Legamorons

In The Trackable Society, Arnold Kling defines a legamoron (legal oxymoron) as any law that could not stand up under widespread enforcement. Some examples:

• laws against marijuana use
• immigration laws
• laws against sexual harassment
• laws against betting on sports
• speed limits
• software licenses
• laws against music sharing
• laws requiring people to pay social security taxes for household workers

A really big example:

In fact, the entire tax system could be viewed as a legamoron. Congress deliberately underfunds the computer systems and audit department of the IRS. Otherwise, if households and businesses had to get everything on their returns exactly right, the cost of tax compliance probably would eat up the entire Gross Domestic Product, and there would be nothing left to tax.

In A Case for Immigration, he explains that "we are all illegal":

For politicians, selective enforcement is a very useful tool. Having lots of laws on the books that are not obeyed means that we are at the mercy of the political class, because all of us are doing something illegal. We might be speeders, marijuana users, accounting standards violators, sexual harassers, etc. Any time a politician wants to, he can come after us.

Legamorons give politicians the option of going after political targets while leaving most constituents alone. If you were a crusading attorney general from New York, you could choose to prosecute people entirely on the basis of their unpopularity. When we are all illegal, any of us could be attacked by a crusading attorney general at any time. Only those of us who keep quiet are safe.

Selective enforcement means the rule of men, not the rule of laws. It means that your protection against politically-motivated legal action is only as good as your PR firm.

How to overcome that sinking feeling in quicksand

How to overcome that sinking feeling in quicksand:

'Everybody thinks, thanks to Hollywood, that you can drown in quicksand. Basically if you do a simple buoyancy calculation, the Archimedes force, it is immediately evident that you can't drown completely,' said Daniel Bonn, of the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Quicksand consists of salt, water, sand and clay. It is the water content that makes quicksand, which is found near estuaries, beaches and rivers, so dangerous.

'If you tread on quicksand, or liquefy it by moving, it goes from something that is almost completely solid to something that is almost completely liquid,' Bonn told Reuters.

He and his colleagues showed that Hollywood had got it wrong by measuring the viscosity, the resistance to flow, of quicksand and its sinking ability.

They also calculated the amount of force necessary to get a trapped foot out -- and found it was the equivalent needed to lift a medium-sized car. Their findings are reported in the science journal Nature.

If someone falls into quicksand they begin to sink and the sand packs densely around the feet, forming a type of trap. In films people sinking in quicksand usually grab on to an overhanging tree branch or are pulled out just as they are about to disappear under the mucky surface.

But Bonn and his team said in real life the victim would sink halfway into the quicksand but would not disappear.

The scientists advised people trapped in quicksand not to panic and to wiggle.

'All you have to do to get your foot out is to introduce water into the sand and if you can do that along your leg by wiggling your leg around, that is the best way to get out,' Bonn said.

Ivory Cower

Victor Davis Hanson claims that "university presidents have lost their dignity" in Ivory Cower:

Finally, there is Robert J. Birgeneau, the new chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Upon arriving in the Bay Area, he quickly vowed to solve the problems he had found. Surprisingly, these had nothing to do with a decline in academic standards, deterioration in the quality of Berkeley's key departments, or a state funding crisis. Instead, the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic, and African-American students enrolled than it should — the campus was only 3% black, 9.5% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white. (The California population comprises 6.5% blacks, 33% Hispanics, 0.92% Native Americans, 11% Asian-Americans, and 45% whites.) Mr. Birgeneau is obsessed with racial diversity, as determined by percentages and quotas. But as we shall see, the numbers, under closer examination, may make him regret pandering to the diversity industry.

Chancellor Birgeneau blames the apparent statistical injustices on Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that forbids the use of racial criteria in state hiring; it passed with the support of 55% of the electorate. In his view, however, democracy ought to defer to elite opinion; thus, to this Canadian academic the state's voters were obviously misguided: 'I personally don't believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence.'

One can learn a lot about the pathologies of the contemporary university from what its presidents say — and don't say. A close look at the data suggests a different picture from the one implied by Mr. Birgeneau's gratuitous lamentations about the lack of diversity. Whites, for instance, are underenrolled at Berkeley: They amount to around 35% of undergraduates versus 45% of the state's population. Given this fact, why doesn't the Chancellor complain about the shortage of whites on campus?

He is oddly quiet, too, about the more explosive issue of the Asian-American presence. This group constitutes almost half the Berkeley student population, even though Asians make up only about 11% of California residents and 4% of the general U.S. population. Why doesn't Mr. Birgeneau admit that achieving his racial utopia would require deliberately reducing the enrollment of Asian-American students mdash; presumably by discounting meritocratic criteria and test scores and instead emphasizing 'community service' or other nebulous standards designed to circumvent Proposition 209? But because the new chancellor is obviously a sensitive sort, he cannot say what he apparently means: something like, 'We have too many Asians, almost five times too many, and I am here to impose a quota on them and other suspect races.' Instead, he worries about 'underrepresentation' of some, while denying the logical corollary of 'overrepresentation' of others. The same logic applies to gender, by the way. UC campuses enroll thousands more women than men, very much out of proportion to the general population, and yet Mr. Birgeneau does not decry the 'overabundance' of women.

Remember, too, that Asians have suffered a particularly long history of discrimination in California. Despite everything from immigration quotas to forced internment during World War II, they have the highest high-school graduation rates in the state, while blacks and Hispanics suffer the lowest. What, then, could we learn from the Asian-American experience that seems to render past hurdles to achievement irrelevant to present academic performance? Don't expect Chancellor Birgeneau to take the lead in asking this question.

Stalin's Old Villa, On the Block, Sparks Post-Soviet Fracas

Stalin's Old Villa, On the Block, Sparks Post-Soviet Fracas describes Stalin's "secret White House," a private resort in Abkhazia known as "Cold River":

Cold River would certainly be an attractive refuge for a privacy-minded Russian oligarch. Painted military green and camouflaged by soaring firs and pines, it's barely visible from sky, land, or sea — a concession to Stalin's notorious paranoia. It can only be reached by a precipitous road that snakes up a thickly wooded hillside. An elevator connects it to the beach.

