the right to a grand entrance. No more dance team, no more theme song, no more dimming the lights. The players just walk onto the court and play the game. That's it. The Hawks did not agree to my deal. They had an over-produced introduction on the big screen, an actual hawk that flew down from the rafters, and even a catch-phrase — something like, "The Spirit Lies Within." Make it stop.

A game against the Bobcats: I began considering the possibility that there could very well be a bit of playing time in the offing and started paying at least cursory attention to what was going on in timeouts, in case Coach D'Antoni said something like, "From now on tonight, everyone will be shooting with his left hand. Deviation from this plan of attack will result in castration immediately following the game." I would really hate to miss one of those instructions, come out firing, and because of my own mental lapse, ruin the rest of my life.

All-Female Roller Derby Packs A Punch With Hockey Fans

According to one fan, "It's girls going around fighting and skating. What more do you need? It's perfect." But it wasn't always that way. From All-Female Roller Derby Packs A Punch With Hockey Fans:

It's a far cry from the early days of roller derby. The sport was founded in 1935 in Chicago, as a distraction from the Depression. It was originally an endurance race. Male-female couples were required to complete tens of thousands of laps, until they reached the equivalent of skating from New York to Los Angeles.

Noticing that occasional collisions between couples elicited the biggest howls from the crowd, promoters made it a contact sport and introduced a point system. It evolved into a co-ed team sport and boomed in the next decades, with teams playing before crowds of 40,000 or more in big venues like New York's Madison Square Garden. Actress Raquel Welch starred in a 1972 roller derby movie, called 'Kansas City Bomber,' and another film, where the teams tried to kill a player in each bout starring James Caan, called 'Rollerball,' appeared in 1975.

Nevertheless, financial troubles, declining crowds and a recession at the time forced the main leagues to shut down in the mid-1970s. Several attempts to revive the sport since then — often using a choreographed, pro-wrestling-style approach — failed.

The latest incarnation, initiated mostly by the female players, seems to have found the right formula, particularly for hockey fans in withdrawal.

Poor, poor hockey fans.

Change or Die

Change or Die:

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You're probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn't change.

Don't believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

For instance, 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise. Even individuals who know they need to change don't change:

"If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Getting people to change requires an emotionally resonant argument, not just an analytical one, that reframes the issue. Change your ways in order to enjoy life, not change or die:

Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.'"

Research shows that this idea applies in business:

Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were "substantially completed" in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived.

Crippled by Their Culture

In Crippled by Their Culture, black conservative Thomas Sowell notes that modern "black" culture is really old southern "redneck" culture, which came over from certain parts of Britain — and that it's a destructive culture with negative consequences:

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that — and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only 'authentic' black culture — and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

His Brain, Her Brain

His Brain, Her Brain summarizes much of the research on sexual differences in brain function. I wasn't familiar with these findings:

But male rats sometimes learn better in the face of stress. Tracey J. Shors of Rutgers University and her collaborators have found that a brief exposure to a series of one-second tail shocks enhanced performance of a learned task and increased the density of dendritic connections to other neurons in male rats yet impaired performance and decreased connection density in female rats. Findings such as these have interesting social implications. The more we discover about how brain mechanisms of learning differ between the sexes, the more we may need to consider how optimal learning environments potentially differ for boys and girls.

Although the hippocampus of the female rat can show a decrement in response to acute stress, it appears to be more resilient than its male counterpart in the face of chronic stress. Cheryl D. Conrad and her co-workers at Arizona State University restrained rats in a mesh cage for six hours — a situation that the rodents find disturbing. The researchers then assessed how vulnerable their hippocampal neurons were to killing by a neurotoxin — a standard measure of the effect of stress on these cells. They noted that chronic restraint rendered the males' hippocampal cells more susceptible to the toxin but had no effect on the females' vulnerability. These findings, and others like them, suggest that in terms of brain damage, females may be better equipped to tolerate chronic stress than males are. Still unclear is what protects female hippocampal cells from the damaging effects of chronic stress, but sex hormones very likely play a role.

2blowhards.com: "Sin City"

I haven't yet seen Sin City, but I enjoyed this comment, by someone named Brian, at 2blowhards.com:

What I found interesting was the way Sin City demonstrated what film can do by revealing what comics can't:

No POV/reactions - I don't recall a single point-of-view/reaction cut in the entire film, and it's this exchange between what the character is seeing and how he is reacting that draws us into the character's mind. (See Rear Window, for instance.) Sin City had none of these exchanges because they don't work in comics, and as a result we didn't identify with the characters as much as we might have.

No crosscutting - Ever since The Great Train Robbery, one of the fundamental powers of film has been the presention of simultaneous action. But every shot in Sin City was sequential to the one before and after it. For instance, in any normal film the scene of Bruce Willis hanging from the ceiling would have been crosscut with the goons approaching: Bruce struggles, goons get closer, Bruce struggles some more, goons get closer still, and all the while the tension mounts. Again, you can't do this in a comic, and therefore some of the suspense sequences (not action, but suspense) weren't as nail-biting as they coulda been otherwise.

