In Terrorism Fight, Government Finds a Surprising Ally: FedEx

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In Terrorism Fight, Government Finds a Surprising Ally: FedEx:

Before Sept. 11, 2001, when federal law-enforcement officials asked FedEx Corp. for help, the company had its limits. It wouldn't provide access to its databases. It often refused to lend uniforms or delivery trucks to agents for undercover operations, citing fears of retribution against employees as well as concerns about customer privacy.

Then came the attacks on New York and Washington and pleas from the government for private-sector help in fighting terrorism. Suddenly, the king of overnight delivery became one of homeland security's best friends.

FedEx has opened the international portion of its databases, including credit-card details, to government officials.

WSJ.com - Carthage Is Trying To Live Down Image As Site of Infanticide

Tunisian scholars, in an attempt to build up their nation's pre-Islamic past, have decided to deny Carthage's reputation for sacrificing large numbers of children in ceremonial fires. From Carthage Is Trying To Live Down Image As Site of Infanticide:

Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He's now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn't expecting to win them over. 'No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts,' he says.

Human sacrifice was common in many ancient cultures. But Carthage was particularly notorious, branded as a serial killer of children for at least 600 years in a site now known as the Tophet, a Hebrew word meaning 'roaster' or 'place of burning.' Most Western scholars believe the practice was organized around the worship of two deities. Mr. Stager says it may also have been a primitive mechanism of population control. Others suggest a more sporadic activity connected to spring fertility rights.

The first to accuse Carthage of incinerating its young were the Romans, who destroyed the city in 146 B.C., ending the world's first great superpower clash. Passed down over the centuries, tales of infant sacrifices inspired the 19th-century novelist Flaubert to visit Carthage in 1858 in search of material for 'Salammbo,' which detailed horrible sacrificial rituals. Foreign archaeologists then fleshed out fiction with hard evidence.

'This is a dreadful period of human degeneracy that we are now unearthing,' wrote Count Byron Khun de Prorok, a Frenchman who took part in the first excavations of Carthage's Tophet in the 1920s. After his own digging decades later, Mr. Stager wrote with a colleague in the Biblical Archaeology Review: 'It is repulsive...Perhaps the Carthaginians would have gotten a better press in the West had they concealed their practices more subtly.'

But what many scholars consider an open-and-shut case, Mr. Fantar and his followers view as a frame-up.

Saving Africa

From Saving Africa:

A common socialist myth is that the high American living standard would depend on exploitation of Africa. How could this be the case when only 0.4 percent of the US economy is based on trade with all African countries?

Resolving the Clash of Civilizations

As long as I can remember, Beirut has been the go-to example of a war-torn city. Only as an adult did I learn that Beirut used to be the Paris of the Middle East. According to Resolving the Clash of Civilizations, it's on its way back:

I recently returned home from Beirut, Lebanon, where I spent a month covering the democratic Cedar Revolution and Syria's withdrawal from the country after a 30 year-long occupation. Few places in the world beat Beirut as a foreign assignment. The city is packed from one end to the other with the classiest hotels, the hippest night clubs, the most stylish bars, the fanciest restaurants, the coziest cafes, and the best shopping districts this side of New York and Paris. But Lebanon's sophisticated and freewheeling culture isn't the only thing that makes a trip to that country both attractive and memorable. Nor is the nascent democracy movement the only encouraging news. One of the best stories out of Lebanon is the one that receives almost no coverage at all — the end of the long-simmering sectarian hatefest and a genuine yearning for friendship between Christians and Muslims.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant

From Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant:

Aristotle, Jedi Master

From Aristotle, Jedi Master:

But when one takes a larger look at the story of Anakin Skywalker's fall, one sees a special genius at work in the creation of that story.

And no, the genius in question is not George Lucas. Lucas succeeded in following the rules and using the elements of classical tragedy to tell the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. But those rules and elements were themselves laid down for posterity a long time ago, in a country relatively far away.

It was Aristotle in his Poetics who discussed the construction of the tragic drama. Aristotle notes that the fortunes of the tragic hero must swing 'from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must not lie in any depravity, but in some great error on his part...' Tragic fear and pity, on the part of the audience, 'may be aroused by the Spectacle ... he who simply hears the account of [the tragedy] shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents...' Thus, the tragic hero must have a fatal flaw, or 'some great error' that helps arouse 'horror and pity' on the part of the audience.

Vouching for Gender Equality in Sweden

Vouching for Gender Equality in Sweden points out a surprising element of Sweden's educational system:

Sweden has a system whereby parents decide upon the school they wish their child to attend, the State paying the costs, whether that school be public or private, for profit or not. With a couple of minor limitations, parents are not even tied to the specific locality or municipality. It is also extremely easy for qualified teachers to set up a new school, teaching what they wish, how they wish, subject only to certain minimum standards.

Stop Blaming China

From Stop Blaming China:

For all their sins, foreigners should not be blamed for America's large trade deficits. China especially is doing nothing worse than producing goods that are cheaper than those produced elsewhere.