Modeling, Simulations Can Help a City Offer More Efficient Exodus

Modeling, Simulations Can Help a City Offer More Efficient Exodus looks at traffic in an emergency:

Under realistic conditions, a freeway carries about 2,000 vehicles per lane each hour past any given point. Doubling the number of lanes by making southbound ones northbound, as on I-45 from Galveston to Dallas, is therefore a crucial first step. Houston officials ordered the reversal only at midday Thursday, after vacillating for more than a day.

That 'contra-flow' will increase a road's capacity 60% to 70%, calculates traffic engineer Avi Polus of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. It doesn't double capacity because left-hand exits, drivers' confusion over going the 'wrong' way and signs turned backward gum up the works.
[...]
Houston officials admit that contra-flow was not even part of their emergency planning. If it had been, says Prof. Polus, "it shouldn't take more than two or three hours to convert freeway lanes to a contra-flow" and change the traffic signals, exit ramps and feeder roads.

The take-away:

Bottom line: If you have six lanes of freeway (of which three are contra-flow), then at 2,000 vehicles an hour per lane and 2.5 people per vehicle, you can get about 600,000 people out of a city every 24 hours. You can load more people into each car or use buses and trains, but evacuating 1.5 million souls will take two to three days. Getting people out of harm's way if there is no advance warning (after, say, a radiological bomb) is just not in the cards.

One final word of advice: motorcycle.

Bacteria at Your Fingertips

Bacteria at Your Fingertips explains that "the gunk in your keyboard could kill you":

A study conducted by Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona, concluded that the computer keyboard was the fifth most germ-contaminated spot in an office. (Topped only by your phone, your desktop — home to an impressive 10 million bacteria — and the handles on the office water fountain and microwave door.) Out of 12 surfaces studied the toilet seat came in cleanest, in case you're wondering where to have your next lunch break.

The Sin of Sin City

I never got around to seeing Sin City, but I meant to. Andrew Klavan's The Sin of Sin City offers an interesting assessment:

The movie, an almost uncannily accurate reproduction of the Frank Miller cult-classic comic-book series of the same name, is certainly as brilliant as it is bad. It’s brilliant because its black-and-white palette with pulsing intrusions of red, yellow, and blue looks beautiful; because its acute and vertiginous camera angles are thrilling; because its imitation of the comic’s atmosphere is remarkably complete; and because the cast is excellent. It’s bad because all that aesthetic power is put into the service of a masturbatory barbarity.

The film’s interlocking stories are all, essentially, the same story. Boy hurts girl; other boy avenges girl. Along the way, the severed heads of women are mounted on walls, the testicles of rapists are ripped off by hand, women are eaten by men, men are eaten by dogs, throats are cut, brains spattered.... In other words, all those gorgeous visuals ultimately represent nothing more interesting than the internal world of a crawly 12-year-old boy, his alternating fantasies of torturing naked women and of being the strongman who comes to their rescue.

Now, 12-year-old boys are what they are and fantasies are what they are, and I condemn neither. If boys’ consciences didn’t wrestle with their violent desires, there would be no adventure stories. Nor, as my own novels attest, do I object to sex and violence as pure entertainment. Sex and violence are central to entertainment because they are central to the language of our dreams.

But the translation of daydreams into art — even violent, sexy pop art—requires at least some minimal interaction between the raw material and a compassionate conception of the terror and dignity of being human.

Green Berets Prefer Biodiesel

From Green Berets Prefer Biodiesel:

When Erwin Rommel's Panzer tanks ran out of diesel fuel in North Africa in World War II, the German general poured cooking oil into their gas tanks to keep the vehicles fighting.

The U.S. military thinks Germany's 'Desert Fox' might have been onto something. At bases throughout the United States, soldiers are filling their gas tanks with biodiesel — diesel fuel made from soybean or other vegetable oil.

From that intro, you'd think the military was switching to biodiesel for logistical regions, but it's not. It's simply trying to meet government goals set by the Energy Policy Act of 1992.

From the title, you'd think the Army's Special Forces were involved. The article mentions the Marines, Navy, and Air Force — no Army, and no Green Berets.

No Green Acres? Try Skyscrapers

From No Green Acres? Try Skyscrapers:

Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They're heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt down.

Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting, servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single computer technician's salary.

The business case:

As of mid-2005, it cost as much as 50 cents to transport a 1-pound head of lettuce from California (where 85 percent of America's lettuce is grown) to the East Coast, according to Ram Acharya, an agricultural economist at Arizona State University. If the lettuce can be grown near where it's eaten, it will have an automatic cost advantage.

OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000 bags of lettuce leaves per year — that's a yield similar to a 100-acre traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a head.

Shooting Not to Kill

Shooting Not to Kill summarizes current non-lethal weapon (NLW) technology:

It is invariably the most novel and strange NLWs that get the most press attention — like the “Who, Me? bomb” (contemplated by the U.S. military as early as 1945 and intended to simulate flatulence in enemy ranks) and the pheromone-based “Gay bomb” (proposed in 1994 to compel an enemy to “make love, not war”). Both of these have been discussed and joked about widely in the media, although neither was ever pursued. But some of the newest real-life NLWs are pretty bizarre, too. For instance, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is a sort of screeching megaphone that can project noises at just over 150 decibels. Too much exposure to that level of noise can cause permanent deafness, but the technology’s backers believe that most people even briefly exposed to LRAD’s noise would run away. The system has already been used in Iraq, including in Fallujah. Israel has used a similar weapon, dubbed “The Scream,” which emits a painfully high-pitched noise.

Another NLW under development — and reportedly to be deployed in Iraq for the first time later this year — is the Active Denial System, a concentrated millimeter-wave beam. Like a microwave oven, it heats moisture. When aimed at a person, the target’s skin warms up, and then gets hotter and hotter, reaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit—a point of agonizing, albeit non-lethal, pain. Like the LRAD, it causes targets to run away and crowds to disperse.

