How Hot Tuna (and Some Sharks) Stay Warm

It looks like some fish are (sort of) warm-blooded. From How Hot Tuna (and Some Sharks) Stay Warm:

Scientists now have direct evidence that the north Pacific salmon shark maintains its red muscle (RM) at 68-86 degrees Fahrenheit (F), much warmer than the 47 F water in which it lives. The elevated muscle temperature presumably helps the salmon shark survive the cold waters of the north Pacific and take advantage of the abundant food supply there. The heat also appears to factor into the fish's impressive swimming ability.
[...]
Salmon sharks are lamnids, a group of sharks that also includes the mako and great white. Numerous studies have shown that lamnid sharks and tunas share many anatomical and physiological specializations that endow them with their impressive swimming power and speed. In contrast to other fish where the RM is near the skin, the RM of these sharks and tunas is near the backbone. Even though the ancestors of bony tuna and cartilaginous sharks diverged more than 400 million years ago, selection pressure for high-performance swimming in each group seems to have occurred independently about 50 million years ago.

Throughout its life, a salmon shark never stops swimming because it will sink. The body heat generated from continuous swimming elevates the RM temperature, which in turn, warms the surrounding white muscle and allows the shark to survive the frigid waters of the north Pacific. If a shark stops swimming, it could die from cold exposure.

Apple sells a million videos in new service

Wow. Apple sells a million videos in new service:

Apple Computer on Monday said its iTunes online service has sold a million videos in under 20 days, sending shares up almost 5 percent.

Seal bites off woman's nose

They seem so cute, don't they? From Seal bites off woman's nose:

A seal bit off a South African woman's nose after she tried to help it back into the sea, an official said Monday.

Elsie van Tonder, 49, is expected to undergo surgery this week after being bitten on a beach near George, about 240 miles east of Cape Town Saturday.

Her nose was found but could not be reattached to her face, local media reported.

'The seal had been lying in the same spot since Friday, so the lady and a few other people were trying to take it back to the water,' said Herman Oosthuizen, a marine biologist with the Department of Environmental Affairs.

'The young female seal then bit her in the face.'

The Great Pumpkin: Backyard Botanists Shoot for 1-Ton Mark

I feel like some kind of Luddite when I read a story like this. It's unnatural! From The Great Pumpkin: Backyard Botanists Shoot for 1-Ton Mark:

Such dedication produces pumpkins that can measure 15 feet to 16 feet around. Twenty years ago, a 500-pound pumpkin was considered a monumental feat. Now, giants regularly tip the scales at 1,200 pounds to 1,400 pounds, bringing within sight the previously incomprehensible: a 1-ton pumpkin.

Howard Dill, a farmer in Nova Scotia, Canada, ushered in the age of the behemoths in the late 1970s by perfecting the genetics of a seed he patented as the Dill Atlantic Giant. Mr. Dill's seed gave anyone a shot at growing a jumbo, throwing open the door to backyard enthusiasts from California to Ohio to as far abroad as Australia. Growers in the northern half of the U.S. have the best success, because cooler summers extend the growing season through September, giving the pumpkins more time to reach their humongous size.

Civilization IV Whom?

Douglas Kern has relapsed into Civilization addiction. In Civilization IV Whom?, he explains the difference between Civilization and civilization:

The history of civilization (but not Civilization) is as much a history of decay, abandonment, and degradation as it is of freedom and heroism. When we assume that civilizations will necessarily progress rather than regress, we take the first step towards undoing the very progress we foolishly assumed to be a given. It seems unlikely that any computer game will ever capture the essence of growing and cultivating a civilization, because the maintenance of a civilization is boring. The patient teaching of age-old lessons, the defense of honorable customs and manners, the reverent admiration of greatness and the intolerance of evil — little animated men on a screen can't act out these dramas. But these dull, humble acts build civilization more than technology and wonders of the world ever could.

Our Brains Strive To See Only the Good, Leading Some to God

From Our Brains Strive To See Only the Good, Leading Some to God:

Religion used to be ascribed to a wish to escape mortality by invoking an afterlife or to feel less alone in the world. Now, some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer of Washington University, St. Louis, calls in a 2003 paper 'a predictable by-product of ordinary cognitive function.'

One of those functions is the ability to imagine what Prof. Boyer calls 'nonphysically present agents.' We do this all the time when we recall the past or project the future, or imagine 'what if' scenarios involving others. It's not a big leap for those same brain mechanisms to imagine spirits and gods as real.

The Horse and the Urban Environment

It's easy to forget that car exhaust was a big improvement. From The Horse and the Urban Environment:

While the nineteenth century American city faced many forms of environmental pollution, none was as all encompassing as that produced by the horse. The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems. The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route or deposited in the stable. While cities made sporadic attempts to keep the streets clean, the manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.

Biloxi Boom!?

If you look hard enough, you can often find a silver lining. From Biloxi Boom!?:

Land prices in Biloxi are up. The reason? Mississippi is a poor state and so historically even homes with water views were modest. When the coast boomed, due to gambling and tourism, the land became a lot more valuable in alternative uses like hotels, casinos, and vacation homes for the rich. But it's costly and takes a long time for developers to buy up small lots and bundle them into bigger packages. The hurricane, however, acted like nature's form of eminent domain. With the small houses destroyed there are many sellers, bundling is becoming easier, and everyone expects that zoning will be changed to favor the developers.

Christopher Hitchens on Heaven on Earth

In his interview with PBS on their documentary on the history of socialism, Heaven on Earth, former-Trotskyite Christoper Hitchens explains the appeal of Marxism — and how Marx recognized the power of capitalism:

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism which is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I mean I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

Well, implied in this is the view that for the first time ever in history there might actually be enough to go around. That this would be possible, that machines could replace drudgery and in the end obviate the need for exploitation at all. So, that the struggle would be not of man against man, but of man to master nature, and that this was not utopian because the actual wealth was there, being created before their eyes. That's why the socialist movement took off, as a vindication of materialism in the minds of the working class. They could see from the mansions and the empires and the great ships and railways that there was no need for them to be poor, there was no need for them to go on making things they were too poor to buy.