Never mind the Chinese policy to keep their currency artificially weak. In all events, this is doing them more harm than good. China gives Americans things that they want in exchange for green bits of paper that are depreciating.

China gives Americans things that they want in exchange for green bits of paper that are depreciating.

The Complete List - ALL-TIME 100 Movies - TIME Magazine

Time just published its All-Time 100 Movies list — and, as a fairly film-literate guy, I must admit that I haven't seen half the films on it.

On the other hand, I've seen the vast majority of the AFI's 100 Greatest American Movies.

BBC NEWS | England | Beds/Bucks/Herts | Two hurt in mock light sabre duel

Two hurt in mock light sabre duel:

Two Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol.

A man, aged 20, and a girl of 17 are believed to have been filming a mock duel when they poured fuel into two glass tubes and lit it.

Of course, you're not eligible for a Darwin award unless you successfully kill yourself through your own stupidity.

Wired News: Everything Bad's Not Bad

I found one element of Wired's review of Everything Bad Is Good for You, Everything Bad's Not Bad, inadvertantly amusing:

[Everything Bad Is Good for You]'s chock-full of interesting insights that are clearly the reflection of an agile and catholic intellect.

The reviewer (or editor) actually linked to a dictionary definition of catholic.

I planned on picking up the book, of course, but this might get me to pick it up even sooner:

The essay begins with a rumination on Johnson's own boyhood experiences exploring dice-based baseball simulations and Dungeons and Dragons games, and describes how he graduated from playing those simulations to building his own in search of a more realistic experience.

Vanity Plate Spells Out Methamphetamine

I would have found this even funnier in high school, when I was studying chemistry. Vanity Plate Spells Out Methamphetamine:

Most drivers may be puzzled by the vanity license plate C9H13N, but plenty of crooks likely nod their heads knowingly.

It's the chemical compound for methamphetamine, and despite a state law that prohibits references to alcohol or illegal substances on vanity plates, it may be perfectly legal.

Bradley A. Benfield, a spokesman for the state Licensing Department, said such a license has been granted to the owner of a black 2002 Audi registered in Seattle. The plate may be legal because the same compound represents amphetamine, a legal substance when used in medicine.

As Cartoons Go Digital, Something Gets Lost

When Disney restores an animated film, it has artists inspect it frame by frame. Other studios aren't so meticulous and rely on digital tools designed for live-action films. From As Cartoons Go Digital, Something Gets Lost:

The technology at issue — called "digital noise reduction," or DNR — works by removing lines that appear in one frame of a film but not the next, reasoning that the line doesn't belong. In live-action films, that usually works well. But in cartoons, the process gets sketchier.

Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web

I didn't know this bit of trivia, from Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web:

The venerable nonprofit Science was founded in the 1880s by Thomas Edison.

How Old Media Can Survive In a New World

An amusing metaphor from How Old Media Can Survive In a New World:

"People aren't going to the Internet because it looks like a newspaper," Mr. Ellin says. "It's because they're getting something exotic and fresh and new and unfiltered. It's like eating French cheese. It hasn't been pasteurized. And it's good."

Adding Music Players To Cellphones Won't Be iPod Killer Some Think

The power of the iPod brand, from Adding Music Players To Cellphones Won't Be iPod Killer Some Think:

Satisfying an image-conscious kid with another digital-music player is like trying to teach the world to sing by buying it a C & C Cola.

The Case for the Empire

I didn't catch The Case for the Empire when it came out (with Attack of the Clones):

So under Imperial rule, a large group of regional potentates, each with access to a sizable army and star destroyers, runs local affairs. These governors owe their fealty to the Emperor. And once the Emperor is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.

In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy — it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.

Which makes the rebels — Lucas's heroes — an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.

I'll take the Empire.

Particle Accelerator Used to Decipher Text

From Particle Accelerator Used to Decipher Text:

A particle accelerator is being used to reveal the long-lost writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, work hidden for centuries after a Christian monk wrote over it in the Middle Ages.

Highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center were used last week to begin deciphering the parts of the 174-page text that have not yet been revealed. The X-rays cause iron in the hidden ink to glow.
[...]
Scholars believe the treatise was copied by a scribe in the 10th century from Archimedes' original Greek scrolls, written in the third century B.C.

It was erased about 200 years later by a monk who reused the parchment for a prayer book, creating a twice-used parchment book known as a "palimpsest." In the 12th century, parchment — scraped and dried animal skins — was rare and costly, and Archimedes' works were in less demand.

I don't even know where to start. Erasing Archimedes? For a prayer book?

The New York Review of Books: Adventures of a True Believer

I love the opening to Adventures of a True Believer, Gary Shteyngart's review of Vladimir Voinovich's Monumental Propaganda:

If Russia weren't governed by fools and reprobates, if the roads were smooth and wide and free of bandits, if Russia were suddenly a modern European country as far removed from Stalin's legacy as today's Germany is from Hitler's, three groups of citizens would suffer the most: corrupt traffic cops, oligarchs, and satirists.

(Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.)

Times Online - Japanese used to swear by code of good manners. Now they just swear

From Japanese used to swear by code of good manners. Now they just swear:

It is a sign of what a well-mannered country Japan is that much of what is regarded as “rude” would not raise a frown in the West. Take the list of offences compiled by the Tokyo authorities, which includes using strong perfume, carrying large bags, kissing, infants, crying, sitting on the floor and, most unexpectedly, using an umbrella to practise golf swings.

Tokyo’s subway stations are decorated with large coloured posters featuring the characters from Sesame Street. “Fold your newspaper!” they implore. “Please don’t take up too much room with your newspaper.”

Japanese standards are quite low when it comes to colorful metaphors:

While it is not true that the Japanese language has no swear words, standards of vituperation are certainly lower than in English. Even the word commonly used to mean “you bastard” — kisama — is simply an impolite way of saying “you”.

The worst that one can do in daily speech would be Shine bakayaro!, which means little more than “Drop dead, you idiot!” Such is the dearth of salty invective that angry Japanese turn increasingly to a reliable English expression, pronounced the Japanese way: Fakkyuu.

Iraqi Insurgent Sniper Training

DefenseTech noted that an Iraqi Insurgent Sniper Training manual has been translated and turned into a PowerPoint presentation (which has been translated into HTML). Naturally, the manual's pretty creepy, presenting photos of various scenarios and asking, "If you had only one shot, who should you kill?"

Being There

I recently visited the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina. It's America's largest private residence. It's also where Being There was filmed, so, naturally, I watched the film again — I had the DVR catch it when it came on recently.

Somehow I'd missed (or forgotten) the closing scene, where Peter Sellers' character, a simpleton who has been mistaken for a man of great ability, literally walks on water. It seems out of place — the rest of the movie is darkly comic, but not at all supernatural — and now I know why. From How the Last Shot in Being There Actually Got Made:

The script for Being There ends as both Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine take walks in the wood. They run into each other. She says 'I was looking for you, Chance.' He says 'I was looking for you too.' They take hands and walk off together.

But near the end of production, somebody went up to Hal and said 'How's it going?'

'Great,' Hal said. 'Sellers has created this character that's so amazing, I could have him walk on water and people would believe it.' Hal stopped and thought. 'As a matter of fact, I will have him walk on water.'

Hal was out on location, miles from Hollywood. The last thing on earth he needed was to contact the home office to discuss the idea of Chance walking on water. It's an idea that wouldn't pitch or read well. If it had been in the script, there would have been endless arguments over what this Jesus allegory was doing in the picture. Only if you've actually seen the film do you realize that it's not a Jesus allegory at all. Chance can walk on water because nobody ever told him he couldn't, not because he's the resurrection of Christ.

Hal knew he could make it work, just as he knew that there was no way in hell the studio would approve of more money for such a controversial shot that wasn't even in the script. He decided to do it anyway.

Brain Candy

In Brain Candy, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You — which I assume I'll buy and read but haven't yet:

One of the ongoing debates in the educational community, similarly, is over the value of homework. Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math. At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on discipline and personal responsibility is unproved. And the causal relation between high-school homework and achievement is unclear: it hasn’t been firmly established whether spending more time on homework in high school makes you a better student or whether better students, finding homework more pleasurable, spend more time doing it. So why, as a society, are we so enamored of homework? Perhaps because we have so little faith in the value of the things that children would otherwise be doing with their time. They could go out for a walk, and get some exercise; they could spend time with their peers, and reap the rewards of friendship. Or, Johnson suggests, they could be playing a video game, and giving their minds a rigorous workout.

If You Want to Win in Sports, Wear Red

If You Want to Win in Sports, Wear Red:

In their survey, the anthropologists analyzed the results of four combat sports at the summer [Olympic] games: boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling.

In those events, the athletes were randomly assigned red protective gear and other sportwear.

Athletes wearing red gear won more often in 16 of 21 rounds of competition in all four events.

The New Yorker: Higher Risk

Michael Specter's Hhigher Risk is about "Crystal meth, the Internet, and dangerous choices about AIDS." I reads like a piece devised specifically to horrify social conservatives:

The first thing people on methamphetamine lose is their common sense; suddenly, anything goes, including unprotected anal sex with many different partners in a single night — which is among the most efficient ways to spread H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In recent surveys, more than ten per cent of gay men in San Francisco and Los Angeles report having used the drug in the past six months; in New York, the figure is even higher.