No moving camera - Or very little. Occasionally the camera would move to follow a character in motion, but it never moved to reveal new information or alter the screen space. Funny that you mentioned Touch of Evil in your review - I was thinking about it a lot during Sin City. ToE has one six-minute shot in the Mexican boy's apartment which follows the actors through three rooms and goes from wide angle long shots to tight closeups and back again. Movement creates mood. Can't do this in comic books either.

No blocking - The actors mostly just stood there and yakked where they stood, just as they'd been drawn. No Spielbergian ballets, no Wellesian waltzes. This plus the mostly static camera gave the film a curiously undynamic feel, considering the subject matter.

The Unhappy Inheritors

There's something unsettling about The Unhappy Inheritors:

McDonough, 47, speaks excitedly and discursively. With the zeal of a reformer, he relishes telling his cautionary inheritor's tale.

'So first of all,' he said, 'there's this closet called the Green Closet. It's one of the last taboos. This culture tells you, if you have more money, you'll be happier. But rich people are in this unique position to say: 'You know what? More stuff doesn't mean more happiness.' But as a rich person, you absolutely cannot tell anybody that there's anything wrong with your life because, first, everybody knows you should be really happy, and, second, they say, 'I should have your problems!' Then there's the shame component. With inherited wealth, there's this little logic chain: I have a lot of money, I should be really happy, but I'm not happy, so I must be really bad.'

In 1986, John L. Levy, a sort of freelance philosopher, wrote a monograph called 'Coping With Inherited Wealth.' It was one of the earlier works in what has become the crowded literature of 'affluenza.' Levy laid out the traits common to many children of wealth: low self-esteem and self-discipline, difficulty using power, boredom and alienation and guilt and suspiciousness.

Life Is a Contact Sport

In Life Is a Contact Sport, Stephen J. Dubner describes the NFL's rookie symposium:

In late June, the N.F.L. convened its rookies in the hope of teaching them to make choices that aren't so poor. For the better part of four days, the league commandeered La Costa Resort and Spa, north of San Diego, for a ''rookie symposium.'' Every drafted rookie was required to attend (or pay a $10,000 fine), from the No. 1 pick, David Carr, to the lowly seventh-rounders. They were not allowed to leave the premises without permission, or have guests, or drink alcohol. Cellphones and pagers were banned from the proceedings, as were do-rags, bandannas and sunglasses. The N.F.L. is working hard to breed the thug life out of any rookie so inclined. From 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., the players would sit through lectures about the pitfalls that await the unwary: paternity suits and domestic-abuse charges, bar fights and drug stings, crooked financial advisers and greedy hangers-on. The symposium would play like a blend of motivational seminar, boot camp, and ''Scared Straight,'' full of cautionary tales.

A taste:

Most of them have taken to carrying two cellphones: one for family and ''real'' friends, the second sometimes called a ''girlfriend phone.'' According to a loose survey I conducted during the symposium — of players, counselors and league and union officials — roughly 50 percent of the rookies have fathered children. (About 10 percent, meanwhile, are married.) The mothers of those children are often shunted to that girlfriend line.

''I heard from an uncle I hadn't seen in six years,'' says Napoleon Harris, a linebacker whom the Raiders drafted in the first round. ''He wanted two things. He wanted free tickets, and he wanted me to set him up with girls. And I started hearing from a cousin I hadn't seen since I was 10. He's been in jail and everything. He was calling me every day, sometimes twice in 20 minutes. A couple weeks ago, I had to snap. He says, 'I'm just calling to tell you how happy I am for you.' I had to say: 'Look, dog, I know you're happy for me. I'm happy for me, too, and I'll get a lot happier when you stop calling my [expletive] phone.'"

Ancient Treasures for Sale: Do antique dealers preserve the past or steal it?

Steven Vincent asks Do antique dealers preserve the past or steal it?:

As you read this, criminals somewhere in the world are destroying portions of mankind's past. With backhoe and shovel, chainsaw and crowbar, they are wrenching priceless objects from sites in the mountains of Peru, the coasts of Sicily, and the deserts of Iraq. Brutal and uncaring, these robbers leave behind a wake of decapitated statues, mutilated temples, and pillaged trenches where archaeologists were seeking clues to little-understood civilizations. The results of this looting include disfigured architectural monuments, vanished aesthetic objects, and an incalculable loss of information about the past. And it shows no signs of diminishing.

As you continue to read, other people across the globe are purchasing some of mankind's oldest and most exquisite creations. Contemplating ancient statues, vases, and stelae, many of these purchasers experience antiquities' near-mystical power to connect them to the past or to transcend time through beauty. Proud of their efforts, these private collectors, commercial dealers, and museum curators view themselves as temporary caretakers of timeless treasures. Their love for these artifacts often resembles the passion one associates with religious fervor. It, too, shows no signs of diminishing.