So to close that gap in perception was the project. And of course to leave behind such remnants of feudalism that had survived into the capitalist system, such as the monarchy, the nation-state, the church, rubbishy cobwebs from the mental attic of prehistory. As I say it now — what a brilliant idea.

Book Picks from Generals, Defense and Intel Experts

The Insider offers a long, long list of Book Picks from Generals, Defense and Intel Experts and says, "to understand the war in Iraq, read something old, something new." No mention of anything borrowed or blue.

Strategic control, by the book

Jamie Hailer, of Hailer Publishing, sounds like my kind of guy. From Strategic control, by the book:

Hailer's best seller is a 40-year-old work on counterinsurgency written by a French army officer who served in China, Southeast Asia and Algeria. Since starting his company as a sideline in March, Hailer has sold about 2,400 copies of David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice to everyone from intel experts to generals-in-training.

'I kind of stumbled on a subculture of retired CIA and Army guys who are pulling their hair out about us blowing it in Iraq like we did in Vietnam,' said Hailer (pronounced Hi-ler). 'When they found out I was publishing this book, they pushed it like crazy.'

Rick Newton, an instructor at the Joint Special Operations University at Hurlburt Field in Florida's Panhandle ordered 100, then e-mailed his buddies at West Point and the Naval War College; they also wanted the book.

Newton, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said he had been looking for the Galula book for a couple of years before being put in touch with Hailer.

'It's the only book I'd found which takes strategic-level goals and links them to what soldiers on the ground have to do,' Newton said of the book, written in 1964 while Galula was on a fellowship at Harvard. 'You read it and scratch your head and say, 'He got it right.''

Next thing Hailer knew, the head of the Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army trains its top brass, ordered 1,500 copies, saying he wanted to put the book in the hands of every student.

Then came e-mail from some sources at the CIA, suggesting that Hailer try to track down a 1978 book on the formation of the Saudi kingdom.

'They said they'd been looking for the book for years and that the only copy had walked out of their library,' Hailer said.
[...]
Hailer began moonlighting as a publisher after reading an article late last year in Inside the Pentagon , an independent weekly journal published in Washington. The author took an informal poll of active and retired generals, defense and intel experts, asking them to name books that would help officers and troops understand the insurgency in Iraq.

"Perhaps the most enthusiastic endorsements from officers and experts ... are reserved for out-of-print or hard-to-find books - mostly on counterinsurgency warfare - that seem to have gained new urgency and application in Iraq," wrote ITP's senior correspondent Elaine Grossman.

Hailer said that statement triggered an enterprise he'd been mulling over for some time, after finding an out-of-print book he wanted on the British Royal Navy was selling on the Internet for more than $1,200. Hailer decided to make his first reprint effort the Galula book because a retired CIA officer told ITP's readers to "run — not walk — to the Pentagon library and get in line" for the book, which he considered "a primer for how to win in Iraq."

Hailer, who had read the Galula book in graduate school, found a copy in the University of South Florida's library. He then tracked down Greenwood Publishing Group in Westport, Conn., the company that had acquired the book's original publisher, and got an enthusiastic response.

"I was lucky I found someone supportive on the first phone call," Hailer said. "He said, "Knock yourself out. We don't even have a copy."'

Hailer drew up a simple contract, agreeing to pay Greenwood royalties for reprint rights (Galula died in 1967). He found a Fort Lauderdale company that was able to make a high-quality scan of the book without destroying it, then he shipped the electronic file to a printer in Minnesota who can produce as few as 10 or as many as 2,000 copies in a run.

The hardest part, said Hailer, is tracking down the rights' holder. In most cases, the copyright for out-of-print books resides with the publishing house, but widespread acquisitions in the industry have made it difficult to trace old contracts. In a couple of cases, the rights have reverted to the author, leading Hailer on more than one global goose-chase.

"I've been tracking one guy for a year-and-a-half now," Hailer said. "His last known address was Florence, Italy, and his last known communication was in 1990. I think he's long gone and for all I know he left no heirs."

In Defense of PowerPoint

A few years back, Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) wrote a particularly damning piece about "slideware" — PowerPoint is Evil (which, by the way, I blogged about at the time). I recently revisited Tufte's piece and some counterarguments.

Don Norman's In Defense of PowerPoint makes the straightforward point that PowerPoint didn't create the problems it's blamed for:

We have had poor talks long before PowerPoint. We have even had bullet points long before PowerPoint — long before computers. In the old days, people typed, stenciled or hand-lettered their slides onto transparencies which were shown with the aid of overhead projectors or wall charts, or photographed them on to glass-plated photographic slides and then, later, 35 mm. slides. These talks were also dull and tedious.

Norman points out that these three things should be separate documents:

1. The notes the speaker will use (which should be seen only by the speaker).
2. The slides the audience will see.
3. Handouts that will be taken away for later study.

Tad Simons makes similar points in Edward Tufte doesn't hate PowerPoint, he hates the culture that spawned it:

Tufte's gripes about PowerPoint sound an awful lot like 1960s criticisms of television's corrupting effect on the mind, and before that, the stupefying nature of vaudeville. This isn't to suggest that Tufte is wrong, just to clarify that our culture has been engaged in an extended conversation about the impact of technology on human thought and communication, of which the debate over PowerPoint is only a small but significant part.

If anything, PowerPoint is the culmination of a decades-long trend in all types of media used to distill complex information into ever more easily digested pieces, making it all but impossible to communicate any kind of complex or nuanced message. Sound bites, campaign slogans, ad copy and bullet points are all part of this evolution toward content-free language. And, for better or worse, this trend has been exploited most profitably in the worlds of business, politics and media — worlds in which, not coincidentally, PowerPoint is extremely popular.
[...]
Tufte's true beef is not with PowerPoint, it is with the entire larger culture outside of academia: the culture that favors get-to-the-point practicality over ivory-tower idealism; the culture that prefers action over dialogue and fists over philosophy; the culture that doesn't trust people who speak in complete sentences; the culture that says don't think about it, "just do it"; the culture that, hate it or not, seems all too willing to deceive itself in the name of freedom, democracy and the American way.

Rule America?

In Rule America?, Jonathan V. Last asks, "What does modern history have to teach us about the age of American empire?":

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: 'In terms of influence it was the only world power.' The British people and their leaders accepted this fact. In the early 1930s, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin pronounced that 'the British Empire stands firm, as a great force for good.' Historian William Manchester argues that 'most of the crown's subjects, abroad as well as at home, felt comfortable with imperialism.'