Most of the criticisms of NLWs relate to the possibility that the weapons could be overused by troops who think the weapons are safe because they are not intended to be lethal. Other criticism involves the possibility that new NLWs could be used for torture; human rights groups have already complained that the Active Denial System, for instance, could be abused in that way. And some NLWs under development might violate international treaties to which the United States is a party.

The Utopian Nightmare

The Utopian Nightmare examines the failure of foreign aid to pull Africa out of poverty:

After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths.

Boss-Zilla!

Boss-Zilla! describes what it's like to work for Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, who has gone through 250 assistants in five years:

The producer — who once forced an underling to tape a sign defining the word 'anticipate' in huge letters above his desk — says that when he asks follow-up questions about work, assistants often look back at him 'like I'm speaking Urdu.' He tells them, 'When I ask you these questions, have an answer ready. Then I would think you're intelligent.'

He is also known for a wicked sense of humor: When one assistant routinely sported ink-stained shirt pockets, Mr. Rudin bought him a half-dozen expensive dress shirts at Bergdorf Goodman, which he then had an intern spot with ink blotches.

The atmosphere drives assistants to perform remarkable tasks. In May 2004, for instance, director Stephen Daldry was climbing in the Himalayas when Mr. Rudin became desperate to show him a new screenplay. After an assistant got the pages into the director's hands in Nepal, Mr. Daldry says he later asked Mr. Rudin in amazement, 'How did you find me?' (An assistant got Mr. Daldry's office to say where he was vacationing, then hired a specialty courier service to take the script to Kathmandu.)

In 1992, L.A.-based assistant Adam Schroeder was asked to deliver an offer to author Terry McMillan, whose best-seller 'Waiting to Exhale' was the subject of a bidding war. Mr. Schroeder says he flew to San Francisco on the Fourth of July, then drove to her suburban home, where she answered the door in a bathrobe. Even after Mr. Schroeder helped the writer's little boy search for a lost rabbit, Mr. Rudin didn't get the film rights. The loss didn't get Mr. Schroeder fired. He now operates his own production outfit in Hollywood. Ms. McMillan declined to comment.

Other times when things go wrong, Mr. Rudin lets loose. Former assistants say he sometimes vents his anger by throwing phones and office supplies, prompting assistants to take precautions. Some feared Mr. Rudin might hurl an easily accessible framed picture on his desk, so they surreptitiously moved it out of his reach. Others measured Mr. Rudin's phone cord so they could keep the appropriate distance. 'The rookies often stood too close,' remembers Mr. Evans.

Angry Surfers Say Cage-Diving Changes Great White's Way

From Angry Surfers Say Cage-Diving Changes Great White's Way:

This shark-diving industry, established in the late 1990s, has become big business on the Cape coast. Drawing in some 35,000 mostly American and European adrenaline junkies a year, shark divers pay some $6.3 million in fees to 12 licensed operators, or as much as $200 a dive, and more for hotel, food and airfare.

But there isn't just fish blood in the water. As the cage-diving industry flourishes, Cape Town beaches — a Mecca for surfers — have been hit by a spate of gruesome shark attacks on people. Critics blame the deaths on shark-diving practices such as baiting and chumming, or the throwing of ground fish into the ocean. Cage-dive operators, these critics say, may have taught sharks to associate humans with food, turning the ocean's apex predators into man-eaters.

Monster Mold Threatens Health in the South

Much of the hurricane-hit South is covered in mold, which was a problem even before everything got soaked. From Monster Mold Threatens Health in the South:

A Louisiana State University allergist, the late Dr. John Salvaggio, described at medical meetings in the 1970s what he called 'New Orleans asthma,' an illness that filled hospital emergency rooms each fall with people who couldn't breathe. He linked it to high levels of mold spores that appeared in the humid, late summer months.

Brokers Fiddle as Real Estate Burns

Alan Murray objects to realtor commissions in Brokers Fiddle as Real Estate Burns:

There are more Realtors out there today — 1.2 million — than there were a decade ago.

Compare that with what happened to stockbrokers, a similar breed who saw their commissions fall from dollars to pennies over the course of three decades. Or look at the even more dramatic fate of travel agents, whose commissions on airline travel plummeted from 12% to nothing between 1995 and 2002.

In an age when information was scarce, Realtors could claim big commissions, because they controlled the gold — the information on houses for sale. But in an age when information is ubiquitous, it's hard to understand how they continue to rake in such fees.

How hunger gnaws away at our human dignity

In How hunger gnaws away at our human dignity, Dodie Bellamy reviews Sharman Apt Russell's Hunger: An Unnatural History, which includes this historical tidbit:

Russell also revisits the notorious 1944 'Minnesota Experiment,' headed by Dr. Ancel Keys (who developed K rations for the Army), which used Quakers and other conscientious objectors as 'volunteers' to lose 24 percent of their body weight. The experiment's unsettling side effects included the rapid deterioration of each subject's personality. Over months, cheerful men grew morose, flat, then bellicose, angry and just plain miserable. They weren't allowed to eat food, so they went on shopping sprees instead, assembling junk-store collections of worthless tchotchkes, in a bizarre ritual of compensation.

Return of the King

Return of the King notes that Peter Jackson has been publishing video "Production Diaries" of his work on King Kong at Kongisking.net.

It also notes that Peter Jackson has lost his hobbit-belly; he's lost 70 pounds in the last year.

In addition to working on the movie directly, Jackson is building his movie-making empire:

He is also the sole overseer of a rapidly expanding movie empire. Wellywood, as it's known to Jackson groupies, encompasses some 1,300 crew members, 7,500 cast members and extras, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of facilities, including soundstages, a motion-capture studio, a props and costume shop, and an antique airplane factory — all scattered across block after block of the Wellington suburbs. When you hire Jackson to direct a movie, Kamins says, "you're making a deal with a biosphere. With a community."

The centerpiece of Jackson's empire is the Weta Workshop, the 65,000-square-foot facility on the site of a former water park outside Wellington. Named after a prehistoric cockroachlike insect indigenous to New Zealand, Weta is an umbrella company encompassing the workshop proper, the f/x shop, and a merchandise company. Lord of the Rings veteran Elijah Wood has called Weta Workshop "Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but without the candy."