Stephen J. Dubner

Journalist Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics (with economist Steven D. Levitt), has a number of his old articles on-line, including, of course The Economist of Odd Questions: Inside the Astonishingly Curious Mind of Steven D. Levitt, the article that led to Freakonomics.

The New York Times > Watching TV Makes You Smarter

In Woody Allen's Sleeper, his character wakes up into a future where scientists realize that steak, cream pies, and hot fudge are all good for us.

Steven Johnson, author of the upcoming Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, explains the Sleeper Curve and how Watching TV Makes You Smarter:

But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of ''24'' that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago. Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During its 44 minutes -- a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials -- the episode connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ''story arc,'' as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.

In the past few decades, storytellers have learned quite a bit about storytelling from an unlikely source:

According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of ''Hill Street Blues,'' the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ''gritty realism.'' Watch an episode of ''Hill Street Blues'' side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades -- ''Starsky and Hutch,'' for instance, or ''Dragnet'' -- and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ''Dragnet'' episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case.

A ''Hill Street Blues'' episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands -- sometimes as many as 10, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters -- and not just bit parts -- swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end.

Critics generally cite ''Hill Street Blues'' as the beginning of ''serious drama'' native in the television medium -- differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic programs from the 50's, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the ''Hill Street'' innovations weren't all that original; they'd long played a defining role in popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a ''Hill Street'' episode -- and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from ''thirtysomething'' to ''Six Feet Under'' -- is the structure of a soap opera. ''Hill Street Blues'' might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that ''Guiding Light'' and ''General Hospital'' mastered long before.

Bochco's genius with ''Hill Street'' was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter.

Definitely read the whole article (and read it before it's placed in the pay-only archives).

Jane Jacobs Revisited

I enjoyed the following two quotes from Jane Jacobs Revisited:

"A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens.... Cities don't lure the middle class. They create it."

"There is no point in pretending that economic development is in everyone's interest.... Economic development, no matter when or where it occurs, is profoundly subversive of the status quo."

Jane Jacobs, The Anti-Planner

Jane Jacobs, The Anti-Planner presents Jacobs as unwittingly "Austrian" (in her economics). It also summarizes her notion of a healthy city:

Jacobs's detailed description of the functioning of healthy urban neighborhoods is based on her close observation of them. In such places, there are people, interested in the neighborhood, on the street throughout most of the day. Early in the morning, workers head off to their jobs in other neighborhoods as well as entering the neighborhood to work. Soon thereafter, parents transporting their children to school appear on the street. Shops open, and shopkeepers, anxious that the area of their business not frighten away customers due to dangers present in the area, keep a close eye on the sidewalks. Mothers with preschool children head to the parks, workers come out to eat lunch in them, and shoppers come and go from area stores. In the early evening workers again come and go from the neighborhood. As night falls, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs keep the sidewalks lively � and generally safe. The role of paid law enforcers in providing urban safety is decidedly secondary for Jacobs.

All of this is in sharp contrast to the life of the neighborhoods beloved by mid-century urban planners. There, 'rational' planning kept uses strictly separate, with offices, factories, shops, and residences segregated into their own areas by strict zoning laws. As a result, neighborhood streets would be deserted for long stretches of time � and therefore dangerous. The increased danger would serve to further discourage pedestrian use of the streets.

United Nutters

From United Nutters:

This week it was confirmed that Zimbabwe has been one of 15 countries chosen by members of the UN's Economic and Social Council in New York to serve on the UN Commission on Human Rights. [...] For the UN to have voted Zimbabwe onto the UN Commission for Human Rights it had to ignore the following:

• the 20,000 members of the opposition that Mugabe ordered killed in the 1980s
• the destruction of half of the economy in the past five years to maintain power; the regular physical abuse encountered by any opposition to his regime (and that includes just saying nasty things about the leader)
• the lack of free media
• food allocation used as a political weapon
• helping wage a war in the Congo so that Mugabe and his cronies make millions from conflict diamonds
• the neglect of the entire health system so that life expectancy has dropped from 55 to 33 years in the past decade.
• I could go on, but you get the point.

But it's often the smallest stories that grab people, so try this. In 2001 a Zimbabwean policeman with a reputation as a serial torturer was seconded to the UN police force in Kosovo. Not minding whose human rights he abused, Henry Dowa carried right on torturing and was eventually asked to leave in 2003. He is now back in Harare committing more offences against the powerless populace of Zimbabwe's capital.