After years of living in constant fear of aids, many gay men have chosen to resume sexual practices that are almost guaranteed to make them sick. In New York City, the rate of syphilis has increased by more than four hundred per cent in the past five years. Gay men account for virtually the entire rise. Between 1998 and 2000, fifteen per cent of the syphilis cases in Chicago could be attributed to gay men. Since 2001, that number has grown to sixty per cent. Look at the statistics closely and you will almost certainly find the drug. In one recent study, twenty-five per cent of those men who reported methamphetamine use in the previous month were infected with H.I.V. The drug appears to double the risk of infection (because it erases inhibitions but also, it seems, because of physiological changes that make the virus easier to transmit), and the risk climbs the more one uses it. Over the past several years, nearly every indicator of risky sexual activity has risen in the gay community. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the aids epidemic, the number of men who say they use condoms regularly is below fifty per cent; after many years of decline, the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses among gay men increased every year between 2000 and 2003, while remaining stable in the rest of the population.

An illustrative anecdote:

“I asked him to explain. And he told me, ‘I go online and put out my stats — if I am a top or a bottom, what I like to do. I am a top, I am H.I.V.-positive. So I will say, “Does anyone want to be topped by an H.I.V.-positive guy?” ’ ”

Klausner continued to recall the conversation: “ ‘I’ll get five responses in half an hour. And then I will speak to them on the phone. If I like their voice, I will invite them over and look through my window. If I like what I see, then I will be home, and if not I can pretend I am gone. It’s been great. I don’t have to talk to anybody to do it. I don’t have to go out of the house. I can get it like this,’ he said, and snapped his fingers.”

The amphetamines, combined with Viagra, allow the men to "party" for hours, and the Internet lets them find anonymous partners. Modern HIV drugs have removed the fear (and stigma) of disease. But here's where it's particularly crazy:

But the average age of newly infected gay men in New York and San Francisco is nearly forty. The real problem lay not with naïve youngsters but with those who had been aware of this epidemic virtually their entire adult lives.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com — which suddenly sounds lewd.)

Number Gut

Here's what happens when you don't have a good intuition for numbers, or Number Gut:

For example, there was news story published back in the late 80s that reported that the state of New Jersey produced 50 billion used tires every year which caused a huge environmental problem. The story got widely disseminated before somebody pointed out that since New Jersey had a population on only around 8 million, 50 billion tires a year came out to 6,250 tires per capita per year. The story got play because the editors had no intuitive feel for the significance of 4 orders of magnitude difference between the size of the population and the tire consumption.

A more recent (and even more political) example, the Lancet Iraqi Mortality Survey (LIMS):

A lot of people who would know better in another context seem perfectly willing to swallow the estimate of 300,000+ dead that LIMS reports with the Falluja cluster included. Examined in detail, LIMS reports that of those 300,000, roughly 250,000 died from violence, and of those something like 220,000 died from Coalition airstrikes. The LIMS authors even suggest [p6 pg7] that this is likely an underestimate.

Anyone with a good number gut for such phenomenon would immediately recognize such numbers as implausible.

Why couldn't 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it's a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.

For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?

Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that's only dead, not dead-and-wounded).

Beauty and the Geek

This looks like some wonderfully low-brow television: Beauty and the Geek:

It all starts with seven women who are academically impaired. Next, add seven men who are brilliant but socially challenged. The concept is to pair up couples for a chance to win a $250,000 grand prize. Each mismatched pair competes in various activities designed to test intellect, fashion savvy and even dance moves. There's a spelling bee for the girls, massage lessons for the guys, and an introduction to actual rocket science when the girls compete to see who can build a working rocket. During these competitions, the geek must try to pass his brains onto the beauty, while the beauty tries to pull the game out of the geek. They're so far apart on the social spectrum that they're practically different species, but if they make it to the end, they could both walk away gifted and gorgeous.

I Am a Pawn of the Jedi Council

I'm no fanboy, yet yesterday, opening day, I found myself watching Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith on the big screen — the really big IMAX screen — and I ate it up. I rolled my eyes all through Episode I, and I only enjoyed bits and pieces of Episode II, but Episode III really worked for me.

The movie has its flaws though:

• The Spiderman Effect: When human actors get replaced by overly acrobatic CG actors, it really jumps out. And Obi-Wan's giant-iguana mount doesn't move quite right.
• Not So Grievous: General Grievous was much more impressive in the animated Clone Wars shorts leading up to the movie.
• It's Frankensteen Now: When young Vader gets maimed: excellent. When maimed Vader gets rebuilt: excellent. When rebuilt Vader gets masked: excellent. When masked Vader breaks his restraints and stumbles forward: way, way too 1931-Frankenstein.
• Padwho?: Padmé does very, very little. Her scenes with Anakin are better than in the previous two movies though — not that that's saying much.
• As Long as I'm Evil Now...: Anakin's descent goes a little too quickly.
• Epilogue: The entire epilogue should go — especially because it becomes very, very obvious that they're trying to shore up as many plot holes as quickly as possible.

What I really enjoyed was Tyler Cowen's "Straussian reading" of The public choice economics of Star Wars. The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

Aren't they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.