But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture. 'After the survivors of the Western front came home,' Manchester writes, 'Britons wanted nothing more to do with war; most of them hoped never again to lay their eyes on an Englishman in uniform, and they were losing their taste for Empire.' Winston Churchill despaired of this change. 'The shadow of victory is disillusion,' he noted. 'The reaction from extreme effort is prostration. The aftermath even of successful war is long and bitter.'

A deep desire to avoid conflict, even at the price of letting the Empire dissolve, permeated British society. In 1931, the House of Commons passed the Statute of Westminster, the first step toward independence for Britain's dominions. In 1932, a poll found that 10.4 million Britons supported England's unilateral disarmament, while only 870,000 opposed it. Historian Alistair Horne observes that, after World War I, it took just about 10 years for the 'urge for national grandeur' to be replaced by 'a deep longing simply to be left in peace.'

Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons — among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.
[...]
These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

The Man Who Would Murder Death

The Man Who Would Murder Death looks at anti-aging "prophet" Aubrey de Grey. While his scientific ideas are fascinating, so are some of his biographical details:

The man who brought them together began his career as a computer scientist, working for several years on programs that find bugs in other programs. He later received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge and devoted himself, in a sense, to finding the bugs in human beings.

An important turning point in Mr. de Grey's personal and professional life occurred at a friend's party in 1990. That's when he met Adelaide Carpenter, who would later become Adelaide de Grey. When they met, Mr. de Grey was a computer scientist in his twenties and had never been married. His wife-to-be was in her forties and had been married twice before. Despite the 19-year age difference, they fell for each other immediately and have been together ever since.

At the time, Ms. de Grey was on sabbatical from her position as a professor of genetics at the University of California at San Diego. She had already established her reputation in the discipline (and made some discoveries that are now in textbooks) and had a comfortable, tenured position. But she had grown tired of her research and her job. So, after she met Mr. de Grey, she decided to quit, move to Cambridge, and work as a technician in a fruit-fly laboratory. It was a big step down professionally, but she enjoyed her work and the company of her new husband.

The age difference was unimportant to Ms. de Grey: What mattered to her was intellectual compatibility. 'I need my male partner to be smarter than I am,' she explains. 'And — I'm trying to be modest here — that narrows down the field quite a bit.' Does her husband fit that bill? She nods vigorously. 'Oh yes.'

Ms. de Grey taught her husband genetics over the dinner table. She was amazed at how quickly he could absorb the concepts. 'Very shortly we were able to have a conversation rather than a tutorial,' she says. While talking about her academic career and her relationship, Ms. de Grey is puffing away steadily on an unfiltered Camel. Mr. de Grey would like her to quit, but she's been a smoker since she was a teenager and believes that nicotine is necessary to kick-start her brain. Unlike her husband, Ms. de Grey has no wish to live forever. She has not agreed to be cryogenically frozen when she dies. (Mr. de Grey has, just in case medicine does not advance speedily enough to save him.)

'I don't think anyone would want to thaw me out,' she says and smiles, revealing a mouth mostly devoid of teeth.

When the software project Mr. de Grey had been working on didn't pan out, he got a part-time job designing a database for fruit-fly researchers at the lab where his wife worked. It is a position he still holds; as it turns out, being a prophet is not a sufficiently remunerative profession. In 1995, after having absorbed a great deal of genetics, Mr. de Grey moved on to gerontology, a subject that had always intrigued him. For two months he immersed himself in the literature. He emerged with an insight into the mechanics of mitochondrial mutations, wrote a paper on what he thought, and submitted it to a respected journal.

It was accepted. He was off to a good start.

Playing Music: The Lost Freedom

Charles Rosen reviews Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording in Playing Music: The Lost Freedom:

His main thesis is that recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: 'portamento' (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo.

Why?

When a recording is intended to be a renewable image of the music rather than the capture of an individual performance, then even eccentric details become less desirable. A sudden rhythmic hurrying of the second theme by Schnabel in Mozart's Concerto in C Major, K. 467, was interesting and effective when I first heard it; now I wait for it come and it is an irritant.

China, India Superpower? Not so Fast!

From China, India Superpower? Not so Fast!:

Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations.
[...]
The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers – one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come.

Economic growth strong

It looks like the doomsayers were wrong. From Economic growth strong:

The U.S. economy shook off headwinds from hurricanes Katrina and Rita to grow at a faster-than-expected 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter, a
Commerce Department report showed on Friday.

Sting Operation Targets Terror

Sting Operation Targets Terror explains how wasps can be trained to detect explosives — or just about anything else: [...]
Unlike dogs and electronic sensors currently in use, the wasps are disposable. They cost pennies and take minutes to train.
[...]
They've built the Wasp Hound -- a $60 odor-detection device made of a small PVC tube containing five wasps.

The Wasp Hound has a fan in the top, which draws odors into the tube through a filter. If the wasps catch a whiff of whatever they've been trained to smell, they crowd around a hole in the filter. A web cam inside the tube is attached to a computer, which alerts the operator to the wasps' reaction with a beep or flashing light.

The wasps have been trained to detect a range of illegal or dangerous substances, including 2,4-DNT (a chemical in TNT); putricine, which is associated with decaying flesh; and molds that produce poisonous compounds called aflatoxins in foods like peanuts and milk.
[...]
Research showed the wasps could be trained to detect other smells. All it involves, Lewis said, is feeding them sugar water while introducing them to a target smell for 10 seconds. Give them a 30-second break, repeat the process twice more, and voilà — trained insects. In this way, each insect can be trained to track a single scent.

The Meaning of Beheading

Theodore Dalrymple explains The Meaning of Beheading:

In the days when murderers in Britain could still be executed by hanging, the Home Office used to receive five unsolicited applications a week for the position of hangman (not even the most rigidly doctrinal feminist has ever demanded that we use the word hangperson). The desire to kill one’s fellow beings in the pursuit of a good cause, in this case the preservation of law and order and the prevention of murder, is therefore quite widespread, even under the most civilized conditions.