Semper Infantilis

In Semper Infantilis, Douglas Kern attacks attempts to keep recruiters off campuses:

Now I know what you're thinking. 'Kern,' you're thinking, 'you're going to write about the ironic vicissitudes of fate. Thirty years ago, a Marine recruiter would have been laughed out of public schools for his dorky hair, goofy outfit, and squaresville manners — not to mention the crappy jobs and useless 'benefits' he had to offer. Now, those same qualities make that Marine recruiter some kind of mystic Rasputin, who must be kept out of schools for being too seductive and enticing.' That would be a good point. But that's not my point.

'Okay,' you're thinking, 'you're going to write about the abject absurdity of the notion that military recruiters will appeal to anyone but a small handful of students. Benefits or no benefits, enlisting in the military entails a near-total surrender of autonomy, abuse from a drill instructor, relentless exercise, and the possibility of a gory death — all for jobs that pay less than the minimum wage when you do the math. In a hot economy, and in the middle of a shooting war, just how many kiddies will follow this Pied Piper out of the city gates?' That's another good point. But it's not my point.

'I got it! Colleges don't require any sacrifices comparable to those that the military demands, but colleges recruit at public schools all the time. Doesn't the military need a little legislative help, to stand on equal footing? And if you don't think that the military deserves to stand on equal footing with colleges, doesn't that opinion reflect an anti-military attitude that most people would rightly reject?' Yes indeed. But that's not it.

'Perhaps,' you're thinking, 'you'll write about how many teens enlist in the military not despite the possibility of combat, but because of it.' Nope.

'Well, smart guy,' you're thinking, 'how about this: it's preposterous to think that any teen in America can enlist in today's military without realizing that death in combat is a real possibility. There's this hip new thing that's hot with the young crowd. It's called television. And if you watched it at any time in the past two years, you might have seen several trillion profiles of young soldiers getting maimed or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, this war has the lowest casualty ratios of any major conflict fought in recent times, yet the MSM lingers over every tragic death like it's the 100,000th soul to perish at Antietam. Are military recruiters really so glib and convincing that they can talk teens out of noticing that war kills?' Sorry. Not my point.

'Ummm�maybe something about the idiocy of kicking military recruiters out of public schools, only to let students drive themselves home at the end of the day? Seeing as how letting teenagers drive is, statistically speaking, every bit as dangerous as letting them join the military?' No.

'All right, Kern,' you growl, 'it's gotta be this: Given that eighteen-year-olds (and younger!) have fought in every American war, frequently with great distinction, it's crazy to suggest that young people possess the wherewithal to be war heroes but not the wisdom to make an intelligent choice about joining the military in the first place.' Now you've got it!"

The Great Illusion, Redux

The Great Illusion, Redux looks at old and new theories of globalization and peace:

You can thank globalization for our dawning Age of Aquarius. As national economies weave ever deeper into the fabric of international trade, as multi-national corporations source components and manpower from diverse corners of the globe, as cooperation nets more than competition, our glorious dawn sweeps the war-like nations into the dust bin of history.

At least, that's the theory. And it's one that is enjoying a robust hearing of late. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, is devoted to just such a thesis. If globalization-as-national pacifier sounds familiar, it's because we've heard it before.

In 1913, the British economist Norman Angell published a widely celebrated book arguing that in an age of interconnected international trade and enmeshed national economies, war was quickly becoming an expensive anachronism. Angell reasoned that thanks to deepening economic ties among powers, war would cost the aggressors more than any hoped-for gains. States, appraising this calculus, would conclude that war was not a worthy option. Global peace ensues.

The book's title was grimly ironic, The Great Illusion.

Music Hellevision

Music Hellevision mocks MTV's new show, Trippin':

Are we supposed to be laughing and enjoying the show with Ms. Diaz? Or enjoying laughing at her? It's difficult to know really, given lines like this from Drew Barrymore:

'I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome.'

Somehow you just know there was a cameraman out there as well, we'll be seeing a slight variation (for a decidedly more specialist market) of the Paris Hilton tape quite soon no doubt.

They enjoyed the benefit of advice during filming from the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council so there's really no excuse for things like this, talking of Bhutan:

'[The] only country in the world where forest cover is increasing.'

Which is I am sure something of a surprise to those in the US, where such cover has been increasing since 1920, also to those of us in the UK where we know very well that there has been an increase since 1940. A lot of very nice Germans took photos of the place for us and handed them over in 1945, that's how we know. This is also a bit of a stunner:

'My favorite thing about Bhutan is they measure their country's wealth, not based on dollar amount but on gross national happiness�'

I think this means they don't have MTV or maybe it's the more usual shortage of self-obsessed actresses, your call on that, really. This is a slight misnomer:

'Nothing goes to waste. It is beautiful. It is inspiring...It is incredible to see how in tune these people are with the environment; they are completely self-sufficient'

No dear, when nothing goes to waste you are not seeing self-sufficiency, you are seeing poverty. Nothing is wasted because if it is, someone dies. That's what it means, destitution, that you are one or two meals, a handful of dried cow dung to cook with away from starvation.