I was wondering what "Weta" meant...

Breaking a Taboo, High Fashion Starts Making Goods Overseas

According to Breaking a Taboo, High Fashion Starts Making Goods Overseas, Italian craftsmanship has long held a certain mystique, but even luxury good production has moved to developing nations:

The 'Made in Italy' mystique dates back to the early 20th century when artisans throughout the Italian peninsula began exporting their products and know-how. Neapolitan shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo was one of the first to venture abroad when he hand-stitched shoes for Jean Harlow, Douglas Fairbanks and other 1920s Hollywood stars. Florentine leather-goods maker Gucci soon followed suit.

After World War II, Italian craftsmen developed a second expertise. Using new ways to wash yarn, the key to high-quality knits, Italy soon surpassed Scotland as the world's best knitwear producer. By the mid-1950s, the 'Made in Italy' label had developed unparalleled snob appeal around the world. Even French companies such as Louis Vuitton and Chanel transferred some production to Italy.

The first shift came during the 1990s luxury-goods boom. Some high-end fashion companies quietly began moving production of secondary, cheaper lines to Eastern Europe to help meet rising demand. Italian handbag maker Francesco Biasia, whose purses sell for between $350 and $500, started shifting production to China and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. Creative Director Claudio Biasia says the company gambled on what it saw as shifting tastes. 'Younger consumers don't care where a product is made,' he says. 'They care about creativity.'

Scientists capture giant squid on camera

Scientists capture giant squid on camera:

Japanese scientists have taken the first photographs of one of the most mysterious creatures in the deep ocean — the giant squid.

Until now the only information about the behavior of the creatures which measure up to 18 meters (59 feet) in length has been based on dead or dying squid washed up on shore or captured in commercial fishing nets.

But Tsunemi Kubodera, of the National Science Museum, and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association, both in Tokyo have captured the first images of Architeuthis attacking bait 900 meters (yards) below the surface in the cold, dark waters of the North Pacific.

'We show the first wild images of a giant squid in its natural environment,' they said in a report on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings B of the Royal Society.

Little is known about the creatures because it has been so difficult to locate and study them alive. Large ships and specialist equipment, which is costly, are needed to study deep sea environments.

The Japanese scientists found the squid by following sperm whales, the most effective hunters of giant squid, as they gathered to feed between September and December in the deep waters off the coast of the Ogasawara Islands in the North Pacific.

They used a remote long-line camera and depth logging system to capture the giant squid in the ocean depths.

'The most dramatic character of giant squids is the pair of extremely long tentacles, distinct from the eight shorter arms. The long tentacles make up to two-thirds of the length of the dead specimens to date,' the scientists said in the journal.

They added that the giant squid appear to be a much more active predator than researchers had suspected and tangled their prey in their elongated feeding tentacles.

Heavy Metal Makes Lighter Planes

From Heavy Metal Makes Lighter Planes:

Qantas engineer Ian Salmon tested wing sections covered with a piezoelectric material that vibrates when a current is applied to it. When the tone of the sound was at its most effective pitch, Salmon's wing panel achieved 22 percent more lift than it would have without the piezoelectric hum.
[...]
It's all about changing the air flow from an unstable laminar flow to a turbulent flow that increases lift, Cummings said. The vibrations change the way the air behaves when it starts to break away from the wing's surface, sucking it closer.

20:20 vision

20:20 vision presents a long list of geniuses who died young:

Keats added to art's martyrology by dying at 25. Shelley lasted until he was 29 when, recklessly eager for extinction, he drowned in a storm off the Italian coast. Byron, having reached decrepitude at 36, pointlessly perished during a chivalric escapade in the Greek war of independence.

Romantic writers worked with an almost crazed acceleration, aware that maturity was a death sentence. Georg Buchner, battling meningitis and depression while fending off political persecution, revolutionised dramatic form in plays like Danton's Death (written in five weeks) and Wozzeck (part of the Barbican's Young Genius season), which he hadn't quite finished when he died of typhus in 1837, aged 23.

Pushkin single-handedly invented Russian literature, then died in the same year as Buchner in an inane duel; he was 38, and had disgraced himself by outliving his self-destructive idol, Byron. Baudelaire paid tribute to the artist's stubborn refusal to accept inexorable time: genius, he said, was childhood recovered at will (and with the aid, although he didn't say so, of hashish).
[...]
A Lancashire lad called Jeremiah Horrocks noticed errors in the calculations of planetary orbits while he was still a teenager, and correctly calculated the transit of Venus. Horrocks published his findings in 1639, and died suddenly two years later; he was 22.

In 1832 Evariste Galois challenged an acquaintance to a duel in order to avenge a woman's honour. The night before the meeting, he sat up to record his mathematical testament, a prophetic exposition of abstract algebra. In those few hours, he invented what we call group theory. Galois was killed the next morning. As peritonitis from his wound wracked him, he said to his brother: 'Don't cry. It takes all my courage to die at 20.'

Males, Females, and College

In Males, Females, and College, Arnold Kling cites this stat: "Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men."

He then shares the distribution of AP scores of the guys and girls in his econ class:

Note that the mean is the same, but the variance is higher for males. There is some evidence, alluded to by the infamous Larry Summers, that such a pattern is true more generally. That is, men [are] more represented at the top and the bottom of distributions of ability.

My guess is that as of 1960, two things reduced the proportion of women in colleges. One was overt discrimination. A second was that much less than half of the population went to college, so that colleges selected more from the top of the distribution.

Leaving aside overt discrimination (although it really was an important factor), imagine that the rule in 1960 was for a college to accept everyone in my class who scored a 4 or better on the AP. Then 2 out of the three students would have been male. Suppose that today the rule is to accept everyone who scored a 3 or better on the AP. Then 5 out of 8 would be female.

My guess is that these numbers have really changed the mating game in college. When I was in college, girls could be choosy and a lot of guys wound up lonely. I think it's the other way around today.

Because social life is such an important issue for students, I wonder if they won't find a way to re-equilibrate the situation.

Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina

From Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina:

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
[...]
The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

"All I want are frickin' sharks with frickin' lasers on their foreheads."

Keith Ferrazzi, Home Depot, and the Blue Dot

Last week I noted that "Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, sounds unbearable." That was after reading an article about him, which described him as juggling multiple cell phones and multiple PDAs. I don't want to be anywhere near that guy — especially while waiting for my flight.

I've now seen him talk, and I can say that he is in fact...an engaging public speaker.

But this is what engaged my curiosity. After his talk, we were told that Home Depot — long story; they're not connected to Ferrazzi — had sponsored the event and they were providing copies of Never Eat Alone — for some of us.

If you had a blue dot on the back of your program, you got a copy. If you didn't, you stared longingly at the pile of crisp new books.

And that's what we did: stare longingly at the pile of crisp new books. Everyone desparately wanted a book. That's the power of artificial scarcity.

Christopher Hitchens

Real Time with Bill Maher has become rather dull, with few strong conservative guests and no conservative presence in the audience. Everyone simply agrees that Bush is an idiot and feels no need to present any evidence.

A few days ago though, Maher invited on former-socialist Christopher Hitchens, now a supporter of the war in Iraq.

From The Passion of Christopher Hitchens:

What tempers the furor over Hitchens is the recognition that he has not really become a soldier for the right. Browsing through his ample writings during the first quarter of 2005, one finds, alongside support for the war in Iraq, a variety of opinions that many American leftists would applaud: a slap at the late Pope John Paul II for “saying that condoms are worse than AIDS,” praise for John Brown as a prophet “who anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation and all that has ensued from it,” and a tribute to Tom Paine as “our unacknowledged founding father ... the moral and intellectual author of the Declaration of Independence.” Hitchens also continues to oppose the death penalty and to advocate putting Henry Kissinger on trial as a war criminal.

Hitchens was clearly the best-read member of the Real Time panel. No one knew how to react when he matter-of-factly pointed out that America's conflict with Islam goes back to the Barbary pirates, who enslaved American sailors as infidels.

Dutch Court Fight Lays Bare Reality Of Kidnap Industry

According to Dutch Court Fight Lays Bare Reality Of Kidnap Industry, kidnappings are big business — although no one wants to admit it:

From Iraq to Chechnya to China, the kidnap industry is booming. According to companies that offer ransom insurance and groups that track the problem, kidnapping generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, enriching criminal gangs and helping fuel armed insurgencies. In almost all cases, for fear of encouraging the practice, governments and companies that pay ransoms deny cooperating with kidnap groups.

In Mr. Erkel's case, this script has unraveled. In an unusually public spat, the Dutch Foreign Ministry has gone to court in Geneva to try and force the Swiss branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, to pay back the money it says was used to purchase Mr. Erkel's freedom — plus 9.2% interest. Documents in that case, which was filed in June 2004, plus numerous interviews in Europe and Russia, lift the veil on the kinds of shadowy negotiations often held between kidnappers, intermediaries and victims' governments, employers and families.

European countries, in particular, often bend their no-ransom pledges, according to many people who work in this field. A string of French and Italian hostages were freed in Iraq earlier this year and few experts believe government denials that ransoms were paid. The U.S. government sticks to its stated policy of not paying. American companies and individuals, however, often cough up through intermediaries hired by insurance companies, says Greg Bangs, a specialist in kidnap and ransom policies for Chubb & Son, an insurance company.

The practice is buoyed by the tangled relationships in many parts of the world between kidnap gangs and the local law-enforcement agencies ostensibly charged with capturing them. In June, the Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Alu Alkhanov, told reporters that Russian forces were responsible for as much as 10% of the reported kidnappings in the region — though he said the practice was legal because they were detaining suspected insurgents. Human-rights groups say families often pay Russian troops to secure the release of an arrested relative. The local police chief investigating the Erkel case says a portion of ransom payments often ends up in the pockets of security officials.

Vaccines That Keep Salmon Safe to Eat May Help Humans

By translating viruses from RNA to DNA, scientist have developed effective vaccines — for fish. From Vaccines That Keep Salmon Safe to Eat May Help Humans:

The domesticated fish are Atlantic salmon, favored by farmers for their docile temperament and fast growth — qualities that make them the Hereford cattle of aquaculture. But unlike indigenous types, the transplanted species have little natural resistance to the local virus, which causes fatal hemorrhaging, and can contract it from the wild fish swimming past their pens.

In mid-2001, a destructive epizootic, the animal equivalent of an epidemic, struck, sickening Atlantic salmon in 36 farms over a two-year period. In some pens, more than 90% of the young fish succumbed.
[...]
The large loss of fish spurred new efforts to develop a vaccine against the virus, which causes the untreatable disease called Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis, or IHN. This time, scientists tried arming the immune system using a snippet of viral genetic code translated into DNA, rather than a traditional approach, such as culturing a weakened IHN virus.

In detail:

Scientists at Aqua Health, a unit of Novartis in Prince Edward Island, Canada, solved the problems of potency and mass production. They took advantage of work by Ottawa scientists, who put a gene for a protein that covers the IHN virus in a ring of DNA, or plasmid, which some bacteria use to share genetic code. A single shot of vaccine behind the salmon's dorsal fin contains 10 micrograms of these DNA rings.

Plasmids make their way into muscle cells, much as infecting viruses do, where they spur the cells' protein-making machinery to pump out copies of the viral protein. By tricking these cells to make telltale proteins of a virus, the DNA-based vaccines better mimic infections and so can confer greater protection.

Like salmon swimming upstream, the viral protein produced by the fish cells migrates into the bloodstream. The fish gird for battle by producing antibodies and preparing white blood cells to fight the virus, a response traditional vaccines barely stimulate. After a few months, the muscle cells containing the plasmids die — as normal muscle cells would — so fish vaccinated as youngsters carry virtually no traces of vaccine except their immunological armor.

NerdTV #3: Bill Joy

The third episode of NerdTV interviews Bill Joy, formerly of Sun, who is now designing a large sailboat:

Well it's an attempt to be, in doing integrated systems design the idea is that a modest number of people living on a sailboat — you know a larger sailboat — is something say more than 100 feet long. Looks like a little island. You have a crew, six, ten crew, five, ten guests. You know ten to 20 people. You're in a salt water environment and so you have to make fresh water and you have to heat it and keep the place cool and move yourself around and cook and clean and do sewage clean up and pump the bilge and not put oil overboard and create power and not have too much emissions and try to be quiet and not too noisy living right next to your power generation, sewage and all the other treatment plants. So it's like an island. And so it's an opportunity to study energy efficiency looking at all the kinds of technology that are available. So for example, if you want to move it around rather than just getting a bigger engine try to figure out a way to make it move with less power and quieter. And rather than putting a big air conditioner try to use better insulation because if you put in a bigger air conditioner you gotta have a bigger generator to run it and bigger fuel tanks to power it.

So you start to see the balance between insulation and so on. And so we started this project about a year ago and looked at all the advanced technologies, looked for insulation, windows, heating, cooling, secondary heat recovery fuel cells, bio-medic ideas in propulsion, aerodynamics, plastic teak decking instead of real teak to try and minimize maintenance, lower more energy efficient water making. So basically a survey on the consumption side because really it's not a factory for much of anything but on the consumption side and the utility side like a water treatment or water making plant, a sewage plant, an electrical plant looking at all those sets of technologies and how they can be done in a more integrated and energy efficient way. So that's been a pretty big project and we're almost complete with the design.

NerdTV #2: Max Levchin

The second episode of NerdTV interviews Max Levchin, co-founder of ebay, after his third all-nighter of the week:

I think there's something very special about the all nighter ethic, and some people dig it, some people don't. So it definitely varies per person. There's definitely something about the nocturnal lifestyle for engineers specifically that really opens up the chakras of creativity or code writing. And people get slightly sillier, but also maybe a little bit more creative. And they get tired and there's some spirit and camaraderie that wakes up in those hours, and you get more done because you're not afraid to tell people to shove it when they're doing something wrong, and the interactions become more interesting.

But also I think there's this massive value that you harness when you're doing an all nighter where you've gone for presumably 7 or 8 hours of work and you're really getting up to a point where something's about to be born, and then you go for 8 more hours. And instead of stopping to go to sleep and let some of these ideas dissipate, you actually focus on the findings you've made in the last few hours and you just go crazy and do some more of that.

There's definitely a downside, because as you get more and more tired your effective IQ probably drops some. And so you have to start being more careful. But if you've been around the block enough times you do things like mutual code reviews and you look at what you've done and make sure people are sane about it.

Iraq and the Police Principle

In Iraq and the Police Principle, Nathan Smith examines the "world policeman" analogy:

While the notion of America as 'world policeman' is often mocked, to understand the principles by which a police force maintains order in a city is essential to good foreign policy.

A police force must (1) be (and be known to be) stronger than anyone else in the city, and (2) operate according to the law, i.e. by a set of well-defined and public rules and procedures. If these conditions hold, citizens live under a generalized credible threat that illegal behavior will be punished. Prosecuting a crime is costly — to the taxpayer who pays cops', judges' and wardens' salaries, to the criminal who loses his freedom or his life, and to the occasional innocent who is convicted by mistake — and does not right the wrong — murder victims cannot be revived, rape cannot be reversed. But the prosecution signals to other potential criminals that obeying the law is in their interest, and society benefits from the crimes that are not committed (or even contemplated) for fear of the police. In the same way, a judicious use of military force can establish a generalized credible threat against potential aggressors or murderous tyrants, thus amplifying the returns, in peace and freedom, to the occasional intervention.

The first Gulf War is a shining example of foreign policy that exploits the police principle. In expelling Saddam's forces from Kuwait, we applied overwhelming force against one aggressor, and in the process established a generalized credible threat that overwhelming force would be, or at least was likely to be, used against aggressors elsewhere.

The threat was credible not only because we won the war handily — everyone (but Saddam) knew we would do that, once we started — but because air power enabled us to do it with few casualties, which made it more likely that we would be willing to do it again.

The threat was generalized because our intervention had the firm backing of international law. International law is conceptually problematic and morally inadequate: it habitually legitimizes dictators while often denying democracies the means to defend themselves. (The Israelis ignore it to survive.) But it is an efficient tool for defining thresholds of acceptable behavior.

Classic Imperialism

In Classic Imperialism, Robert Kaplan describes a number of small humanitarian missions by U.S. Special Forces (and Marines) throughout Africa and Asia:

All of this — not military occupations, with their attendant proconsuls — is what constitutes classic imperialism: by, through, and with the 'indigs,' as the Special Forces phrase goes. Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops, since time immemorial, are what has allowed imperial powers to project their might at minimum risk and expense. It was true of Rome even in adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of imperial France and Great Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies. Iraq, especially when the Coalition Provisional Authority was in control instead of the Iraqis, is a perversion, not an accurate expression, of traditional imperialism.

Hurricane Relief? Or a $200,000 Check?

Steven E. Landsburg asks, Hurricane Relief? Or a $200,000 Check?:

Before we spend $200 billion on New Orleans disaster relief, can we just pause for about three seconds, please? That should be long enough to divide one number by another. The numbers I have in mind are, on the one hand, $200 billion, and, on the other hand, 1 million people — the prestorm population of the New Orleans area, broadly defined.

Two-hundred billion divided by 1 million is 200,000. For the cost of reconstructing New Orleans, the government could simply give $200,000 to every resident of the region — that's $800,000 for a family of four. Given a choice, which do you think the people down there would prefer?

I'm guessing most of them would take the cash. I can't prove that, but I think I can make it plausible: If your city were demolished, would you prefer to have it rebuilt — with someone else making all the decisions about how it gets rebuilt — or would you prefer to collect $800,000 in cash and move your family elsewhere? I've asked a lot of people this question during the last week, and, according to my informal unscientific survey, pretty much everyone would take the money and run.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

The kindness of strangers

The kindness of strangers examines the life of Robert Trivers, the troubled iconoclast who first explained the evolutionary advantages of altruism (for a "selfish" gene):

In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers's papers.

EO Wilson, who coined the term sociobiology, described him as one of the most influential — and consistently correct — theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time. But he was reckless, aggressive and suffered from bipolar disorder which led him into agonising, debilitating breakdowns. His work was politically controversial. Harvard would not give him a professorship and towards the end of the 70s he seemed to vanish. In fact, he went in 1979 to the University of California in Santa Cruz, then a university with a reputation for drug abuse and slackness. 'It was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake,' he says, 'in the sense that I can't afford to make another one like that. I survived, and I helped raise my children for a while; but that was all.'

He also switched his attention from theoretical biology to the detailed and difficult study of stretches of DNA and their conflicts within particular bodies. He says: 'Call it arrogance, overconfidence, or ignorance; it was mostly ignorance, I think. I naively thought - this was my phrase - I'll whip genetics into shape in three to five years. Fifteen years later, genetics has whipped me into shape. You do not whip genetics into shape within three to five years. It took me eight to 10 to understand what I was reading.'

He has a long, long history of mastering a subject, then moving on:

He was sent to grand schools — at Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts, where the Bushes went, he was regarded as a promising mathematician after he taught himself calculus, in three months, aged 14; and he took two advanced maths courses before he arrived at Harvard. Typically enough, he then lost interest in maths, and decided to be a lawyer instead, fighting injustice, defending people who were minimally criminal. He had grown up in Washington as well as Berlin and Copenhagen, and was keenly aware of injustice and racial discrimination.

In order to become a lawyer, he had to have a humanities degree, so his first studies at Harvard were in American history. They were interrupted by the first, and worst, of his breakdowns, which took the form of spiralling mania — staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and then collapsing. He was hospitalised, and treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs.

While recovering, he took courses in art, and was hired to illustrate, and then to write, a series of textbooks for high schools. Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology. He fell in love with the logic of evolution. In the flow of genes through generations, and the steady, inexorable shaping of behaviour by natural selection, he saw a geometry of time, as beautiful as the geometry of space that Newton and Galileo had discovered.

Read the whole article.

iPod, circa 1954

Boing Boing's iPod, circa 1954 points to a BBC story, The Old New, about a once-novel transistor radio that bears an uncanny resemblance to the iPod Mini:

The Regency TR-1 transistor radio, made in 1954, had a decent claim to be a genuine piece of innovation, however. It was, by popular agreement, the world's first commercially sold transistor pocket radio.

Small enough to hold in your hand, and powered by batteries, it came in a variety of delicious colours, including green, pearlescent blue, lavender, white and red.

The device went on sale just in time for hip young gadget freaks to hear Elvis Presley singing That's All Right — recognised by many as the moment at which rock'n'roll was born.

The TR-1 was marketed under the slogan "See it! Hear it! Get it!"

We're All Machiavellians

In We're All Machiavellians, Frans B.M. de Waal explains his groundbreaking work with chimpanzees:

It's refreshing to work with chimpanzees: They are the honest politicians we all long for. When the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises.

I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem Zoo chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days students were supposed to be antiestablishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observations of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained.

Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible; not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and yes, the desire to dominate.

Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple.

The Planning Illusion

Arnold Kling describes The Planning Illusion:

When something goes wrong, there is a natural desire to blame a lack of planning. In fact, with hindsight, it is always possible to come up with a plan that would have worked better. I would refer to this as the planning illusion. This illusion causes a number of problems.

First, the planning illusion leads to the syndrome known as 'planning for the last war.' Organizations develop a set of operating strategies that are based on theories that are outdated, or just completely misguided.

Second, faith in planning causes organizations to become overly centralized. Information from peripheral sources is ignored. Flexibility for field-level decisionmaking is denied.

Finally, faith in planning leads people to believe that government has a solution for every problem. In many cases, better approaches emerge from decentralized improvisations.

Large organizations plan. Small organizations improvise:

My reading of FEMA, the Federal agency currently blamed for the awful scenes in New Orleans, is that up until very recently, it acted as a sort of insurance adjuster. FEMA officials would arrive days or weeks after a disaster, assess damages, and help process funds for compensating victims. This may or may not have been the mission in theory, but it appears to be the way that FEMA operated in practice.

Now, the public appears to expect FEMA to operate as a sort of domestic Green Beret outfit, able to parachute in to a crisis area and solve humanitarian and engineering problems in real time. In theory, such an organization would be highly valuable. In practice, it strikes me as implausible that FEMA would turn out to be that organization.

Knowledge Deficit

The Wall Street Journal examines the Knowledge Deficit in economics. Russel Roberts writes:

Whenever I teach a seminar on basic economics, I always survey the audience: What proportion of the American labor force earns the minimum wage or less and what is the standard of living of the average American today relative to 100 years ago?

Even among highly-educated groups such as journalists or congressional staffers, the median answer is depressingly similar — they think 20% of the American work force earns the minimum wage or less. In fact, the actual number is something less than 3%. Usually a non-trivial portion of each group thinks that our material well-being is lower today than 100 years ago. Their median answer is that we are 50% better off than we were 100 years ago. In fact, the average American is at least five and maybe 30 times better off than we were in the good old days. There's a dramatic range because it's hard to value the opportunity to listen to your iPod while recovering from open heart surgery. But 50% is a very bad answer.

Mixed-up Malaysia

Theodore Dalrymple explores Mixed-up Malaysia:

When you arrive into Kuala Lumpur airport, you are warned in writing and by the air stewards that the mandatory death penalty is in force for drug smugglers in Malaysia. For some strange reason, this warning makes you feel guilty: could someone have secretly loaded your luggage with drugs between check-in and boarding?

Surely the policy keeps Malaysia drug-free? But I learnt, in the first newspaper that I read after arriving, that Malaysia intends to start a needle-exchange scheme and institute a methadone-substitution program for its drug addicts, all in the name of harm reduction. The death penalty for drug smugglers notwithstanding, Malaysia seems to have quite an HIV problem: officially 60,000 people are seropositive, though unofficial estimates put the real number at 300,000 — 5 times the rate of the United States.

Our Culture, What’s Left Of It

Jamie Glazov of FrontPage magazine interviews Theodore Dalrymple on his new book, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, which is a compilation of essays.

On depression:

I have noticed the disappearance of the word 'unhappy' from common usage, and its replacement by the word 'depressed.' While unhappiness is a state of mind that is clearly the result of the circumstances of one's life, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by circumstances beyond one's control, or a mixture of both, depression is an illness that is the doctor's responsibility to cure. This is so, however one happens to be leading one's life. And the doctor, enjoined to pass no judgement that could be interpreted as moral on his patients, has no option but to play along with this deception. The result is the gross over-prescription of medication, without any reduction in unhappiness.

On conflicting goals:

It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.

I think it was Dostoyevsky who said that, even if the government were 100 per cent benevolent and arranged everything for our own good, as judged by rational criteria, we should still want to exercise our freedom by going against its dispensations.

One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men — that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.

On political correctness:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Cell Competition and Cooperation, or Why Fat Cells Don't Go Willingly

Art De Vany starts his Cell Competition and Cooperation, or Why Fat Cells Don't Go Willingly with some examples of passive aggression in the wild:

Plants that are too easy to eat and are nutritious are attractive to herbivores. So, unless they can respond by limiting the ability of herbivores to digest them or by preventing the reproduction of herbivores, they will not survive the evolutionary race. Consequently, plants have many strategies to disarm, kill, or prevent the reproduction of their predators (herbivores). Grasses and the wheat that we eat that are evolved from them contain mineral sequestering substances that lock up the minerals in an herbivore, preventing mineral metabolism and growth. Phytic acid is one of the most prevalent of these and it binds zinc and calcium so that the herbivore does not develop. Phytic acid does the same thing in the human body so that a child raised on a high grain diet is deprived of the minerals he or she requires to develop. Rice, a relative of grass, does the same thing, which is one reason why northern Chinese are taller than southern Chinese; the northerners eat far less rice and more vegetables and meat.

Another trick plants have to keep from being eaten is to chemically castrate male herbivores who consume them. The chemical in this case is a form of plant estrogen that de-masculinizes the male plant eater. This happens to human males too and to females who experience too much estrogen from eating soy beans and wheat.

Yet another trick is outright poison. Plant toxins are among the most dangerous in the biological world. Ricin, the deadly toxin that kills almost instantly, is derived from soy beans. Gluten, the deadly protein that dissolves the gut of celiac disease sufferers, is one of the other protective toxins that wheat and grass related plants use.

The same thing happens inside the body:

When it comes to cancer, strange things happen because cancer tumors compete with one another for the body's resources. Large cancers secrete substances that limit the growth of smaller cancers. Thus, when a large tumor is removed surgically, the smaller ones are now left unsuppressed and may grow rapidly. This can present a problem for the patient. After a major cancer surgery the patient may face further cancers later because they are no longer suppressed by their larger competitors.

Then he moves on to fat — which is just another organ in the body, competing for resources.

Writing sensible email messages

43 Folders has a solid article on Writing sensible email messages. I especially back their advice to write a great subject line:

Compose a great “Subject:” line that hits the high points or summarizes the thrust of the message. Avoid “Hi,” “One more thing...,” or “FYI,” in favor of typing a short summary of the most important points in the message:

• Lunch resched to Friday @ 1pm
• Reminder: Monday is "St. Bono's Day" — no classes
• REQ: Resend Larry Tate zip file?
• HELP: Can you defrag my C drive?
• Thanks for the new liver — works great!

Planned Parenthood Gets Freaky!

Planned Parenthood Gets Freaky! describes the pro-choice Pledge-a-Picket program:

Here's how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.

The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, sounds unbearable:

Keith Ferrazzi enters your life like a circus coming to town — the two ringing cell phones, the two PalmPilots, the multiple conversations in which he seems to be listening and talking simultaneously. The way he walks and looks, all tanned and fit, with the styled hair and custom suit and black Prada shoes. The deals that are hanging in the air, the favors being extended or secured, the sideshows, the laughter, the juggling. That irresistible balloon of energy.

The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker:

Rule 1: Don't network just to network.
Rule 2: Take names.
Rule 3: Build it before you need it.
Rule 4: Never eat alone.
Rule 5: Be interesting.
Rule 6: Manage the gatekeeper. Artfully.
Rule 7: Always ask.
Rule 8: Don't keep score.
Rule 9: Ping constantly.
Rule 10: Find anchor tenants. Feed them.

Rule 7 in action:

Pete Ferrazzi, a steelworker whose world was hard hours and low wages, knew he wanted more for his son. He knew his boy's life would be better if he could find a way out of their working-class Pittsburgh suburb.

But the elder Ferrazzi didn't know the exits. He'd never been to college. He knew nothing of country clubs or private schools. He could picture only one man who might have the sort of pull that could help: his boss. Actually, the boss of his boss's boss -- Alex McKenna, CEO of Kennametal, in whose factory Pete Ferrazzi worked. The two men had never met. But the elder Ferrazzi had an idea about how the world worked. He'd observed that audacity was often the only thing that separated two equally talented men and their job titles. Pete Ferrazzi asked to speak with McKenna, who, upon hearing the request, was so intrigued that he took the meeting. In it, he agreed to meet Pete's son, Keith, but not to do anything more.

However, it turned out that McKenna liked the precocious adolescent — especially because of the way young Keith had come to his attention. McKenna was on the board of a local prep school where he sent his own children, by reputation one of the best schools in the country. Strings were indeed pulled, and Keith entered a new world, on scholarship, that set him on an entirely new course, just as his father had hoped. "I got one of the best educations America has to offer," Ferrazzi says today. "Starting with elementary school, prep school, on to Yale and Harvard — it would never have happened if my father hadn't believed that it never hurts to ask. The worst anyone can say is no. Not many people believe that. Embarrassment and fear are debilitating."