There is no doubt that a good execution has its attractions. Once when I arrived in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, I found it deserted, a ghost city: Everyone was away at the public executions. The television report later that day said that the crowd was very nearly disappointed, because the execution ground had been waterlogged, but fortunately — at least for the spectators — a dry area was found into which the stakes could be driven so that the criminals could be shot after all.

Doctor Johnson thought that, if one of the purposes of an execution was to deter, it should be held in public. Certainly public executions were very popular, and in the past everyone loved a good one: When Dr. William Palmer, for example — the Prince of Poisoners — was hanged at Stafford Gaol in 1856, the number of spectators exceeded the population of the town by three times. (Palmer was in advance of his time as far as the precautionary principle was concerned. Approaching the somewhat rickety and ramshackle scaffold with the hangman, he turned to him and asked, “Is it safe?”)

Charles I was beheaded with an axe: Such a death was considered nobler and more dignified than mere hanging, a form of execution unbecoming for the upper classes. Beheading remained the prerogative of the well-born in Europe until Dr. Guillotin, in the name of humanity, proposed his democratic beheading machine after the Convention decreed in 1792 that all executions henceforth should be by decapitation; the machine swiftly proved popular with the crowds and was last used in public in France in 1939. There was once a considerable and learned medical debate in France not only about the most humane method of severing the head from the body, but about whether consciousness survived beheading, the lips and eyes of the beheaded having sometimes been seen in the basket to move for some seconds after separation from the neck.

Since then, our sensibility in the matter of decapitation has changed greatly. During the war the Japanese beheaded many of their prisoners, not as a tribute to their nobility, but as an expression of complete contempt for them. This provoked our revulsion. Beheading of any kind henceforth seemed to us barbaric and primitive. One might have moral qualms about the hygienically sound, quasi-medical, almost euphemistic executions by injection that take place in chambers bearing a too-close resemblance to operating rooms, but no one would propose beheading as an alternative.

Except, of course, in the Islamic world.

The Oracle That Is Delphi

GM's auto parts spin off, Delphi Corp., is declaring bankruptcy, and pundits are using that to call for protectionism and other policy changes. In The Oracle That Is Delphi, Duane D. Freese argues that neither protectionism nor nationalized health care will work and explains the policy history underlying employer-provided pensions and health care:

The worst thing that happened to manufacturing in this country may have been when government decided to exempt its provision of pensions and health insurance from taxation.

The Revenue Act of 1913, implementing income taxation after the passage of the 16th Amendment allowing it, exempted pension trusts from taxation, encouraging the development of such plans over personal saving and investment. Then in World War II, FDR's wage and price board allowed employers to get around the controls put in place for the war by allowing exceptions for both pension trusts and health insurance. [...] And the connection between employment and health insurance was cemented by the Internal Revenue Service in 1954, when it stipulated that employer contributions to health insurance plans for their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income.

The result of these tax favors was to boost benefits' share of costs from 20% of compensation to more than 40%. And while it relieved workers and retirees of worrying about their retirement income and their health care needs, it also stopped them thinking hard about it as well — an oversight that contributes to a low national savings rate and skyrocketing health care costs.

Cite “Freakonomics,” Get Kicked Out of Class

Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics received this letter, reproduced in Cite “Freakonomics,” Get Kicked Out of Class:

Dr. Levitt:

I was asked to leave a college classroom because of you.

I’m a college student and currently taking Criminology. Among the subjects we’re currently studying are Victimization. The professor uses a powerpoint presentation as an aid. We requested the powerpoint because he talked so fast and often gave statistics hard to believe. Now he shows us well documented charts, statistical numbers, and papers from different authors.

I noted he quoted some ideals from “The Changing Relationship Between Income and Crime Victimization” (specifically how poor people are now more likely to be assaulted or robbed). He specifically named Levitt as the author. Having read “Freakonomics”, I picked up on the name and readily agreed with the idea.

Later the professor asked the question: “Why did crime fall in the 1990’s?” Answers were typical: good economy, more police, etc. I offered a different view with the Roe v Wade approach. The professor immediately accused me of being all sorts of nasty things. I assured him my opinion was not loosely based, but rather well documented. He stuck back that no one in their right mind could possible prove that case had any effect on crime in the 90’s. I answered back that one of the authors previously discussed in that very day’s discussion wrote the paper and a few follow-ups and also co-authored a book containing that assertion. The professor was so upset at losing ground in the argument that I was asked to leave the room.

Apparently college professors are the ultimate authority on classroom information but not necessarily on the subject’s actual facts.

Thanks for getting me kicked out the room! I enjoyed every minute of it!

Ben Bernanke

I don't have anything insightful to say about Ben Bernanke, Greenspan's successor, but Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, and Tyler Cowen (also here) certainly do.

God save the heretic

Christopher Hart presents his argument against the proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, before the Lords this week, in God save the heretic:

Jonathan Swift observed that the problem with religion was that there wasn’t enough of it around: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Three centuries on there is even less of it around and we still hate each other.

The difficulty, at least for the scientifically educated but spiritually malnourished, is not the idea of religion itself, meaning some system of ritualised worship that helps us to make sense, if only symbolically, of the human, natural and supernatural worlds. The difficulty is rather that all the religions on offer are so patently preposterous, if not downright unpleasant.

Judaism tells us in its most sacred text, the Torah, that a donkey once turned round and started an argument with its master (Numbers, chapter 22); and that the supreme creator took time out to instruct his chosen people not to carry dead badgers, pelicans, hoopoes or bats (Leviticus, chapter 11).

Christianity, while accepting these texts as sacred, further believes that God manifested himself on earth in the form of an excitable and frequently ill-tempered 1st-century Jewish rabbi called Joshua (“Jesus” in Greek) who disowned his family and believed that the world was soon going to end. How do we know Jesus was Jewish? Because he lived at home until he was 30 and his mother thought he was God.

Then there is Islam. Its followers believe that its sacred text, the Koran, is the word of Allah as dictated to his prophet Muhammad. Non-Muslims might regard Muhammad as a deluded and bellicose man who had far too many wives than was good for him. His private life as recorded in the Koran itself, for instance sura 66, is also rather surprising.

Buddhism is an increasingly popular choice for westerners these days with its distinctive mix of cowardice, escapism and self-absorption. Hinduism has always been the colourful and vibrant national religion of India, although under the guidance of that wicked imperialist power, the British raj, it did at last begin to accept that burning women alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres might not be such a good idea.

Shintoism, the national religion of Japan, venerated the emperor as a living god, at least until 1946 when Hirohito, under gentle pressure from the US army, admitted on the radio that he wasn’t really.

The emperor Vespasian’s last sardonic words, as he lay awaiting death and the posthumous deification bestowed on the Caesars, best put this religious belief into perspective: “I think I’m turning into a god.”

Some like to believe that primitive tribal religions were much nicer. Unfortunately many of them practised human sacrifice. When the British (wicked imperialist power, etc) captured the Ashanti capital of Kumasi in present-day Ghana, they found a grove of death where the ground was saturated with the blood of thousands of human victims.

This confirms one’s sense that whatever the truth about God, all religions without exception are fallible human creations, in parts beautiful and profound and in parts ridiculous and repellent. To protect them from criticism is bad for our society and, even more importantly, bad for our souls.

Power and Persuasion

Frederick W. Kagan opens Power and Persuasion with this quote from diplomat-historian George F. Kennan:

You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.

Kagan explains why Napolean failed and Bismarck succeeded:

Diplomacy is not simply the art of persuading others to accept a set of demands. It is the art of discerning objectives the world will accept — and the restraints on one’s own power that one must accept in turn. Peace can endure after conflict only if all the major players find it preferable to another war.

Surveillance Supremacy

In Surveillance Supremacy, Arnold Kling explains why we need command of the spies:

In the twenty years between the two World Wars, there was a paradigm shift involving air power. Air combat, which was a sideshow during the first World War, was decisive during the second. The most important naval engagements — Pearl Harbor, Midway, Coral Sea — were decided by aircraft. The Battle of Britain was famously a duel in the air. During the Second World War, no country could attempt a major ground attack in the face of an enemy's air superiority. (The Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge under cover of un-flyable weather, which according to legend caused General George Patton to ask for divine relief.)

From 1940 on, the air was viewed as a decisive theater of war. Military men spoke of 'air superiority,' 'air supremacy,' or 'command of the skies.'

The cheapening of material goods is leading to another paradigm shift in military affairs. It is becoming less and less costly to assemble and deliver weapons that can cause mass casualties and major economic loss. It is becoming commensurately more valuable to be able to figure out who the bad guys are and keep track of what they are up to. What we need in the information age is surveillance supremacy — command of the spies, if you will.

Could a human swing through the jungle on vines?

The Straight Dope answers the question, Could a human swing through the jungle on vines?:

As depicted in the Tarzan movies, the vines are attached at the top, free-swinging at the bottom. In reality, lianas are attached at the bottom (they're plants, with roots in the ground) and ... well, maybe not free-swinging, but not reliably anchored at the top. Yank on a liana and one of two things is going to happen: nothing, because the top is entwined in the tree canopy, in which case, being secured at both ends, the thing won't let you do much swinging — at best you'll be able to sway back and forth; or it falls on top of you in a heap.

Tarzan's creator didn't create the vine-swinging myth though:

Don't blame Edgar Rice Burroughs for steering the public wrong, though. Here's his description of how a young Tarzan gets around from the first book, Tarzan of the Apes (1914):

He could spring twenty feet across space at the dizzy heights of the forest top, and grasp with unerring precision, and without apparent jar, a limb waving wildly in the path of an approaching tornado. He could drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground, or he could gain the utmost pinnacle of the loftiest tropical giant with the ease and swiftness of a squirrel. Though but ten years old, he was fully as strong as the average man of thirty.... And day by day his strength was increasing.

In short, Tarzan propels himself the same way most arboreal primates do, by swinging, climbing, and leaping among the branches. Vines play no special role in this process.

(Hat tip to GeekPress.)

The Antikythera Mechanism

The clockwork computer describes the Antikythera mechanism:

When a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps — the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device.

The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments, in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the late Derek Price, a science historian at Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A new analysis, though, suggests that the device was cleverer than Price thought, and reinforces the evidence for his theory of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology.

The 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to the Present

It would appear that I've read few of Time magazine's top 100 Novels from 1923 to the present — and many of those I read were either high school reading assignments or genre fiction.

That said, Catch-22 and The Catcher in the Rye were never assigned to me in school — and I'm glad, because I hated them both.

Incidentally, if you look at the Readers' Choice list, I've read most of the top 20:

1. 1984
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
4. Watchmen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Things Fall Apart
7. The Great Gatsby
8. The Catcher in the Rye
9. Snow Crash
10. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
11. Lolita
12. Catch-22
13. Ubik
14. A Clockwork Orange
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
16. Animal Farm
17. Lord of the Flies
18. Slaughterhouse-Five
19. Beloved
20. The Grapes of Wrath
21. Atonement

America: Lost in Translation

In America: Lost in Translation, Richard Pells describes his experience as a Fulbright senior specialist in Indonesia:

The breakdown in communication, however, did not result simply from the struggle many Asians have in pronouncing certain English words. In the 'discussions' that followed my lectures (which frequently took the form of someone delivering a 10-minute speech before arriving at a question), and in the conversations I had with individual students and faculty members, I found myself repeatedly saying, 'I don't understand what you mean.' That was true even when their comments or queries were translated into recognizable English. The problem was not one of language, but of context. What I didn't grasp, at least not for a while, were the political and cultural assumptions behind the questions Indonesians were posing.

My dialogue with Indonesians often became surreal. 'Is there grass in Texas?' I was regularly asked of my home state. Obviously Indonesians — having seen far too many old Westerns — supposed that Texas, with some of the most heavily populated urban areas in America, was a veritable wasteland of sagebrush and dust. Indonesians also seemed obsessed with the prevalence of what they called 'free sex' in America. Someone finally explained to me that they meant the tendency of Americans to engage in sex before marriage or after divorce — whereas in Indonesia such activity is forbidden, in theory if not in practice. And since many Indonesians in my audiences had seen Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, they were convinced that students in American high schools were heavily armed, just waiting for the opportunity to open fire.

But it was their questions about Moore himself that left me truly befuddled. I was asked continually if the Bush administration had subsidized Moore's movies, including Fahrenheit 9/11. Eventually I realized that such a question revealed an entirely different set of ideas about the relationship between government and culture. Since Indonesians believed that movies, plays, and novels could scarcely exist without the political and financial support of the state, it was hard for them to imagine the existence of a 'private' sector in the arts, or the absence of an American ministry of culture.

Nazism, racism, glory, in the fists of two men

From Nazism, racism, glory, in the fists of two men:

On June 22, 1938, America and Europe were more caught up in a sporting event than they had ever been before or were ever likely to be again. The heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, a black sharecropper's son from rural Alabama, was fighting a rematch with former champion Max Schmeling, the man chosen by the Nazi party to carry the banner of Aryan supremacy. The world, or at least that portion of it ready to plunge into war, held its collective breath.

The triumph of the racehorse Seabiscuit has been touted by revisionists as the most inspiring sporting event of Depression-era America, but as David Margolick points out in his epic retelling of the Louis-Schmeling saga, 'Beyond Glory,' on the night the two men stepped into the ring at Yankee Stadium there were more people listening — perhaps 20 million more — than tuned in later that year to follow Seabiscuit in his famous race with War Admiral. Perhaps half the population of the United States heard the fight, more than would hear any of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. Someone estimated that more journalists covered the fight than had been present at Versailles to cover the end of World War I.

Are Jews Smarter? What Genetic Science Tells Us

This idea is getting a lot of play. From Are Jews Smarter? What Genetic Science Tells Us:

This story begins, as it inevitably must, in the Old Country.

At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned the lush hills of Lucca, Italy, and — at the invitation of Charlemagne — headed for the severer climes of the Rhineland and Northern France. These Jews didn’t have a name for themselves, at first. They were tied together mostly by kinship. But ultimately, they became known as Ashkenazim, a variation on the Hebrew word for one of Noah’s grandsons.

In some ways, life was good for the Jews in this strange new place. They’d been lured there on favorable terms, with promises of physical protection, peaceful travel, and the ability to adjudicate their own quarrels. (The charter of Henry IV, dated 1090, includes this assurance: “If anyone shall wound a Jew, but not mortally, he shall pay one pound of gold . . . If he is unable to pay the prescribed amount . . . his eyes will be put out and his right hand cut off.”) But in other ways, life was difficult. The Ashkenazim couldn’t own land. They were banned from the guilds. They were heavily taxed.

Yet the Ashkenazim did very well, in spite of these constraints, because they found an ingenious way to adapt to their new environment that didn’t rely on physical labor. What they noticed, as they set up their towns, located mainly at the crossroads of trade routes, was that there was no one around to lend money.

So there it was: a demand and a new supplier. Because of the Christian prohibition against usury, Jews found themselves a financially indispensable place in their new home, extending loans to peasants, tradesmen, knights, courtiers, even the occasional monastery. The records from these days are scarce. But where they exist, they are often startling. In 1270, for example, 80 percent of the 228 adult Jewish males in Perpignan, France, made their living lending money to their Gentile neighbors, according to Marcus Arkin’s Aspects of Jewish Economic History. One of the most prolific was a rabbi. Two others were identified, in the notarial records, as “poets.”

Success at money-lending required a different set of skills than farming or any of the traditional trades. Some, surely, were social: cultivating connections, winning over trust (or maybe bullying your way there, Shylock’s awful pound of flesh). It probably required some aggression, because the field was competitive, with Jews suffering so few professional options. But it also required cognitive skills, or something my generation would call numeracy — a fluency in mathematics, a dexterity with numbers — and my grandmother’s generation would call “a head for figures.” If you were Jewish in Perpignan in 1270, and you didn’t have a head for figures, you didn’t stand much of a chance.

Numeracy, literacy, critical reasoning: For millennia, these have been the currency of Jewish culture, the stuff of Talmudic study, immigrant success, and Borscht Belt punch lines. Two Jews, three opinions . . . Keep practicing, you’ll thank me later . . . Q: When does a Jewish fetus become a human? A: When it graduates from medical school.

Of course, there’s another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther said Jewish doctors were so smart they could develop a poison that could kill Christians in a single day — or any other time period of their choosing (and four centuries later, Pravda suggested Jewish doctors were spies sent to kill Stalin). After the calamities of September 11, one of the creepier conspiracy theories to whip through the Muslim world was the idea that only Jews were cunning enough to have pulled off the hijackings.

Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield. The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases most commonly found in Ashkenazim — particularly the lysosomal storage diseases, like Tay-Sachs — were likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. The paper contained references, but no footnotes. It was not written in the genteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific inquiries but as a polemic. Its science was mainly conjecture. Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone.

It didn’t.

Update: As Robert McHenry points out in The Education of Gesture, that intro can't be true:

If you haven't caught it yet, here's the problem: Charlemagne died in 814 CE. No one is expected to know that particular fact, but many generally educated persons might recall that he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Christmas in 800. This would make his survival into the tenth century highly unlikely on the face of it.

On the DVR

I couldn't agree more with Michael Blowhard's On the DVR:

I wonder if people who haven't yet sprung for a digital video recorder — a Tivo, or maybe a box that your cable company will rent you — understand how dramatically using one can change your experience of television.
[...]
But for me what's been most wonderful is the way the DVR — essentially some software and a hard drive — becomes the TV equivalent of your book or CD library. When The Wife and I settle in to do a little tube-watching, we don't see 'what's on television.' Instead, we check out what's waiting for us on the hard drive.

You can accumulate an amazing collection of shows with only a minimal amount of programming effort. It used to be common to say that TV was the enemy of true culture. These days ... Well, if you use your DVR wisely, watching TV can become a rewarding part of a classy cultural life.

The list of what's on his DVR seems eerily familiar.

Why do we believe in God?

Robert Winston asks, Why do we believe in God? and looks at the long-held belief that extreme religiosity and insanity are linked:

Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put this association to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups, such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers — the 'extrinsically' religious — than among the fervently committed.

Vegas, Baby... Vegas!

In Vegas, Baby... Vegas!, James K. Glassman discusses Learning from Las Vegas:

In 1972, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote a book called Learning From Las Vegas, which celebrated the gambling capital's architecture. Designers and builders, the authors insisted, should respond to the tastes and desires of "common" folks, as the architects of Las Vegas had.

Learning from Las Vegas created a scandal. In a typical commentary from a cultural journal, the Ohio Review described the book as "dangerous," and warned that it "inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon. It threatens those things that we use to distinguish the difference between us, the cultured, and them, the vulgar."

Flash forward 33 years. America's professional classes — especially economists, journalists, and politicians — have even more to learn from Las Vegas. I go there three or four times a year, and I suggest that the mandarins of Washington and New York should take similar pilgrimages to learn how the world really works.

Judging by the number of people rushing to live in it, Las Vegas is one of the most successful cities in the world. By far America's fastest-growing metropolitan area, its population rose from 273,000 in 1970 to 1,700,000 today. The city also attracted 37 million visitors last year — about the same as New York City.

Las Vegas has become the most exciting and gorgeous urban artifact of the past few decades. It has the best restaurants (practically every great chef now has an outpost, most recently Daniel Boulud), most dramatic hotels, most creative nightclubs, and grand shopping. Of course, it also has gambling.

But it's not just the gambling. Dave Kirvin, one of Vegas's top PR executives, points out that the big casino-hotels now collect the majority of their revenues from "non-gaming activities" — rooms, dinners, drinks, shows. Many other places have now adopted gambling, but none has approached the success of Las Vegas.

The Age of Radical Enhancement

In The Age of Radical Enhancement, Arnold Kling again looks at ideas raised by Kurzweil's singularity:

Perhaps the last unenhanced human to make a significant contribution in the field of mathematics has already been born. In twenty years, the tenure track at top university mathematics departments may consist entirely of people who depend on drugs, direct neural-computer connections, genetic modification, or a combination of all three in order to achieve high-level performance.

Some people would argue that the leading edge of this phenomenon is athletes' use of steroids. I would caution, however, that athletics is atypical in that it is a zero-sum game, and we should not automatically adopt zero-sum bioethics.

When Kling asked his college-age daughter is they knew many students taking Adderall, an amphetamine cocktail prescribed for ADD, they each responded "Of course." Here's what Slate writer Joshua Foer had to say about The Adderall Me:

Depressives have Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and mental-processing speed and decreases fatigue. It's often called a cognitive steroid because it can make people better at whatever it is they're doing. When scientists administered amphetamines to college shot-putters, they were able to throw more than 4 percent farther. According to one recent study, as many as one in five college students have taken Adderall or its chemical cousin Ritalin as study buddies.

The drug also has a distinguished literary pedigree. During his most productive two decades, W.H. Auden began every morning with a fix of Benzedrine, an over-the-counter amphetamine similar to Adderall that was used to treat nasal congestion. James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all took the drug to increase their output. Before the FDA made Benzedrine prescription-only in 1959, Jack Kerouac got hopped up on it and wrote On the Road in a three-week "kick-writing" session. "Amphetamines gave me a quickness of thought and writing that was at least three times my normal rhythm," another devotee, John-Paul Sartre, once remarked.

If stimulants worked for those writers, why not for me? [...] As an experiment, I decided to take Adderall for a week. The results were miraculous. On a recent Tuesday, after whipping my brother in two out of three games of pingpong — a triumph that has occurred exactly once before in the history of our rivalry — I proceeded to best my previous high score by almost 10 percent in the online anagrams game that has been my recent procrastination tool of choice. Then I sat down and read 175 pages of Stephen Jay Gould's impenetrably dense book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It was like I'd been bitten by a radioactive spider.

An anecdote involving mathematician Paul Erdös:

There's also the risk that Adderall can work too well. The mathematician Paul Erdös, who famously opined that "a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems," began taking Benzedrine in his late 50s and credited the drug with extending his productivity long past the expiration date of his colleagues. But he eventually became psychologically dependent. In 1979, a friend offered Erdös $500 if he could kick his Benzedrine habit for just a month. Erdös met the challenge, but his productivity plummeted so drastically that he decided to go back on the drug. After a 1987 Atlantic Monthly profile discussed his love affair with psychostimulants, the mathematician wrote the author a rueful note. "You shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine," he said. "It's not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed."

Epic Pooh and Into the Woods

Years ago, fantasy writer Michael Moorcock attacked the popular works of Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), and Richard Adams (Watership Down) as Epic Pooh — comforting, unchallenging, and conservative:

I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall. Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage. If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.

In Into the Woods, James Parker takes a different point of view:

But writing off "Watership Down" as a manifesto of middle-class conservatism misses the point; the book's unique effect resides not solely in the comforting, cabbage-muffled discourse of the well-behaved rabbits, but in the irruption — into their quiet, grey world — of violence and domination.

For this was the other sphere of Adams's experience: Prior to his career in government, he'd had an action-packed war, serving in the Middle East and then participating, as an officer in the 1st Airborne Division, in Operation Market Garden, the calamitous and bloody Allied attempt to clear the main bridges in German-occupied Holland. The Second World War shaped him as irresistibly as the first had shaped those other primary English fantasists, Tolkien and Lewis: "I must confess," wrote Adams, "that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath."

Active duty is no guarantee against whimsy — A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, was a signals officer at the Battle of the Somme — but the marks of Adams's war on "Watership Down" are plain. The lines of power in the book are drawn with brutal clarity, from the Owslafa — the Gestapo-like enforcers of General Woundwort's warren — to the more improvised and benign, but no less efficient, command structure used by Hazel and his band of runaway bucks. And the novel's violence, ever-threatening, occurs with a terrible, scuffling abruptness, leaving half-severed ears, torn haunches, nostrils filled with blood. The frozen state of "tharn" — defined in the book's "Lapine Glossary" as "stupefied, distraught, hypnotized with fear" — is a facet of rabbit-hood, certainly, but its human version is shell shock: locked terror, the draining away of courage.

Kurzweilomics

Arnold Kling opens his Kurzweilomics piece — about the economic consequences of Kurzweil's singularity — with an anecdote from Simon Kuznets, cited by Robert Fogel:

He used to give a one-year course in growth economics, both at Johns Hopkins and Harvard. One of the points he made was that if you wanted to find accurate forecasts of what happened in the past, don't look at what the economists said. The economists in 1850 wrote that the progress of the last decade had been so great that it could not possibly continue. And economists at the end of the nineteenth century wrote that the progress of the last half century had been so great that it could not possibly continue during the twentieth century. Kuznets said you would come closest to an accurate forecast if you read the writers of science fiction. But even the writers of science fiction were too pessimistic.

If returns are in fact accelerating, many of our problems go away:

If output per person in 2025 is more than 5 times what it is today, then the economy will have won the race. That means that all of the concerns that economists raise about the middle of this century, such as the external debt of the U.S. economy (the cumulative trade deficit), the fiscal implications of Social Security and Medicare, or gloomy scenarios for global warming, will be trivialized by the sheer heights that economic wealth will have scaled by that time. If Kurzweil is correct, then the mountain of debt that we fear we are accumulating now will seem like a molehill by 2040. We will pay off this debt the way someone who wins a million-dollar lottery pays off a car loan.

My Story: An Anecdotal Argument for Immigration Reform

Ilya Shapiro and his Russian parents escaped to Canada, where he grew up. In My Story: An Anecdotal Argument for Immigration Reform he explains how difficult it is to become an permanent resident or citizen of the United States:

And yet there is no way to become a permanent resident without a spouse or employer acting as a sponsor (or without winning the 'green card lottery,' for which neither Canadians nor Russians — were I to reacquire that passport and avoid being sent to Chechnya — are eligible). Unlike every other immigrant-accepting country, the United States makes no provision for 'independent immigration.' That is, the executive and legislative branches have not established a set of criteria by which immigration workers can evaluate would-be immigrants — no 'points system' like the one that enabled my engineer parents to come to Canada.

While I am hugely grateful for the opportunity to live and work in America (and in our nation's capital), I am not presently able to use the wonderful education and skills I have been given for the higher purpose that has long directed my path: the service of my country. I cannot work in the State or Defense Departments, in the challenging and critical Justice Department jobs for which I am otherwise qualified, in Executive Office positions, or in any other legal or policy-making posts for which I have prepared my whole life. I cannot even 'put my money where my mouth is' (in terms of my support of our engagement in Iraq) by serving in the military JAG Corps — or even enlisting as a simple infantryman.

Smarter on Drugs

Michael S. Gazzaniga thinks people are Smarter on Drugs:

Scientists have known for years that more commonplace chemicals such as adrenaline, glucose and caffeine increase memory and performance. We all know it, too: procrastinators find clarity of mind in the adrenaline rush to meet a deadline; we try not to work 'on an empty stomach'; and we are willing to pay a premium for a vente latte — all testimony to our appreciation of these legal activities.

Self-medicating with Starbucks is one thing. But consider the following. In July 2002 Jerome Yesavage and his colleagues at Stanford University discovered that donepezil, a drug approved by the FDA to slow the memory loss of Alzheimer's patients, improves the memory of the normal population. The researchers trained pilots in a flight simulator to perform specific maneuvers and to respond to emergencies that developed during their mock flight, after giving half the pilots donepezil and half a placebo. One month later they retested the pilots and found that those who had taken the donepezil remembered their training better, as shown by improved performance. The possibility exists that donepezil could become a Ritalin for college students.

He compares donepezil (Aricept) to Ritalin because "it is commonly thought to boost SAT scores by more than 100 points, for both the hyperactive and the normal user."

Total Film's 50 Greatest Horror Movies

The editors of Total Film have presented their list of The 50 Greatest Horror Movies of all time. Here's the first half of the list:

1 THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 1974
2 HALLOWEEN 1978
3 SUSPIRIA 1977
4 DAWN OF THE DEAD 1978
5 THE SHINING 1980
6 PSYCHO 1960
7 THE WICKER MAN 1973
8 ROSEMARY’S BABY 1968
9 DON’T LOOK NOW 1973
10 CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST 1980
11 THE THING 1982
12 CARRIE 1976
13 THE EXORCIST 1973
14 THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999
15 WITCHFINDER GENERAL 1968
16 THE HAUNTING 1963
17 THE EVIL DEAD 1981
18 PEEPING TOM 1960
19 ALIEN 1979
20 BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN 1935
21 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 1968
22 CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE 1944
23 SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE 2003
24 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 1984
25 AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON 1981

I'll have to hunt down a few of those, which I haven't seen yet — I spent last Halloween weekend catching up on horror movies — but first I must fulfill my obligation to disagree with those rankings.

I won't quibble over one and two; they're obviously horror classics. The first Halloween, by the way, is remarkably low-gore. Let's skip to three. Last year I anxiously awaited seeing Suspiria for the first time — thank you, DVR and obscure cable channel — and I can say it was a total waste of time. It wouldn't make my top 50.

Dawn of the Dead definitely deserves to be high on the list — even the fast-zombie remake — but the original Night of the Living Dead deserves to be higher — and way, way higher than 21.

The Shining is definitely super-creepy. Psycho, on the other hand, has one utterly, fantastically horrifying shower scene — and not much else. I'd rank it much lower. I don't know The Wicker Man.

Rosemary's Baby is brilliant. I don't know Don't Look Now or Cannibal Holocaust, but I have my doubts. The Thing, Carrie, and The Exorcist all belong high on the list. I only caught Carrie for the first time last year — again, huzzah for the DVR! — and it might be one of the best horror movies I've ever seen. It's so much more than that one famous blood-bath at the end.

The Blair Witch Project worked for me. The Haunting didn't. At all. I don't know Witchfinder General.

Sam Raimi's Evil Dead is a classic, of sorts, but it's better known for its extremely quotable sequels, the tongue-in-cheek Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. I don't know Peeping Tom.

Alien may be my favorite "horror" movie of all time, but I understand why not everyone would rate it as one of the top horror movies of all time: it has all the trappings of serious science fiction.

Bride of Frankenstein may be a classic, but it's awful. Of course, the original Frankenstein is really, really awful — but it introduced an iconic character design for the monster, and it had some wonderfully gothic imagery. Still, I can't believe the abnormal brain bit from Young Frankenstein was in the original.

I haven't caught Curse of the Cat People yet, and I don't know Switchblade Romance, but I did rewatch A Nightmare on Elm Street last Halloween, and I wasn't impressed. I haven't seen An American Werewolf in London in years, but I remember it as good 'n' creepy.