Ripping Off Good Reads in China

I don't know why I find this so terribly funny, but I do. From Ripping Off Good Reads in China:

The five-volume 'Executive Ability' book series is a classic in Chinese business and management circles. Collectively, it has sold more than 2 million copies in the last two years. Top universities and public libraries in China keep multiple copies on hand.

It's also a big fake.

The series purports to be a translation of English-language works, but no such titles exist. The principal author � a Paul Thomas, said to be an eminent Harvard University business professor � is not real. Also made up is the rave review on the back cover, attributed to the Wall Street Journal: 'The most practical and advanced management thought of our time.'

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Wired News: Podcasting Killed the Radio Star

Wow. From Podcasting Killed the Radio Star:

The world's first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom.

Infinity plans to convert San Francisco's 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.

Infinity, one of the country's largest radio operators with more than 183 stations around the country, will invite do-it-yourselfers to upload digital audio files for broadcast consideration by way of the KYOURadio.com website.

Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists

Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists, as "more than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks":

The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.

"It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie," Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. "The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die."
[...]
The pond's water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg, the toads did not appear to have a disease, and a laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, she said.

The Submarine

Paul Graham reveals The Submarine beneath the news:

One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such 'press hits.' Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.

Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. They made us into stars. And we weren't the only ones. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site 'eBay?'

Why blogs are popular:

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications — which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Paul Graham opens Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas by describing his plan to provide seed money to young (undergrad) entrepreneurs:

We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we quickly saw that we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.

Why do good hackers have bad business ideas? The Still Life Effect:

If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.
[...]
How do we fix that? I don't think we should discard plunging. Plunging into an idea is a good thing. The solution is at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good.

Another great point:

Why did so few applicants really think about what customers want? I think the problem with many, as with people in their early twenties generally, is that they've been trained their whole lives to jump through predefined hoops. They've spent 15-20 years solving problems other people have set for them. And how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve? Two or three course projects? They're good at solving problems, but bad choosing them.

And another:

Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you can create wealth very rapidly.

That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't — because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators.

A cute anecdote on how they came up with their company name:

I wrote a program to generate all the combinations of "Web" plus a three letter word. I learned from this that most three letter words are bad: Webpig, Webdog, Webfat, Webzit, Webfug. But one of them was Webvia; I swapped them to make Viaweb.

Recruiters of M.B.A.s Return to Campuses, Looking for More

Good news for anyone in (or just entering) business school. Recruiters of M.B.A.s Return to Campuses, Looking for More:

Last fall, investment banks and management consulting firms, two of the biggest wooers of M.B.A.s, flooded back to business schools to recruit more aggressively than they have since the blockbuster autumn of 2000, business schools report. Now on their heels comes a broad assortment of employers in fields ranging from technology to health care to airlines, hoping to scoop up the remaining campus prospects.

For Utah Billionaire, Search for Roots Is Blooming Field

From For Utah Billionaire, Search for Roots Is Blooming Field:

A Sorenson company called Relative Genetics Inc. is selling tests for $50 and up that help people figure out where they fit in the database — and sometimes connect with specific ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago.

New technology is setting off a genealogy gold rush inconceivable in an earlier era when people had to rely on old courthouse records and half-remembered family lore. Scientists now have several ways of using DNA to determine ancestry. The simplest involves the Y chromosome, which is found only in men and accumulates small changes over the centuries. If men have nearly identical Y chromosomes, it means they share a recent ancestor going up the male line. Another method uses mitochondrial DNA, which passes from a mother to her children. It can be used to determine ancestry through the female line.

Such tests used to cost thousands of dollars apiece. Now they're relatively cheap — and some entrepreneurs see both scientific and commercial potential. This month, the National Geographic Society announced it was teaming up with International Business Machines Corp. and Family Tree DNA of Houston to build a database of 100,000 samples from ethnic groups around the world. National Geographic is selling a service — for $99.95 plus shipping and handling — in which people can send in their own DNA and find out where they fit on humanity's family tree. For example, it might show that a person's ancestors on the male line came out of Africa, through Central Asia and into a particular part of Europe.

I have to think there will be a few unpleasant discoveries when people trace their paternal lineage.

New Rules

It's easy to dislike Bill Maher, but I enjoy some of his work, especially his New Rules at the end of his show. From March 18:

New Rule: Don't try to talk to me about any dream you've had that I wasn't in. There's a very limited audience that's interested in your dreams. That's why they're only showing in your head!

My favorite:

You know — you know, there's what we pay lip service to, and then there's what we pay money for. And that is what we actually value. We could have good security at the airport. We know how to do it. Have you ever been to a casino? There's more cameras than a Korean wedding. [groans] With all kinds of zoom lenses that can count the stitches on your date's sex change from 50 feet! You can't do math in your head in a casino — without being spotted, reported on videotape, hustled off the floor and buried in the desert by Joe Pesci!