As Inmates Age, A Prison Carpenter Builds More Coffins

Here's a grim story. As Inmates Age, A Prison Carpenter Builds More Coffins:

At Angola [state penitentiary], 97% of inmates now die in prison, up from about 80% a decade ago.
[...]
The rise of lengthy, mandatory sentences and a nationwide tough-on-crime attitude has resulted in a booming prison population — 2.1 million last June, compared with 501,886 in 1980 — and an aging one. The number of inmates dying from natural causes rose to 2,700 in 2002 from 799 in 1982, according to the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Inmates often arrive at prison in the physical condition of someone 10 years to 15 years older because of the lack of health care they received while free, according to the American Correctional Association, a group of corrections officials. Chronic illnesses such as HIV, hepatitis and asthma are prevalent among prisoners, as are histories of alcohol and drug abuse, making them more likely to die earlier than normal.
[...]
Angola gets society's most serious offenders — child molesters, murderers and rapists. Two years ago, the prison stopped accepting anyone with a sentence of less than 50 years, meaning few will ever leave.

Here's where it gets really grim though:

For years, inmates were buried in flimsy coffins that resembled shipping crates, each costing anywhere from $650 to $900. In June 1995, the prison was preparing to bury Joseph Siegel, a 69-year-old prisoner who had been convicted in 1971 for burglary and murdering a state senator.

As the inmates lifted Mr. Siegel's coffin to lay into the freshly dug grave, his body fell through the bottom of the casket. They carefully laid the coffin over the body and started to shovel dirt over the coffin. The lid then caved in.

That's why one of the inmates now makes coffins for the prison.

2blowhards.com: Fact of the Day

Michael Blowhard's Fact of the Day (from The American Enterprise):

According to Bureau of Labor statistics, 5,559 Americans were killed by workplace injuries in 2003. 5,115 of these people were men.

With Ratings Tight, TV Networks Vie For Richest Viewers

From With Ratings Tight, TV Networks Vie For Richest Viewers:

The TV sitcom "The Office," a documentary-style parody of corporate life, will return to General Electric Co.'s NBC in September despite a weak ratings performance. NBC's "Committed" — a higher-rated sitcom about two neurotic twentysomethings — won't be back.

The primary reason: Rich people like 'The Office.'

Of course, really rich people like the original British version better.

The Most Important Fifth Wheel

The Most Important Fifth Wheel recounts the history of the steering wheel — and of driving in general:

A word here about the concentration required to control a car in those early days. Once you had hand cranked the engine, got it chugging and quickly jumped back into the driver's seat, you released the hand brake, depressed the clutch pedal (which might also be the brake pedal, but let's not get into that), put the car into gear and lurched forward.

There was no 'gas pedal' to press with your foot. The so-called 'accelerator' pedal on the floor merely released the engine governor which kept the motor turning no faster than a 'decent' 650-700 rpm. You used that pedal sparingly and only when in top gear.

Meanwhile, using a series of brass levers on some device in the center of your steering wheel you would then try to slow the engine down enough to make a proper gear change by 'retarding' the spark. On some cars you might have a lever that allows you to crudely adjust the flow of fuel through the carburetor. Forget the cell phone! See if you can get into high gear and achieve, say, 20 miles per hour without wrecking.

Early cars didn't have steering wheels:

The first automobiles, more than a century ago, were driven with "tillers," basically a steel shaft with a brass or wood handle on top. In 1900, Packard was the first American car to introduce a steering wheel instead of a tiller.

Early drivers sat on the right:

Incidentally, most American cars, like the European ones, had right-hand drive until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. Then it apparently began to dawn on everyone that the driver no longer had to lean out the right side of the vehicle with his whip hand. The only "horses" were those under the hood, and since the left side gave better visibility on American roads… hey, why not?

Wired News: Narrowcasting Your Show

Narrowcasting Your Show looks at some "long tail" TV startups:

Ken Lipscomb, chief executive of the Atlanta-based company, says DaveTV will offer more than 100 channels featuring 100,000 hours of licensed programming, much of it specialized fare such as illegal street racing and bedtime stories read by an on-screen narrator.

The hog video will be on the company's 'bbq' channel, featuring more than 1,000 barbecue-related programs. Initially, DaveTV will only be available for viewing on a computer. But the company promises a set-top box for about $200 that will allow downloads to be played on televisions.

Also getting into the act, a company called Brightcove Networks will let customers avoid buying a separate set-top box and instead link their TVs to newer computers that run Microsoft Windows Media Center software.

The Long Tail: Robot Child-Herders

In Robot Child-Herders, Chris Anderson explains how the Roomba gets kids to clean up their toys and tires them out before bed:

This works with three magic phrases:

1. "Roomba's coming out tonight. Clean up your toys or Roomba will eat them!"
2. "If you can clean them up fast you can stay up to watch Roomba!"
3. "Here goes Roomba. Don't let him touch you!"

The uttering of these three sentences results in the perfect end to an evening. The kids scurry around and pick up every last toy (it's the tiniest Lego pieces that get eaten the fastest), then race around the room jumping over Roomba as it drives from wall to wall, randomly changing direction just often enough to make the game fun. (We've told them that if Roomba runs into them it will think that they're a wall and not clean there, which may or may not be true.) Then, after 15 minutes of this, they're bored and ready for bed.

Wired News: No Wrong Answer: Click It

From No Wrong Answer: Click It:

Professor Ross Cheit put it to the students in his Ethics and Public Policy class at Brown University: Are you morally obliged to report cheating if you know about it? The room began to hum, but no one so much as raised a hand.

Still, within 90 seconds, Cheit had roughly 150 student responses displayed on an overhead screen, plotted as a multicolored bar graph — 64 percent said yes, 35 percent, no.

Several times each class, Cheit's students answer his questions using handheld wireless devices that resemble television remote controls. The devices, which the students call "clickers," are being used on hundreds of college campuses and are even finding their way into grade schools.

But can the professor phone a friend? And does he have a limited number of lifelines?

Wired News: Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

Super Water Kills Bugs Dead describes a new product, Microcyn, that sounds too good to be true:

A California company has figured out how to use two simple materials — water and salt — to create a solution that wipes out single-celled organisms, and which appears to speed healing of burns, wounds and diabetic ulcers.

The solution looks, smells and tastes like water, but carries an ion imbalance that makes short work of bacteria, viruses and even hard-to-kill spores.

Developed by Oculus Innovative Sciences in Petaluma, the super-oxygenated water is claimed to be as effective a disinfectant as chlorine bleach, but is harmless to people, animals and plants. If accidentally ingested by a child, the likely impact is a bad case of clean teeth.
[...]
According to Hoji Alimi, founder and president of Oculus, the ion-hungry water creates an osmotic potential that ruptures the cell walls of single-celled organisms, and out leaks the cell's cytoplasm. Because multicellular organisms — people, animals, plants — are tightly bound, the water is prevented from surrounding the cells, and there is no negative impact.

While super-oxygenated water is nothing new — Microcyn has its roots in efforts to decontaminate nuclear reactors' cooling pipes, according to Alimi — it is typically effective for only a few hours after it is formulated. To keep it handy, hospitals and labs must invest in extremely expensive machines costing $100,000 or more.

Oculus has developed a new formula with a shelf life of at least a year, which opens up an array of potential applications.

And unlike prior formulations of super-oxygenated water, Microcyn is pH-neutral, so it won't damage healthy tissue. This has prompted successful experiments in the treatment of challenging wounds like diabetic ulcers.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | John Cleese writing Aardman film

Ooh, this could be good. John Cleese writing Aardman film:

Monty Python star John Cleese is writing the next feature film for Aardman Animations, the makers of Wallace and Gromit have announced.
[...]
"It will be great comedy adventure about a pre-historic culture clash between two tribes, one comparatively evolved tribe, and one un-evolved tribe," he said.

Chris Moore

I've enjoyed each season of Project Greenlight, and I'm sad to read Chris Moore's statement about the end of this season:

Last night was probably the last new episode of Project Greenlight ever. I am sorry to be reporting this here, but anyone reading this blog is a devoted and loyal Project Greenlight fan. You have been loyal and vocal and true fans of what we have tried to do, so I want you all to know the truth first. Although the movie FEAST awaits release, the ratings of this year's Project Greenlight show will not warrant bringing the show back. It is possible that Dimension will do the movie again, which could mean there is a contest again next year. However, my gut is telling me that without the whole three-headed monster of the TV show, contest and film, there is little chance of Project Greenlight continuing.

French in Action, Destinos, and Fokus Deutsch

When I was studying French many years ago, we watched a few episodes of French in Action in class (on VHS tape):

The storyline of an American student and a young Frenchwoman's adventures in Paris and the French countryside is reinforced by Dr. Capretz’s on-camera instruction.

It was surprisingly good. (And Mireille was très jolie.) It was also brand new at the time. Now, it's all on-line.

And there's a similar Spanish program, Destinos, and a German program, Fokus Deutsch.

As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls

From As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls:

A substantial body of research finds that at least 45% of parents' advantage in income is passed along to their children, and perhaps as much as 60%.

The article contends that we don't live in the meritocracy of our cherished American myth, because "Americans are no more or less likely to rise above, or fall below, their parents' economic class than they were 35 years ago."

But that argument presupposes that, in a meritocracy, a father's income wouldn't correlate with his son's, which is ludicrous, because a father and his son aren't two random strangers with nothing in common; they're father and son. Children inherit much more than money from their parents.

Cool Tools -- 20Q

I'd heard of the 20Q, but I didn't know its backstory:

Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17 years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener's genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.

Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000 synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that learning into the chip in the orb. In other words, this sphere is a handheld version of Burgener's Twenty Questions web site. (Because it knows about fewer objects than the web version, it gets confused less often, so its success rate is ironically higher.)

The toy is remarkable. Because it is so small, so autonomous, its intelligence is shocking to the unprepared. Most children can't stump it, and if you stick to objects it will stump smart adults about 80% of the time with 20 questions and most of the time with an additional 5 questions. I love to watch people's reactions when they think of a 'hard' thing, and after a seemingly irrational set of questions you are convinced are dumb, the sly ball tells you what you had in mind. (For instance, it can correctly guess 'flying squirrel'without asking 'does it fly?') People who play chess machines won't be surprised, but just about everyone else is tickled. It feels like the future.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Ramayana

Indian publisher, Amar Chitra Katha, puts out comicbook versions of classical Indian literature, like the Ramayana.

Frankly, it's more than a bit odd to see centuries-old religious texts presented in the same style as The Amazing Spiderman — until you realize that they pretty much read like superhero comics.

Cool Tools -- iStopMotion

iStopMotion sounds like fun:

This is a very cool application that creates stop-motion and time-lapse videos. For years my kids and I have been making claymation episodes, doll and figure animations, paper cutout sequences, and fun time-lapse movies with our family handy-cam, but our primitive method of simply blinking the on-button has always been less than satisfactory. Our brain-dead way creates three problems: the interval is too long (jerky movement), you can't see what motion should be next, and you can't edit out goofs when you make a boo-boo — which is 100% certain.

iStopMotion software is a much better way to do animation, and it solves all three problems. You connect a live video feed from your camera to your computer (via USB or Firewire) and then you control the film from your keyboard — or this is cool — via voice command! After you capture a frame, the program overlays that frame as transparent layer over the current camera view so you can see exactly where you need to move next. You can even request the last 5 frames (onion skinning animators call it) to get a sense of direction and trajectory, which allows a very fine tuning of the motion. And you can edit mistakes, and do redos on the fly. All this is simple enough that my 7-year-old could instantly manage it. Yet it is sophisticated enough that film students use this software for thesis projects. Making time-lapse films is even easier.

Cool Tools -- Costco

I feel like Kevin Kelly is reading my mind when he writes about Costco:

Costco has become my personal shopper. I do some research, then I buy what they sell. Like all discount chains they have professionals working full time looking for deals/quality. But what I like about Costco is their niche — which is my niche. They consistently find a bargain in the 'highest common denominator' bracket. What they seem to aim for, and what I am happy with, is the highest quality common quality. Not the very best, not the cheapest, and not mediocre either, but a good brand-name bargain in the high middle. They consistently deliver a great price on a very popular and competent item. It's neither optimization (the top model with the most features), nor is it minimization (cheapest per feature) nor plain thriftiness. Rather Costco aims for some sort of consumer satisficing, to use Herb Simon's term: a high quality that is just good enough, but at a low-end price.

They make shopping easy by eleminating the tyranny of non-essential choice. You don't have to waste cycles trying to scrutinize similar models or brands. They do that for you: 'here's the good enough one you need' they say. The typical Wal-Mart store will have 80,000 unique stock items; the typical Costco will have only 3,500.

Right now I shop there almost weekly.

OpinionJournal - Neither Fools Nor Cowards

From Neither Fools Nor Cowards:

'The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.'

— Sir William Francis Butler

How Slumping Market for SUVs Is Hurting Detroit's Bottom Line

From How Slumping Market for SUVs Is Hurting Detroit's Bottom Line:

An unpublished study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute estimates that profits of large and midsize SUVs for GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group dropped 40%, or almost $7 billion, from 2001 to the end of last year.

Profits from SUVs dropped 40%, almost $7 billion, from 2001 to the end of last year.

Catch that 'Tiger'

Catch that 'Tiger' looks at the now-extinct Thylacine, the marsupial "tiger" or "wolf" of Tasmania:

This image is one familiar to many Australians. It's also one of the most haunting to us as well. It's from a grainy black and white film shot of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, or Thylacine, in Hobart Zoo in 1933. The film runs only nine seconds — but it's one of the few glimpses any of us will have of the now supposedly extinct mammal — remarkable for reportedly being able to open its jaws wider than any other mammal (a range of 120 degrees) and for being the world's largest marsupial carnivore. And — for embedding itself into 'Australian mythology' as a mysterious and intangible, almost supernatural creature.

I'd propose that while Abraham Zapruder's footage of JFK being shot in Dallas has an eerie resonance with many Americans, for me this simple, nine second film connects on an almost spiritual level for many Australians. It certainly haunts me every time I see it.

I found better Thylacine footage at the ARKive.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing for the original story.)

Science of Nightclub Bouncing Studied

From Science of Nightclub Bouncing Studied:

While bouncers might not be traditional subjects for scientific study, they provided Salter with vivid examples of the kind of dominance hierarchies among humans that Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz studied among barnyard fowl and Jane Goodall observed among chimpanzees. Salter decided to study bouncers when a friend told him, 'Hey, you want dominance, go to nightclubs.'

After an initial survey of bars in Brisbane, Australia, Salter moved to Germany. With Karl Grammer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology in Vienna, he videotaped 60 hours of confrontations between doormen and potential customers at the famous Nacht-Caf�.

Salter found that men and women use different strategies when confronted by doormen assessing whether they are worthy of entry to the Munich hotspot. As men turned the corner and began the long walk up to the wall of doormen, they accelerated, compressed their body speed, and looked straight ahead trying to avoid eye contact with the doormen until absolutely necessary.

Women, in contrast, looked at the doormen, slowed down, and began flirting. The more skin they were showing (Salter diligently measured this off his videotapes), the more they flirted.

The doormen looked at prospective customers' wealth, attractiveness, and youth. To judge how much money a supplicant had to throw around inside, they were particularly concerned with his shoes.

Beautiful women were always welcome, unless they appeared from their excessively skimpy dress, heavy makeup, extremely high heels and slack posture to be prostitutes.

A man in his 60s could get in if he had a lovely young woman on each arm. Women of that age seldom even tried to get past the doormen.

This sounds plausible:

Managers of tough Australian bars, Salter discovered, labeled rum and coke as "the fighting drink." The "Cuba Libre's" alcohol loosens inhibitions and saps judgment, while the sugar and caffeine rev up the drinkers. Beer is safer for bar owners worried about getting their furniture smashed up because it takes beer drinkers longer to get drunk.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com.)

Hiring is Obsolete

In Hiring is Obsolete, Paul Graham makes the case that it costs less to start up a new company than it used to, and that "[t]he less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it." And that's why recent grads should consider starting a new company:

The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.

What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. But there's a way to appeal their judgement. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.

Some perspective on the risks:

If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.

I love this aside about PowerPoint:

For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people's fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you.

An unusual metaphor:

A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. I think there are a lot of undergrads whose brains are in a similar position: they're only a few steps away from being able to start successful startups, if they wanted to, but they don't realize it. They have more than enough technical skill. They just haven't realized yet that the way to create wealth is to make what users want, and that employers are just proxies for users in which risk is pooled.

Dramatic Novelty in Games and Stories

Ernest Adams contrasts Dramatic Novelty in Games and Stories with an example from Red Dwarf:

RIMMER: So there we were at 2:30 in the morning; I was beginning to wish I had never come to cadet training school. To the south lay water - there was no way we could cross that. To the east and west two armies squeezed us in a pincer. The only way was north; I had to go for it and pray the gods were smiling on me. I picked up the dice and threw two sixes. Caldecott couldn't believe it. My go again; another two sixes!

[some time later]

RIMMER: So a six and a three and he came back with a three and a two.

LISTER: Rimmer, can't you tell the story is not gripping me? I'm in a state of non-grippedness, I am completely smegging ungripped. Shut the smeg up.

RIMMER: Don't you want to hear the Risk story?

LISTER: That's what I've been saying for the last fifteen minutes.

RIMMER: But I thought that was because I hadn't got to the really interesting bit.

LISTER: What really interesting bit?

RIMMER: Ah well, that was about two hours later, after he'd thrown a three and a two and I'd thrown a four and a one. I picked up the dice...

LISTER: Hang on Rimmer, hang on... the really interesting bit is exactly the same as the dull bit.

RIMMER: You don't know what I did with the dice though, do you? For all you know, I could have jammed them up his nostrils, head-butted him on the nose and they could have blasted out of his ears. That would've been quite interesting.

LISTER: OK, Rimmer. What did you do with the dice?

RIMMER: I threw a five and a two.

LISTER: And that's the really interesting bit?

RIMMER: Well, it was interesting to me, it got me into Irkutsk.

As Adams points out, "to an outside observer, Risk is a dreadfully repetitious game."

Letter From a Dungeon

The (dormant) gamer in me got a kick out of this Letter From a Dungeon by Ernest Adams:

My Dear Master,

I write to you from the thirteenth level of a dungeon. The dungeon has a name, but I will not disturb you with it, for it sounds ridiculous and made up. My companion and I have stopped to rest and heal ourselves before going on, and I felt that as you have not heard from me since I left the School, you might care to know how your pupil has fared.

If I may say so without impertinence, our adventures have had an altogether different character from what I was led to expect at school. There we were of course taught of many different heroes — King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table; Beowulf; Siegfried; Salah-el-Din; Robin Hood. I fancied that someday I should come to be like them. I was trained to be a warrior by your esteemed self, and we live in a world seemingly designed for heroes and their deeds… and yet I find myself on a quest, or series of quests, so unheroic as to make me wonder if I ever had a proper understanding of the meaning of the word.

But let me begin at the beginning. My companion and I arrived at the town (it has a similarly ludicrous name), and were immediately introduced to a group of folk: a blacksmith, a healing-woman, a grocer, a thaumaturge, and the like. Each of these people sells an array of goods and services at a wide range of prices, yet oddly enough my companion and I seem to be the only customers they ever get. The townspeople themselves are neither warriors nor wizards, for they welcomed us with open arms and promptly began to importune us to undertake errands of various sorts for them, for which they promised rich rewards. Indeed, having achieved several of these I know they do not lie, for with each success they gave us great sums of gold. We have no use for it, however, except to buy overpriced goods at their own shops. While they have no other customers, they also have no competition.

Exploring the countryside around