From April 15:

New Rule: Stop saying anybody or anything is like the Nazis, okay? Republicans aren't like the Nazis. Even Neo-Nazis aren't like the Nazis. Nothing is like the Nazis...except for Wal-Mart.

And finally, New Rule: Parents have to stop coddling their children. The latest is, schools have stopped grading papers with red ink because of complaints that a big, mean, red X is too negative. Why, a kid might even think he got it wrong and learn something. These parents today are so fixated on protection, it's amazing they ever got pregnant in the first place.

A recent reality show called "Super Nanny" placed an old-school, discipline-wielding nanny into a family where the mother can't figure out the reason she's having a nervous breakdown is that she says things to her kids like, "Tyler, mommy would really appreciate it if you didn't throw rocks at me." You know, moms and dads these days are like the Democratic Party: lame, spineless and not holding up their end of the equation. And kids are like the Republicans: drunk with power and out of control!

Maybe that's why there's also a new phenomenon called "parent coaching," a kind of tech-support service for clueless parents when their 3.0-year-old goes haywire. As described in a recent New York Times article, here are some of the questions a typical mom asks her parenting coach: What should she do when Skylar won't do his chores? Should there be limits on how he spends his allowance? Should Forrest get dessert if he does not eat a healthy dinner?

Now, for those of you who are saying, "But, Bill, you're not a parent," I say, "True. But I have one thing these parents apparently don't: a brain!" This is not rocket science. What you should do when Skylar won't do his chores. How about using your size advantage. Make him. Because if there's one thing we know about kids, it's that if you give them an inch, the authorities will raid your Neverland Ranch.

Yes, like Michael Jackson, parents these days act like they're on a date with their children. Trying to impress them, trying to buy their love and never contradicting them or giving them a big red X when they're wrong.

So, no, I don't have kids. And you know what? I don't intend to have any until people start making some I'd want my kids to play with! Until then, I'm just glad I own a lot of stock in Ritalin.

For High Schoolers, Summer Is Time To Polish Resumes

In Ancient Rome, young men from good patrician families had to demonstrate their manly virtue by serving in a successful military campaign before returning to Rome to take political office. Now it seems that American teenagers need to perform community service before entering a prestigious university. From For High Schoolers, Summer Is Time To Polish Resumes:

Forget about the lazy, hazy days of summer.

As soon as classes are over for the year at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., 16-year-old Jamie Cohen is off to Senegal where she'll work with AIDS victims for four weeks. Armed with her research, she'll then head to Yale University to present an AIDS 'plan of action' to other teens, as part of a program put on by a travel company. When she applies to colleges 18 months from now, Ms. Cohen says the experience 'will definitely help. I'll do an essay around it.'

I've read that the SAT has been "recalibrated" so that older scores are about 100 points lower than modern scores. That may explain this phenomenon:

California's Pomona College says one-third of the students it accepted for next fall scored the maximum 800 on either the verbal or math part of the SAT admissions tests.

American Obesity Association - AOA Fact Sheets

My recent trip through the Charlotte and Asheville airports led me to research the Percentage of Adults with Obesity in the U.S. by State. North Carolina isn't too bad:

U.S. States	1991	1998	2000	2001
California	10.0	16.8	19.2	20.9
North Carolina	13.0	19.0	21.3	22.4
Pennsylvania	14.4	19.0	20.7	21.4

If you can't master English, try Globish

Jean-Paul Nerri�re has declared that the new lingua franca of the global village is Globish. If you can't master English, try Globish:

The main principles of Globish are a vocabulary of only 1,500 words in English (the OED lists 615,000), gestures and repetition.
[...]
The seeds for Globish came about in the 1980s when Nerri�re was working for IBM in Paris with colleagues of about 40 nationalities. At a meeting where they were to be addressed by two Americans whose flight had been delayed, they started exchanging shoptalk in what Nerri�re calls "une certaine forme d'anglais perverti." Then the Americans arrived and beyond their opening phrases, "Call me Jim," "Call me Bill," no one understood a word. And Jim and Bill, needless to say, did not understand perverted English.

Nerri�re's site, jpn-globish.com, has a number of articles, in French, about English (or American) and Globish. Naturally, "Fuck", un mot � ne pas employer, mais � conna�tre et reconna�tre caught my eye. Reading about your own language's argot can be quite amusing. I enjoyed this pre-Starbucks joke (at Americans' expense):

En revanche, si vous voulez vous illustrer aux yeux de vos amis am�ricains, vous pouvez leur poser la devinette suivante: "what is the difference between the american coffee and making love on a beach?" ("Quelle est la diff�rence entre le caf� am�ricain et faire l'amour sur une plage?", le caf� de l�-bas �tant connu pour sa dilution, � l'oppos� des pr�f�rences fran�aises et italiennes qui r�clament la concentration savoureuse).

R�ponse "There is no difference, they are both fucking close to water". Difficilement traduisible en fran�ais, mais l'effet est assur�.

The Age of Autism: The Amish anomaly - (United Press International)

From The Age of Autism: The Amish anomaly:

The mainstream scientific consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder, one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United States.

Applying that model to Lancaster County, there ought to be 130 Amish men, women and children here with Autism Spectrum Disorder. [...] That means upwards of 50 Amish people of all ages should be living in Lancaster County with full-syndrome autism, the "classic autism" first described in 1943 by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins University. The full-syndrome disorder is hard to miss, characterized by "markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activities and interests," according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Our reporter could only find three Amish children with full-blown autism: one adopted from China (by Asian-American converts to the Amish-Mennonite religion), one who received a vaccination at the request of federal health officials (and went into her own world almost immediately thereafter), and one more who isn't described.

Energetic Ignorance

James K. Glassman doesn't pull any punches in Energetic Ignorance:

There's no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy.

Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories� They're more than twice as efficient in using energy than they were 50 years ago.

Fine. But, despite the conventional political wisdom, conservation has not cut our energy use. To the contrary. "The more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume," write Peter Huber and Mark Mills in their brilliant new book, The Bottomless Well. Energy becomes more desirable if it works faster and better. "To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it."

Anyway, why on earth would we want to curb energy consumption? Energy abounds, and the leverage is incredible. It's a tiny proportion of the economy, yet without it, we'd grind to a halt.

Japan-China: Why All the Fuss?

In Japan-China: Why All the Fuss?, Ralph Kinney Bennett explains what the Chinese are still upset about:

While the western world was concentrating on an approaching Christmas that marked a slow economic rise out of the Depression and on Adolf Hitler's continuing 'diplomacy' in Europe, the bloodbath of Nanking made some headlines but relatively little impact outside Asia. The conservative estimate of civilian deaths at the hands of Japanese soldiers in and around Nanking was 260,000. Some experts place the figure at 350,000.

This was one city, in a period of less than two months. France and Belgium each lost over 100,000 civilians in the whole course of World War II. Great Britain lost 61,000. But the Chinese at Nanking were literally slaughtered by the thousands — beheaded, bayoneted, burned alive, machine-gunned. Their bodies choked canals, rivers and ponds until the water actually ran red.

And in the bitter memory of the Chinese, it was not just the loss of life, but the cruel élan with which the Japanese carried out the atrocities. At the height of the slaughter in Nanking, a Japanese soldier noted that "a pig is more valuable now than the life of a human being. That's because a pig is edible."

Wired News: Anti-HIV Bacterium Isolated?

From Wired News: Anti-HIV Bacterium Isolated?:

Lin Tao, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago's dentistry college, has found a strain of lactobacillus — a common bacteria in our bodies — that binds to the sugar envelope on the surface of HIV. The bacterium targets HIV because it uses the sugar as a food source.

Tao and colleagues at Chicago's Rush University isolated the lactobacilli from the oral and vaginal cavities of healthy human volunteers. The team then tested the bacteria against HIV and found two strains that specifically trap the virus by eating mannose and — in the lab at least — block infection.

"If we can find its natural enemy, we can control the spread of HIV naturally and cost-effectively, just as we use cats to control mice," Tao said.

Levers, and Radars, and Bears, Oh, My!

One of my pet peeves is using the word leverage simply to mean use, ignoring the whole point of the metaphor: a lever multiplies your effort.

leverage
Pronunciation: 'le-v&-rij, 'lE-; 'lev-rij, 'lEv-
Function: noun
1 : the action of a lever or the mechanical advantage gained by it
2 : POWER, EFFECTIVENESS
3 : the use of credit to enhance one's speculative capacity

I recently read Arnold Kling's Under the Radar, about "bootstrapping" (or "netstrapping") a net business without venture capital, and he does not misuse leverage. In fact, he goes one step further, and only uses leverage as a noun. He uses lever as the verb form:

lever
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): le�vered; le�ver�ing /'le-v&-ri[ng], 'lE-; 'lev-ri[ng], 'lEv-/
1 : to pry, raise, or move with or as if with a lever
2 : to operate (a device) in the manner of a lever

Once you see it, it makes sense — but leverage is still an accepted verb, and it's the accepted verb for "supplying with financial leverage":

leverage
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -aged; -ag�ing
: to provide (as a corporation) or supplement (as money) with leverage; also : to enhance as if by supplying with financial leverage

Anyway, in his book, Kling lists a number of important traits for a netstrapper, including Ability to Stand Up to the Bear:

You are going to need revenue. In order to get enough revenue, chances are at some point you are going to have to propose to a customer a price that represents an outrageously high markup over your costs, and you will have to make the price stick. I call this "standing up to the bear."

I once read somewhere that when you meet a bear in the woods, you should not run away. The bear is too fast for you. Instead, your best chance is to stand up tall and show the bear that you are not intimidated. If you can pull it off, the bear will not bother you.

I don't know whether standing up to the bear really works in the woods. I can't say that I'd ever want to try it. But I've always wanted to use it as a metaphor.

Just as most of us instinctively run from the bear, I think that most of us are too quick to reduce our pricing to something that will just cover costs. I don't know the psychology involved — it could be guilt, fear of rejection, or eagerness to please. In any case, economic theory notwithstanding, we seldom maximize profits.

Getting Afghans to Talk Without Torture

Based on the description from Getting Afghans to Talk Without Torture, American soldiers could just as well be stationed in Viking-era Iceland:

American commanders have learned that there are ways to get the locals to talk, and identify the people firing the rocket. The most useful method is to halt reconstruction projects, or shut down the weekly bazaar (where local Afghans can sell goods to the thousands of troops and civilians on the base). Either of these moves costs the local Afghan economy thousands of dollars a week. In a country where $20 a month is a good salary, that kind of loss is felt. It may take weeks, or even months, before the local elders get together and decide that it�s better for all concerned that the guilty guy be turned in. Afghans often settle disputes in terms of money. That�s an ancient tradition that survives in the West in the form of fines levied by judges. For the Afghans, the identity of a guilty Afghan is worth only so much in economic losses. So far, several rocket firing incidents have been cleared up this way. Not just in Bagram, but in other parts of Afghanistan as well. Sometimes, Civil Affairs or Special Forces officers, who have established good relations with the locals, can just go to the elders, or local strongman, and ask for the rocket firing, or sniping, or planting of mines, to stop. Usually, the perpetrator is known to many of the locals. Such a request often gets the attacks to stop, even though the guy responsible does not get turned in. If local attacks have killed or injured American troops, the negotiations are a bit more intense. The Afghans recognize the concept of �blood feud� and can understand that angry American soldiers, eager to get revenge, might be something to avoid. Sometimes the guilty party is identified, and it is left to the American troops to do the rest. Other times, it turns out that one of the local men has suddenly left the area. And the locals don�t expect to see him return until the local American troops finish their tour of duty.

Culture Shock in Afghanistan

According to Culture Shock in Afghanistan, the new Afghan army is learning the western way of war:

When these young men encounter the NATO instructors there is a bit of culture shock. The uniforms, drills and need to salute officers is all pretty alien. But the combat training is the biggest shock of all. The young men have heard the stories of how the Americans fight, and are impressed. During the 1980s, the Russian soldiers often fled, or didn�t fight back when attacked. The Americans fight, and they fight to kill. Many of the Americans lionized in Afghan war stories were Special Forces or commandoes, and the Afghans respect the kind of ruthless killing machine these troops represented. But the training they receive to emulate these war stories seems endless, exhausting and repetitive. Many Afghans drop out, discouraged, exhausted or disillusioned. The American war movies so popular in Afghanistan rarely show the reality of combat training. But most of the recruits persist. After their first few combat actions, the Afghan troops get it. The drills were important, and the strange tactics work.

War games

War games describes some of the newer military-training products coming out of the entertainment world:

Hill then unveils ICT's latest offering to that end: an interactive learning program called 'Army Excellence in Leadership' (or AXL — everything at ICT has an acronym). The first part consists of a short film, Power Hungry. The setting is Afghanistan. An impatient young American officer has been assigned to oversee a delivery of food relief. He must deal with foreboding terrain, limited resources, confusion within his own ranks, and a pair of treacherous Afghan warlords named Omar and Muhammad. The situation deteriorates, guns are drawn, and Omar ends up nonchalantly shooting one of his own hungry tribesmen. In the second part, a digitally animated head appears in the corner of the screen to quiz the player on the movie. The player, in turn, can ask the talking head questions, and then pull up characters and grill them as well. Hill summons Omar and inquires after his motives. Omar gives a facetious-sounding response. I suggest asking: 'What do you think of the American presence in Afghanistan?'

Omar's reply to this is, on the whole, rather evasive, but at one point he launches in to a subtle point about the clash of cultures in the Afghan war. 'You Americans don't want to believe that someone who offers to help you would do something you don't like,' he says. I find this to be a fascinating observation. Hill explains that ICT gets input from cultural anthropologists.

A large percentage of American soldiers now carry personal DVD players and game consoles, Hill explains. Army Excellence in Leadership has already been shipped out to soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq. The response, apparently, has been enthusiastic.

Saving Ryan's Privates

Saving Ryan's Privates describes the new kevlarhosen being tested by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory:

Developed by LB Technologies, these Kevlar shorts meet National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Level IIIa protection from fragmentation and small arms fire requirements to an area of the body previously unprotected — the waistline to the knees and the vulnerable femoral artery. Due to increased use by insurgents of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), this protection is especially needed for soldiers in Iraq, in particular for turret gunners.

The Charter School Revolution

The Charter School Revolution sings the praises of the Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut: