What's the buzz? Teens can't stand it

What's the buzz? Teens can't stand it describes a new technology for dispersing loitering kids:

The device, called the Mosquito ('It's small and annoying,' Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

The grocery store we went to just used classical music.

The First Real Aphrodisiac Is a Nasal Spray

The First Real, Horny-Making, Body-Shaking Aphrodisiac Is a Nasal Spray:

Horn of rhinoceros. Penis of tiger. Root of sea holly. Husk of the emerald-green blister beetle known as the Spanish fly. So colorful and exotic is the list of substances that have been claimed to heighten sexual appetite that it’s hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment on first beholding the latest entry — a small white plastic nasal inhaler containing an odorless, colorless synthetic chemical called PT-141. Plain as it is, however, there is one thing that distinguishes PT-141 from the 4,000 years’ worth of recorded medicinal aphrodisiacs that precede it: It actually works.

And it’s coming to a medicine cabinet near you. The drug will soon enter Phase 3 clinical trials, the final round of testing before it goes to the Food and Drug Administration for review, and with the FDA’s approval it could reach the market in as soon as three years. The full range of possible risks and side effects has yet to be determined, but already this much is known: Putting that inhaler up your nose and popping off a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as few as fifteen minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel “genital warmth, tingling and throbbing,” not to mention “a strong desire to have sex.” Among men, who’ve been tested with the drug more extensively, the data set is, shall we say, richer.
[...]
Fast-acting and long-lasting, packaged in an easily concealed, single-use nasal inhaler, unaffected by food or alcohol consumption, PT-141 seems bound to take its place alongside MDMA, cocaine, poppers, and booze itself in the pantheon of club drugs. If the chemical is all it’s cracked up to be, the perennial pharmacological dilemma of the pickup scene — namely, how to maximize the fun when the drinks required to set the mood are always more than enough to dull the senses — would appear to have found its solution.

Some history:

Two years earlier, and just three years past its start-up, the company had bought the rights to develop a substance called Melanotan II. Originally isolated by University of Arizona researchers looking for a way to give Caucasian desert-dwellers a healthy, sunblocking tan without exposing them to dangerous ultraviolet rays, Melanotan II achieved that modern miracle and more: It also appeared to facilitate weight loss, increase sexual appetite, and — why not? — act as an anti-inflammatory too. Quickly dubbed “the Barbie drug,” Melanotan II seemed too good to be true.

In fact, it was too good to be good. A drug with so many effects, Palatin decided, was not an effectively marketable one. So Palatin’s researchers set out to isolate the individual effects in the laboratory, experimenting with variations on Melanotan II’s molecular theme.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

In Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, Daniel Hillis describes his time working on massively parallel computers at Thinking Machines with his buddy Carl's dad:

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

'We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.'

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. 'Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say echo.' Or, 'Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out.' Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

"The Movies": machinima for the rest of us

Chris Anderson looks at Peter Molyneux's The Movies, which he calls "machinima for the rest of us":

Which is why my kids and I were really looking forward to The Movies, a new game/machinima studio from Peter Molyneux, the legendary games designer of Black & White fame. We've now had a few weeks to play with it, and it's really quite wonderful.

At its core, it's a SimStudio game, where you have to build a Hollywood studio, operate it, make movies and the rest of the usual Sim-style resource management stuff. That's fun enough, but the really interesting bit is the 'Sandbox' mode, where you can make your own movies, pretty much from scratch.

You choose from a wide variety of sets, costumes and, best of all, pre-animated micro-scenes ('Walk in with ax', 'Discover body'; 'Slip on banana peel') many of which can be tweaked with more or less tension, humor, or whatever makes sense in context. You pick pre-created actors or create your own with the usual facial modeling tools. Then you string all these together in a storyboard with some gentle plot and pacing assistance, and when you're done 'filming' you can type in your dialog as subtitles or record a voice-over in a sophisticated post-production studio.

Hacking 101

Hacking 101 provides an introduction to UNIX development:

While I was working on an open source project, I recruited a number of university student volunteers who were interested in contributing to the development. These volunteers were no doubt talented and enthusiastic programmers — I knew that because some of them were A-grade students in a course I taught. However, there was a problem: most of them grew up in a Windows/Mac culture, and were new converts to the UNIX world. To them, the entire GNU/Linux development environment is totally alien: command shell, man page reading, software building with make/autoconf/automake/libtool, and not to mention emacs and cvs. I ended up spending a considerable amount of effort in initiating them into the UNIX culture, and in assisting them to become productive developers even when they only have limited exposure to program development on UNIX platforms. After a while, I began to realize that there is actually a gap that needs to be filled — these young hackers need a textbook to initiate them into UNIX hackerdom. And I intend this document to somehow fill this gap.

Special Relativity: Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?

I like Daniel Hillis's explanation of Special Relativity, in Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?:

You've probably heard that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but have you ever wondered how this rule gets enforced? What happens when you're cruising along in your spaceship and you go faster and faster and faster until you hit the light barrier? Do the dilithium crystals that power your engine suddenly melt down? Do you vanish from the known universe? Do you go backward in time? The correct answer is none of the above. Don't feel bad if you don't know it; no one in the world knew it until Albert Einstein worked it out.

The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation is to understand the simple equation that you have probably seen before: e = mc². In order to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: i = 144 f. The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (12² = 144). Another way of writing the same equation would be i = c²f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c² is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing.

The Next Magic Kingdom, Future Perfect

The Next Magic Kingdom, Future Perfect gives an example of long-term thinking:

Technology is self-creating. When I design a faster computer, it lets me create an even faster one. In science, this is called autocatalytic: every change increases the rate of change. So people are right to think they can't plan for the future the way they used to. In the Middle Ages, you could be in a cathedral and then figure that your grandchildren would finish it. Long-term projects made a kind of sense. These days, you can't imagine a three-generation project. No one believes that such a thing would remain relevant. I like the example of the oak beams in one of the dining halls at Oxford, which were put up in the sixteenth century. Several years ago, they had to replace the beams — twenty-foot oak beams, which are very hard to come by. They called the Oxford forester and asked if there were any such trees, and sure enough there were. In other words, someone thought far ahead enough to have planted the trees in the expectation of replacing the beams. You can't imagine that kind of thinking anymore. It just wouldn't occur to many people to make a centuries-long development.

The nuclear blitz that never was

According to The nuclear blitz that never was, recently published documents, originally written by the Hungarian People's Army 1st Group Directorate, describe what would have happened in a Cold War confrontation:

At 7am on 23 June, 1965, Vienna is hit by two 500 kiloton devices, and completely destroyed.

A single bomb falls on Munich, obliterating the city.

The Italian cultural centres of Verona and Vicenza — both cities with important American and Nato military connections — are devastated.

Airfields, armoured divisions and barracks are also struck.

In all, thirty nuclear weapons are launched.

At the same time, Nato bombs destroy Budapest and other cities in Hungary.

It is not clear who has struck first.

Adult Behavior on Projects

Tim Lister has "often said that risk management is project management for adults," and now he adds that "Agile Methods address many of the most common software risks," in Adult Behavior on Projects:

I think of software projects as journeys into the uncertain. As we begin we may not know exactly what we are to build, we may not know what is the most appropriate technology to build it with, and therefore we aren't sure what skills we'll need, and add that up and we are very unsure of how long a journey we will take. The odd thing is that many people are very certain of when we will be done. The deadline is very often set before the system is specified. At face value, this is comical, but what is happening is that the organization is trying rather clumsily to set a project goal or a project constraint.

South Park's tribute to Monty Python

Any fan of South Park and Monty Python must naturally watch South Park's tribute to Monty Python.

Dividends, Buybacks Set New Benchmark for Largess

This sounds like good news. Dividends, Buybacks Set New Benchmark for Largess:

This year, the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are on track to pay out more than $500 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases, or buybacks, according to S&P. That's up more than 30% from last year's record — and equivalent to nearly $1,700 for every person in the U.S.

But it also means that companies are effectively saying, "We don't know how to use all this money":

But there could be an economic downside to the cash glut. The fact that companies have been sitting on so much cash is, in some respects, a vote of no-confidence in U.S. economic prospects: At least some companies may be signaling they can't find enough profitable ways to reinvest their earnings, so they are simply returning it to shareholders.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Evan Williams, co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs, makers of Blogger, shares his Ten Rules for Web Startups:

1. Be Narrow
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
4. Be Picky
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
7. Be Greedy
8. Be Tiny
9. Be Agile
10. Be Balanced

Benford's Law

According to Benford's Law, a number is far more likely to start with the digit 1:

Benford's Law is named for the late Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electric Company. In 1938 he noticed that pages of logarithms corresponding to numbers starting with the numeral 1 were much dirtier and more worn than other pages.
[...]
Dr. Benford concluded that it was unlikely that physicists and engineers had some special preference for logarithms starting with 1. He therefore embarked on a mathematical analysis of 20,229 sets of numbers, including such wildly disparate categories as the areas of rivers, baseball statistics, numbers in magazine articles and the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book 'American Men of Science.' All these seemingly unrelated sets of numbers followed the same first-digit probability pattern as the worn pages of logarithm tables suggested. In all cases, the number 1 turned up as the first digit about 30 percent of the time, more often than any other.

To illustrate Benford's Law, Dr. Mark J. Nigrini offered this example:

If we think of the Dow Jones stock average as 1,000, our first digit would be 1.

To get to a Dow Jones average with a first digit of 2, the average must increase to 2,000, and getting from 1,000 to 2,000 is a 100 percent increase.

Let's say that the Dow goes up at a rate of about 20 percent a year. That means that it would take five years to get from 1 to 2 as a first digit.

But suppose we start with a first digit 5. It only requires a 20 percent increase to get from 5,000 to 6,000, and that is achieved in one year.

When the Dow reaches 9,000, it takes only an 11 percent increase and just seven months to reach the 10,000 mark, which starts with the number 1. At that point you start over with the first digit a 1, once again. Once again, you must double the number — 10,000 — to 20,000 before reaching 2 as the first digit.

As you can see, the number 1 predominates at every step of the progression, as it does in logarithmic sequences.

Tyler Cowen's Law

Arnold Kling cites Tyler Cowen's Law that no political party can be mass-captured by the intelligent and brought around to sanity:

There are passionate Republicans and passionate Democrats. But I agree with Tyler Cowen that neither party is likely to seem attractive. I can give a number of examples that for me illustrate Tyler Cowen's law. These are policies that neither party is likely to endorse, even though to me they make sense.

• a trade policy of unilateral disarmament
• surrender in the drug war
• separation of family and state
• creating an agency to audit the Department of Homeland Security

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives explains how the color images were created for The Empire That Was Russia, the Library of Congress Exhibition:

We know that Prokudin-Gorskii intended his photographic images to be viewed in color because he developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.

Googling For Gold

Entrepreneurs are now Googling For Gold:

The Google effect is already changing the delicate balance in Silicon Valley between venture capitalists and startup companies. Instead of nurturing the most promising startups with an eye toward taking the fledgling businesses public, a growing number of VCs now scour the landscape for anyone with a technology or service that might fill a gap in Google's portfolio. Google itself and not the larger market has become the exit strategy as VCs plan for the day they can take their money out of their startups.

Escherization

Escherization has been reduced to an algorithm:

Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination. Can we automate the discovery of tilings by recognizable motifs? More formally, we pose the Escherization problem:

Given a shape S, find a new shape T such that:

1. T is as close as possible to S; and
2. Copies of T fit together to form a tiling of the plane.

Theory of Anything? Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own

"Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience," and now he's shooting down String Theory. From Theory of Anything? Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own:

String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact. When I asked physicists like Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek and string theory superstar Edward Witten for ideas about how to prove string theory, they typically began with scenarios like, 'Let's say we had a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way …' Wilczek said strings aren't a theory, but rather a search for a theory. Witten bluntly added, 'We don't yet understand the core idea.'

Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big

Anne Thompson analyzes the economics of filmmaking in Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big:

In Hollywood, there's a studio price and an indie price. There's a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you're Peter Jackson coming off 'The Lord of the Rings').

Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. If you're George Clooney, you recognize the value of putting yourself in quality work that will stand the test of time.

No studio is going to admit the obvious: They can't afford to make all their movies at top-tier prices. And if they only make a few tentpoles a year, what are they going to do with the rest of their slate? None of the studios is willing to slash the fat from their motion picture divisions.

Baudrillard on Tour

Larissa MacFarquhar summarizes Baudrillard on Tour:

Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives individuals the illusion of choice while in fact entrapping them in a vast web of simulated reality. In 1999, the movie “The Matrix,” which was based on this theory, transformed him from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure. But Baudrillard was ambivalent about the film — he declined an invitation to participate in the writing of its sequels — and these days he is still going about his usual French-philosopher business, scandalizing audiences with the grandiloquent sweep of his gnomic pronouncements and his post-Marxian pessimism.

How to Fund a Startup

Paul Graham's How to Fund a Startup is "a complete summary of funding options for startup founders":

• Friends and Family
• Consulting
• Angel Investors
• Seed Funding Firms
• Venture Capital Funds

Even out of context his footnotes are interesting:

[1] The aim of such regulations is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be able to protect themselves. The unintended consequence is that the investments that generate the highest returns, like hedge funds, are available only to the rich.

[2] Consulting is where product companies go to die. IBM is the most famous example. So starting as a consulting company is like starting out in the grave and trying to work your way up into the world of the living.

[3] If "near you" doesn't mean the Bay Area, Boston, or Seattle, consider moving. It's not a coincidence you haven't heard of many startups from Philadelphia.

[4] Investors are often compared to sheep. And they are like sheep, but that's a rational response to their situation. Sheep act the way they do for a reason. If all the other sheep head for a certain field, it's probably good grazing. And when a wolf appears, is he going to eat a sheep in the middle of the flock, or one near the edge?

[5] This was partly confidence, and partly simple ignorance. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms were the impressive ones. We thought software was all that mattered. But that turned out to be the right direction to be naive in: it's much better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making a good product.

[6] I've omitted one source: government grants. I don't think these are even worth thinking about for the average startup. Governments may mean well when they set up grant programs to encourage startups, but what they give with one hand they take away with the other: the process of applying is inevitably so arduous, and the restrictions on what you can do with the money so burdensome, that it would be easier to take a job to get the money.

You should be especially suspicious of grants whose purpose is some kind of social engineering-- e.g. to encourage more startups to be started in Mississippi. Free money to start a startup in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which make investments rather than giving grants. For example, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns. They would probably be worth approaching-- if you don't mind taking money from the CIA.

[7] Options have largely been replaced with restricted stock, which amounts to the same thing. Instead of earning the right to buy stock, the employee gets the stock up front, and earns the right not to have to give it back. The shares set aside for this purpose are still called the "option pool."

[8] First-rate technical people do not generally hire themselves out to do technical due diligence for VCs. So the most difficult part for startup founders is often responding politely to the inane questions of the "expert" they send to look you over.

[9] VCs regularly wipe out angels by issuing arbitrary amounts of new stock. They seem to have a standard piece of casuistry for this situation: that the angels are no longer working to help the company, and so don't deserve to keep their stock. This of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what investment means; like any investor, the angel is being compensated for risks he took earlier. By a similar logic, one could argue that the VCs should be deprived of their shares when the company goes public.

[10] One new thing the company might encounter is a down round, or a funding round at valuation lower than the previous round. Down rounds are bad news; it is generally the common stock holders who take the hit. Some of the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to do with down rounds-- like "full ratchet anti-dilution," which is as frightening as it sounds.

Founders are tempted to ignore these clauses, because they think the company will either be a big success or a complete bust. VCs know otherwise: it's not uncommon for startups to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. So it's worth negotiating anti-dilution provisions, even though you don't think you need to, and VCs will try to make you feel that you're being gratuitously troublesome.

Unbelieveable 3D Pavement Drawings!

I have to agree that these are Unbelieveable 3D Pavement Drawings!.

Of course, they're only unbelievably 3D from just the right angle. Viewed from the wrong angle, they're wildly distorted and not-at-all 3D.

Arcadia's Furnishings

Derek Lowe explores the terrible state of academic labs in Arcadia's Furnishings:

I haven't worked in a US academic chemistry lab since 1988, so you'll have to take that into account as you read today's post. But I don't think that things have changed enough to invalidate this observation: many grad-school science labs are so depressing as to defy belief. This isn't universal, but I've seen enough examples to convince me. The atmosphere doesn't correlate well with the amount of money around, either, because I've seen some lower-level departments that weren't so bad, and a couple of Ivy League lab corridors that would pull the serotonin right out of your brain just to walk down them.

Many of the students and post-docs working at these places don't realize this, though, which is surely to their benefit. It's only after you've gone out into the Real World for a while and come back for a visit that it hits you. That's certainly how it dawned on me.

Five Men in a Limo

As Michael Blowhard says, "You know these men and their work, believe me": Five Men in a Limo.

Web 2.0

Paul Graham finally finds a common thread amongst the disparate elements of Web 2.0:

Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term 'Web 2.0' so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new — that it didn't predict anything.

But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The 'trends' we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

A VC explains Evolution vs. Intelligent Design — when it comes to startups:

For years, I have been fascinated by the fact that many of the very best startup companies come out of 'side projects'. They are accidents really. eBay, Google, and Yahoo! are all examples of this mode of starting companies. Delicious was born this way. One of my favorite web services, Sitemeter, started this way. So did Vimeo. I could go on and on, but like a Oscar speech, I need to stop. Sorry to all the 'side project' startups I left off this list.

Brad and I have been seeing a lot of 'one man bands' as well lately. Companies that have been single handedly started by one person with some outsourced development. These people see something they'd like to have and they build it. And all of a sudden, they are in our office with a pitch deck and the need for money to turn the thing they've built into a company.

So I was at breakfast a couple weeks ago with Nick Denton and we got to talking about this phenomenon. So Nick says, 'it's the evolution vs intelligent design debate'. And I about choked on my really great full english breakfast (which is not dead and is alive and well at the Coffee Shop in Union Square in NYC).

Nick is right, there are two ways to build a company.

You can design it from scratch, figuring out exactly what you want to build, getting it all down on paper, raising some money, and then building it. And there are plenty of success stories for that way of building a company.

Or you can just find yourself doing a startup because something you started as a hobby, or to serve your own needs, just took on a life of its own and you have no choice but to evolve it into a business.

Choking Krazy Kulo

Actor and UFC commentator Joe Rogan demonstrated a choke hold on a cooperative radio personality called Krazy Kulo on the Ramiro & Pebbles show on JAMN 94.5 in Boston — and it worked a little too well. Watch the video.

Why $5 Gas Is Good for America

Why $5 Gas Is Good for America looks on the bright side:

So rising oil prices are more than just an irritant or even an ominous nick out of the GDP. They're an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy — with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.

Google's Growth Helps Ignite Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy

From Google's Growth Helps Ignite Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy:

One top-notch engineer is worth '300 times or more than the average,' explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.

One for 'The Birds': Wild Turkeys Attack Humans in Suburbia

The wild turkey bears little resemblance to its domesticated cousin. From One for 'The Birds': Wild Turkeys Attack Humans in Suburbia:

In April, Will Millington was riding his dirt bike down a narrow trail in Norman, Okla., when he stopped before a flock of wild turkeys. The hens scattered, but two toms flared their feathers and stalked toward him. Then they suddenly leapt in the air, beat Mr. Millington with their wings and tried to scratch him with the sharp spurs on the backs of their legs.

Mr. Millington frantically revved his bike's motor. Thirty yards down the trail he looked back. 'They were running after me,' says the 46-year-old property manager. 'That was kind of spooky.'

As Americans prepare to eat some 46 million domestic turkeys slaughtered for Thanksgiving, their wild cousins are fighting back. The explosion of the wild turkey population to nearly seven million from just 30,000 in the 1930s has put a growing number of humans in the face of angry gobblers.

In Year of Disasters, Experts Bring Order To Chaos of Relief

Logistics experts from the private sector are lending their expertise to non-profit relief organizations. From In Year of Disasters, Experts Bring Order To Chaos of Relief:

The first change was simple but crucial — halting the practice of unloading the planes directly into trucks. That's a classic recipe for tarmac tie-ups: It blocks the landing strips so other planes can't touch down. 'They think it's the most efficient way, but it's actually the slowest,' he says. He directed the planes to taxi off the runway to an area where they could be unloaded in a more orderly fashion — their contents transported into organized holding areas for later distribution. The other improvements amounted to the relatively prosaic inventory and warehouse management methods practiced by large shippers.

Why People Hate Economics

Arnold Kling explains Why People Hate Economics:

Paul Bloom's essay 'Is God an Accident?' in the latest issue of The Atlantic, suggests that humans' belief in God, Intelligent Design, and the afterlife is an artifact of brain structure. In this essay, I am going to suggest that the same artifact that explains why people are instinctively anti-Darwin explains why they are instinctively anti-economic.

Bloom says that we use one brain mechanism to analyze the physical world, as when we line up a shot on the billiard table. We use another brain mechanism to interact socially, as when we try to get a date for the prom.
[...]
The difference between analytical and social reasoning strikes me as similar to the difference that I once drew between Type C and Type M arguments. I wrote, 'Type C arguments are about the consequences of policies. Type M arguments are about the alleged motives of individuals who advocate policies.'
[...]
Economics is an attempt to use a type C brain to understand market processes in impersonal terms.

Upscale Experience, Downscale Prices

Upscale Experience, Downscale Prices examines trends in retailing, including the emergence of lifestyle centers — which I've been naively calling outdoor malls:

Open-air pedestrian walkways, dozens of small merchants, no large anchor store. Developers are embracing this format, known as the lifestyle center, as the replacement for outdated enclosed malls.

'There isn't going to be this one super-regional mall model that everyone' constructs, says Mr. Stanek. 'Consumers have said that rather than going into a one-million-square-foot mall, they're more interested in getting to specific stores.'

The International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade association, says there are currently 132 lifestyle centers in the U.S. that total nearly 50 million square feet. That's still small next to the 951 million square feet of enclosed mall space in the U.S. Still, more than 60% of the lifestyle-center square footage has opened since 2000. And 52 more lifestyle centers — totaling 7.3 million square feet — are under construction, according to the council.

Developers often build lifestyle centers in upper-income communities where older, upscale shoppers will be drawn to typical lifestyle-center tenants: Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Gap, Bath & Body Works, Pottery Barn and Victoria's Secret.

Taking the trend a step further, some developers are building so-called retail districts — which combine office, retail, residential and open spaces — on the sites of demolished older malls. Continuum Partners' Belmar development in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo., proposes one million square feet of retail space in the lifestyle-center format, 900,000 square feet of office space, nine acres of parks and 1,300 homes. Belmar would sit on the 104-acre site of Lakewood's former Villa Italia Mall.

'Once the retailers learn they can survive without the department store,' says Mark Falcone, Continuum's CEO, 'they move into more unconventional formats like these multilevel retail districts.'

What's Behind the Boom

What's Behind the Boom examines some of the longer-term forces that are reshaping the housing industry:

America still has lots of wide-open spaces, but many of them aren't where people want to live. And builders are finding it more difficult to get permits to put up new houses in many of the more economically vibrant metropolitan areas, particularly along the East and West coasts.

'The housing supply has been constrained by government regulation as opposed to fundamental geographic limitations,' concludes a paper released in December 2004 by Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, and two colleagues.

Homeowners share the blame. Prof. Glaeser's paper says they have grown savvier about organizing themselves to block proposals that would bring new and more densely packed housing to their neighborhoods — something that they fear could reduce the value of existing homes.

In the more crowded markets, home values no longer have much to do with the cost of building a home. In San Francisco, the paper estimates, the structure itself typically accounts for no more than 30% of a home's value; the rest of the value reflects the costs of land and obtaining regulatory approvals to build. That's why some people pay as much as $1 million for an old home, immediately tear it down and build a new one.

The Mayor of Ar Rutbah

In The Mayor of Ar Rutbah, James A. Gavrilis describes how his company of Special Forces soldiers established a functioning democracy in one Iraqi town:

As an alternative to Saddam’s regime, the particular form of democracy was not as important as the concept of a polity that provided for the individual. That was really what Iraqis missed under Saddam. Good governance had to precede the form or type of democracy. Because we were effective in providing services, were responsive to individual concerns, and improved their lives, the Iraqis gravitated toward us and the changes we introduced. However, we didn’t have to change much. Ar Rutbah already had a secular structure that worked. We just put good people in office and changed the character of governance, not the entire infrastructure.
[...]
In the end, I spent only about $3,000. This sum included the salaries of the police, the mayor, the army colonel, and a few soldiers and public officials. We paid for the crane and the flatbed trailers to move the generators to the city for electricity, and for fuel to run the generators. And we picked up the tab for other necessities, such as painting, tea, and copies of the renunciation form. But the change did not depend on the influx of funds; the Iraqis did a lot themselves. The real progress was the efficient and decent government and the environment we established. Without a lot of money to invest, we made assessments and established priorities, and talked with the Iraqis, exchanging ideas and visions of the future.

Hellboy Animated

Tad Stones describes his early efforts to get Hellboy Animated:

I first pitched Hellboy as an animated prime time show about ten years ago while I was still at Disney. (Hey, they claimed they wanted fresh ideas!) I even produced a little video reel on Adobe Premiere, complete with an animated Touchstone logo. No interest, of course. I was given several logical reasons why it wouldn't really fit on prime time television, most of which can be summed up in the sentence, 'It's not The Simpsons.' Ironically, I now work at Film Roman Studios where the entire first floor is taken up by artists working on The Simpsons.
[...]
Years later I got really close. [...] But as we worked on the show, it became obvious the executives wanted it safer, calmer and much more kid-friendly than the movie. My favorite exec quote: "Why do we need antagonists?" Finally, after the feature film disappointed at the box office, our production was shut down, fittingly, on Friday the 13th.

Now he's finally getting his chance to do it right.

(Hat tip to Drawn.)

Bad for Business

In Bad for Business, Hans Labohm cites the opening lines of "Doing Business in 2006 — Creating Jobs", a report cosponsored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group:

If you were opening a new business in Lao PDR, the start-up procedures would take 198 days. If you were opening one in Syria, you would have to put up $61,000 in minimum capital — 51 times the average annual income. If you were building a warehouse in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fees for utility hook-up and compliance with building regulations would amount to 87 times average income. And if you ran a business in Guatemala, it would take you 1,459 days to resolve a simple dispute in the courts. If you were paying all business taxes in Sierra Leone, they would take 164 percent of your company's gross profit.

Outsourcing to the Heartland

Some American firms are outsourcing to the Heartland rather than India:

Rural Sourcing claims to provide information technology services at 30 percent to 50 percent below most U.S. consulting firms by tapping into the increasing number of IT professionals in rural America, where overhead and wages are lower than in metropolitan areas."

If you need work done in grammatically correct English, should you send it to Bangalore or Greenville, NC? Wait, don't answer that.

Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit

The Economist's Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit calls Peter Drucker "The one management thinker every educated person should read":

Along the way, he became increasingly convinced that the best hope for saving civilisation from barbarism lay in the humdrum science of management. He was too sensitive to the thinness of the crust of civilisation to share the classic liberal faith in the market, but too clear-sighted to embrace the growing fashion for big-government solutions. The man in the grey-flannel suit held out more hope for mankind than either the hidden hand or the gentleman in Whitehall.

Aspirin: Not Approvable

Derek Lowe points out that there's no way aspirin would be approved today if it were a new drug. In fact, it wouldn't even make it out of the lab. From Aspirin: Not Approvable:

Aspirin causes gastric lesions in rats and dogs, which are the standard small and large animal models for drug toxicity. This side effect occurs at levels which would raise red flags for any new compound. What would a present-day research organization do about it? If we stipulate that they could determine that aspirin worked by inhibiting cyclooxegenase enzymes, they would surely try to break the vascular effects of the drug apart from its anti-inflammatory effects. They would try to find new compounds that selectively inhibited only one of the enzyme subtypes. They would, in other words, produce Vioxx, and Celebrex, and the other COX-2 inhibitors, and this is just why these drugs were developed.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)

The Prodigy Puzzle

Ann Hulbert's The Prodigy Puzzle looks at the search for "genius" and how young prodigies have been discovered, researched, and trained over the years.

Now We Call It Marketing

The Wall Street Journal's latest "Eyes on the Road" column, Surf Lessons, has a great line:

Polite Americans no longer indulge in stereotyping. Now, we call it marketing.

Where the Bets Are

Where the Bets Are looks at the state of venture capital:

The technology world is revving up again as venture capitalists seek out a new batch of young start-ups they hope will become the next Yahoo or eBay.

Through the third quarter, venture capitalists have poured some $16.2 billion into 1,605 deals, according to VentureOne, an industry tracker owned by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. That's a far cry from the $95 billion that flowed into start-ups at the height of the tech boom five years ago. But it's on par with the $21.5 billion invested in 2004 and in keeping with the industry's historical norms.

This time around, the VCs aren't looking just to Internet start-ups or biotech firms for hot growth. Many are exploring new markets overseas, as well as underserved sectors such as alternative energy. Many also are placing their bets on more mature companies — start-ups that weathered the tech downturn and now boast a cool new product or, better yet, a profit.

Some trends playing out in VC:

1. The China Strategy
2. Clean Tech
3. Digital Living Room
4. New Kids on the Block
5. Rock Stars
6. Web 2.0
7. Older and Wiser
8. Adopting Orphans
9. Telecom Comeback
10. Late Exits

Where There Is No Doctor

David Werner originally wrote Where There Is No Doctor as "a village health care handbook" for rural Mexicans without access to modern medical care.

It has since been translated into English — making it a hit with survivalists preparing for The End of the World as We Know It.

Now it's available in its entirety on-line — but you'll probably want a paper copy in case of total social collapse.

The Bakeoff

In The Bakeoff, Malcolm Gladwell looks at a cookie-baking Dream Team and compares it to a nuclear power plant crew and an open-source software development team:

The strength of the Dream Team — the fact that it had so many smart people on it — was also its weakness: it had too many smart people on it. Size provides expertise. But it also creates friction, and one of the truths Project Delta exposed is that we tend to overestimate the importance of expertise and underestimate the problem of friction. Gary Klein, a decision-making consultant, once examined this issue in depth at a nuclear power plant in North Carolina. In the nineteen-nineties, the power supply used to keep the reactor cool malfunctioned. The plant had to shut down in a hurry, and the shutdown went badly. So the managers brought in Klein's consulting group to observe as they ran through one of the crisis rehearsals mandated by federal regulators. 'The drill lasted four hours,' David Klinger, the lead consultant on the project, recalled. 'It was in this big operations room, and there were between eighty and eighty-five people involved. We roamed around, and we set up a video camera, because we wanted to make sense of what was happening.'

When the consultants asked people what was going on, though, they couldn't get any satisfactory answers. 'Each person only knew a little piece of the puzzle, like the radiation person knew where the radiation was, or the maintenance person would say, 'I'm trying to get this valve closed,' ' Klinger said. 'No one had the big picture. We started to ask questions. We said, 'What is your mission?' And if the person didn't have one, we said, 'Get out.' There were just too many people. We ended up getting that team down from eighty-five to thirty-five people, and the first thing that happened was that the noise in the room was dramatically reduced.' The room was quiet and calm enough so that people could easily find those they needed to talk to. 'At the very end, they had a big drill that the N.R.C. was going to regulate. The regulators said it was one of their hardest drills. And you know what? They aced it.' Was the plant's management team smarter with thirty-five people on it than it was with eighty-five? Of course not, but the expertise of those additional fifty people was more than cancelled out by the extra confusion and noise they created.

The open-source movement has had the same problem. The number of people involved can result in enormous friction.

Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy 'Black Monday'

The times, they are a-changin'. Retailers used to gear up for Black Friday. Now Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy 'Black Monday':

With the rapid expansion of the Internet, the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown to be the all-important kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. On that day, consumers head back to work — and their computers — ready to shop after the long holiday weekend.

Last year, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the peak day for online transactions, according to VeriSign Payment Services, a unit of eBay Inc.'s PayPal that processes electronic payments for about 150,000 online merchants. Some 77% of online retailers said their sales increased noticeably that day, according to a recent survey by e-commerce company Shopzilla Inc. and industry group Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, which is calling the day "Cyber Monday."

Before computers, how did anyone look busy at work?

Throughout the year, Monday is typically the biggest sales day of the week for many online retailers, many of which have expanded their Web sites considerably, so they're more like online catalogs.

Some 30% of online jewelry seller Blue Nile Inc.'s weekly sales happen on Mondays, for example, and then sales taper off as the week goes on, says CEO Mark Vadon. "Our biggest time of the day is right at lunchtime," he says. "You can almost see the wave as it changes time zones."

Nutrition and crime? Sounds way too good to be true

In Nutrition and crime? Sounds way too good to be true, Steven Levitt cites a fascinating article:

The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26 percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the placebo group showed no change.

Theodore Dalrymple's The Starving Criminal makes a similar observation, noting that members of the criminal underclass rarely sit down to dinner, often go without food while on drugs, and even consider prison a good opportunity to fatten back up before hitting the streets again.

Top 20 Geek Novels

The Guardian did a small on-line survey to discover the top 20 geek novels:

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

I can maintain some geek cred by noting that I've read more than half the list — but I certainly lose some points by not having read any Philip K. Dick (yet).

Entrepreneurial Finance Around the Globe

Jeff Cornwall explains why looking at external financing isn't a good way to study Entrepreneurial Finance Around the Globe:

Almost four out of five start-ups in the US use some combination of self-financing and/or friends and family. The next largest source is debt financing. Less than one percent use equity financing.

Laser etched Powerbook

Phillip Torrone has this to say about his Laser etched Powerbook:

I didn't really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17' Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also the vi book cover image, from O'Reilly), but it seemed like it had to done.

UFC 56: Full Force

UFC 56: Full Force was held last night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Nevada. It pitted both of the coaches from this last season of The Ultimate Fighter, Rich Franklin and Matt Hughes, against lesser foes.

As you can see, Franklin knocked out — or KTFOed, as the fans say — Nate Quarry, and Hughes submitted Joe "Diesel" Riggs with a "Kimura" shoulder lock.

Tribal Yearnings

In Tribal Yearnings, Roger Sandall notes that Hawaiians are trying to be recognized as an Indian tribe, and he offers up Karl Popper's thoughts on tribalism:

In his account of Heraclitus, a philosopher whose motto was “everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest”, Popper claims that the very idea of ubiquitous change was “revolutionary”. At the time, hardly anyone thought of culture in this way, especially given “the stability and rigidity of social life in a tribal aristocracy.” Where hierarchic settings of this sort prevailed, everything “is determined by social and religious taboos; everybody has his assigned place within the whole of the social structure; everyone feels that his place is the proper, the ‘natural’ place, assigned to him by the forces which rule the world; everyone ‘knows his place’”.

It might be useful to point out that this exactly fits every Polynesian culture ever known, including that of old-time Honolulu. Before the retribalization of Hawaii gets much further its advocates should perhaps take a look where they’re heading. But joking aside, the fact is that an intense conservatism regulated and controlled an entire hierarchic social order, just as Popper said it did, and because of this social change took place very slowly—and rarely as a result of rational discussion. True, change did sometimes occur, but “the comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conversions or revulsions, or of the introduction of new magical taboos.”

He thought there was something of this quasi-religious character to be seen in the rise of Nazism and Communism too. Both grew from the same socio-psychological roots as the political theorising of men like Plato over two thousand years ago—the “strain of civilization”, a generalised anxiety about the drift of events, a feeling that cultural breakdown is imminent, that familiar things are disintegrating, that everything known and valued is about to collapse and we won’t be able to stop it.

“I suppose that what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in a footnote, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.”

The Relevance of Romance

The Relevance of Romance explains why a piece of light entertainment is pertinent to our times:

Historical romances are usually as much about contemporary times as about the past, and the new film The Legend of Zorro is a perfect example. Typically, historical romances center on the replacement of an unjust social and political order with a just one. Westerns and vigilante stories, by contrast, tend to concentrate on establishment of rule of law in areas that have either never been civilized (Westerns) or where civilization has broken down (vigilante stories).

The fascinating thing about Johnston McCulley's Zorro novels and stories is that they combine all three genres: set in Old California in the 1840s, they are simultaneously historical romance, Western, and vigilante story. As a result, they show establishment of rule of law as a central element in the replacement of an unjust social and political order and the bringing of justice and peace for the common people.

That makes the Zorro stories highly relevant fables for our time, as the United States works to establish rule of law in Iraq and fight off a global terrorist threat. It is also what makes The Legend of Zorro particularly pertinent to current political debates.

Are Humans Genetically Disposed to Pray to the State?

Don Boudreaux asks Are Humans Genetically Disposed to Pray to the State? and looks at Paul Bloom's Is God an Accident?:

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.

'Data Never Tell a Story; They Must Be Interpreted'

In 'Data Never Tell a Story; They Must Be Interpreted' David R. Henderson looks at socialized (and semi-socialized) medicine:

When governments run medical systems, they systematically overprovide services of general practitioners and underprovide specialists' services. That way, they can look good to the majority of citizens, who are healthy and who judge the system by whether they can get a doctor's appointment, not by whether they must wait 40 weeks from referral by a general practitioner to surgery by an orthopedist.

The Killer That Matters Most

Roy Spencer explains that The Killer That Matters Most to Africans is not global warming:

What is killing Africans in greatest numbers is poverty, and international trade policies that prevent Africans from protecting themselves from diseases that are easily preventable. The Ambassador mentioned pressure from environmentalists in wealthy nations that has prevented the construction of hydroelectric dams in Africa, denying electricity to millions of people. Two billion of the Earth's inhabitants still do not have access to electricity, leading to massive death tolls from problems such as food-borne illnesses (due to a lack of refrigeration) and pneumonia brought on by breathing air contaminated by the burning of dung or wood for heat and cooking. Anyone that has had to suffer through a loss of electricity for any length of time becomes quickly aware of how necessary electricity is for daily life.

How Big Can Small Get?

Glenn Reynolds explains the nature of the firm in How Big Can Small Get?:

One of the things we teach law students is that a corporation isn't really a thing, but a web of contracts. A big corporation is a bigger web of contracts than a small one, but lots of times the differences aren't as significant as they might seem. A small corporation that contracts out its design work to another company, its manufacturing to various others, and relies on other corporations to do the actual retail selling is doing pretty much the same things as a big corporation that keeps all those activities under one roof. The shape is different, but the web of contracts is just as big either way.

That doesn't mean that there's no difference at all. In fact, for a variety of technological and sociological reasons, the different configurations might behave pretty differently. But it's not really because of size, but because of the way the different components interact.

In the really old days, prior to the industrial revolution, there were no real advantages to hugeness. 1,000 blacksmiths pounding on anvils weren't any more efficient per capita than a single blacksmith working alone. In fact, with the overhead for management, they were probably less so. Powered equipment and division of labor changed things, though, as we learned ways to make 1,000 people working together far more than 1,000 times as productive as a single individual, even allowing for the inevitable management overhead and idiocies.

Now things have changed again. In many fields, the individuals may actually be more productive on their own than they would be as part of big organizations, where time that could be spent on productive matters is instead spent in endless meetings, at diversity-training retreats, and the like. And easy communications and coordination, thanks to computers and other modern technology allow those individuals to be coordinated without nearly as much overhead.

This is where one difference between big and small organizations presents itself. In a small organization, people deal mostly with customers and suppliers. They get ahead mostly by making both (but especially the customers) happy. In big organizations, people mostly deal with other people within the organization, and they get ahead mostly by making those people happy. Pleasing customers is a way to get ahead only to the extent that it also pleases the bosses, and if you have to choose whom to please, you're better off pleasing your boss than your customer.

Low-Cost Credit for Low-Cost Items

Low-Cost Credit for Low-Cost Items explains the booming market for selling to the "bottom of the pyramid" in Brazil:

Ms. da Cruz, who lives in São Vicente, a coastal town an hour's bus ride from São Paulo, made a purchase in September equal to one-fifth of her monthly salary. She bought three irons — one for herself and two as gifts for her mother and sister — for 72 reais, or just over $32.

"It was a big purchase," she said. "I normally couldn't pay for it."

She could, though, because of a new policy at CompreBem, a supermarket chain owned by Grupo Pão de Açúcar, Brazil's biggest retailer. The plan allows her to pay for the purchase in 10 interest-free monthly installments of about $3.20 a month.

Big retailers in Brazil are lowering the bar for what they will sell on credit. Though the country's shops and department stores have long sold big-ticket items on installment plans, Brazilian and multinational retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour of France, have begun offering purchase plans with monthly payments that come to no more than one or two reais — about 45 to 90 cents.

Why are they just now offering credit to the poor?

Brazil's erratic economic history made it a long slog for retailers to reach this market. Expensive credit — Brazil still boasts the highest real interest rates in the world — kept most low-income consumers from seeking loans. And years of runaway inflation meant stores were able to offer few affordable payment plans.

But economic changes in the last decade helped curb inflation and laid the groundwork for what many economists believe is a nascent period of prolonged, if modest, growth. After years of stagnation, Brazil's gross domestic product in 2004 grew by 4.9 percent, the quickest clip in a decade, and is expected to grow by more than 3 percent this year.

Slower inflation enabled stores to introduce payment plans for retail goods that many consumers once strained to finance — from tennis shoes and televisions, to refrigerators and home computers.

(Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.)

Suburban Despair - Is urban sprawl really an American menace?

Witold Rybczynski asks, Is urban sprawl really an American menace?:

In Sprawl, cheekily subtitled 'A Compact History,' Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the assumptions that underpin most people's strongly held convictions about sprawl. His conclusions are unexpected. To begin with, he finds that urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny's maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum — where Cicero had a summer house — were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs — those urbanized areas outside cities' protective walls — had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. This pattern continued during the Renaissance. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs.

(Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.)

The Torturous World of Powerpoint

In The Torturous World of Powerpoint, Brad Felt presents "a list of questions that a pitch to a VC should address":

1. What is your vision?
2. What is your market opportunity and how big is it?
3. Describe your product/service
4. who is your customer?
5. What is your value proposition?
6. How are you selling?
7. How do you acquire customers?
8. Who is your management team?
9. What is your revenue model?
10. What stage of development are you at?
11. What are your plans for fund raising?
12. Who is your competition?
13. What partnerships do you have?
14. How do you fit with the prospective investor?
15. Other

In Defoe's Time, the Specter Of Plagues Was Ever-Present

In In Defoe's Time, the Specter Of Plagues Was Ever-Present, Cynthia Crossen asks, If avian flu begins to pass from human to human, as the plague did in the 17th century, should people with symptoms of the disease be immediately isolated, even if that means virtually imprisoning them?:

Defoe, a journalist best known for his earlier novel, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, wrote about the plague years in an authoritative first-person voice, as though he himself had witnessed the extraordinary acts of horror, courage and cowardice he chronicles. But in 1665, the year the Black Death decimated London, Defoe was only about five years old. Using his imagination to flesh out the few statistics and contemporary narratives available to him, Defoe draws a terrible but riveting picture of a society trying to outrun death.

Medical science offered no vaccination or cure for the plague -- 'We were not to expect that the physicians could stop God's judgments,' Defoe writes -- so England's only line of defense was to prevent those who became infected from contaminating others. Some went to 'pest houses,' but in many cities, including London, a cheaper solution was simply to lock the sick and their families in their own homes, allowing no one to enter or leave for 40 days. Round-the-clock watchmen guarded their doors, on which foot-long red crosses and the words 'Lord, have mercy upon us' were drawn.

Unfortunately, imprisoning the healthy with the infected condemned all to death. So people came up with ingenious ways of distracting the watchmen, breaking the locks and escaping. One large family, confined because one of their maids had become ill, escaped through a large hole they had punched in the wall of their house. Another family used gunpowder to blow up their watchman and fled through their windows. 'It would fill a little volume to set down the arts used by people to shut the eyes of the watchmen and to escape or break out,' Defoe writes. And because the escapees rendered themselves homeless, they wandered around in desperate circumstances, sometimes surviving the plague only to starve to death.

The Future for The Unheavenly City

In The Future for The Unheavenly City, James K. Glassman looks at the effects of the European social model, which tends to lock the young and underqualified out of the job market:

In his 1970 book, The Unheavenly City, Banfield developed the thesis that, while successful contributors to society look to the future, the underclass is 'present-oriented.' Burning cars make a bright present but a dim future.

Future orientation comes through an economic system that convinces people that by investing (in themselves, if not in businesses), they will reap large benefits down the road. In much of Europe, that is not happening.

Prisoner of Narnia

Adam Gopknik looks at C. S. Lewis, the Prisoner of Narnia:

The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures — Churchill is the other — whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified — more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass — truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California — and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an admirer.)

The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing.

So true:

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

'Metropolis' film poster sells for record $690,000

I'll happily settle for a cheap reproduction. From 'Metropolis' film poster sells for record $690,000:

A poster for the classic German 1920s film 'Metropolis' has been sold for a world record $690,000 to a private collector from the United States, the London gallery which arranged the sale said on Tuesday.

The sale beat the previous record for a movie poster of $453,500, set in 1997 by a poster for the 1932 film 'The Mummy,' the Reel Poster Gallery said.

Graphic artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm designed the sepia-colored poster featuring the futuristic skyline which helped make Fritz Lang's film famous.

The art deco poster is one of only four known copies in existence. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Berlin's Film Museum have one each while another is in a private collection.

Kinkajou Repeatedly Attacks Elderly Woman

Beware the Jubjub bird, shun the frumious Bandersnatch, and above all watch out for the manxome Kinkajou! Kinkajou Repeatedly Attacks Elderly Woman:

An elderly Pontotoc County woman received 20 stitches after being attacked and repeatedly bitten by a kinkajou, a raccoon-like pet that had escaped from a home five miles away.

Sadie Hester, 82, said she heard her dogs barking and fighting with something on the front porch Friday night.

'I went out there Saturday morning about 8 to clean up the porch because they'd torn everything up,' she said. 'I thought whatever it was, was gone. I never saw him.'

Hester said as she started sweeping, the kinkajou jumped on her and wrapped his tail around her arm.

'He kept biting my hands because I was trying to pry his teeth out of my hands,' she said. 'I just kept trying to get him off, and he tore up my left arm pretty bad.'

Hester got 16 stitches in her left arm and four in her right hand. She also received several bites that did not require stitches.

Transvestites Hoodwink Tourists With Kiss

What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. Transvestites Hoodwink Tourists With Kiss:

Members of a transvestite gang have confessed to concealing strong sedative pills under their tongues and spitting them down the throats of their victims while kissing, causing them to pass out so they can be easily robbed, police said.

The confession came from three attractive transvestites arrested last week in Bangkok for stealing more than $7,300 in cash and valuables from a Bangladeshi businessman, said police Lt. Col. Akachai Chaicharoen.

America's First War on Islamic Terror

Orrin Judd interviews Joshua E. London's about his new book on America's Barbary Wars, Victory in Tripoli : How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, in America's First War on Islamic Terror:

The United States encountered Islam very early in our history. America's first diplomatic encounter with Islam, in the form of John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's meeting with the Ambassador of Tripoli to Brittan in May 1786, explicitly revealed, over two hundred years ago, the religious nature of the conflict — the jihad — facing the United States. That was before what we call 'Colonialism' entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging us into the fray, and well before the founding of the State of Israel. America became entangled in that part of the world and dragged into a war with the Barbary States simply because of the religious obligation within Islam to bring belief to those who do not share it. From there, the other similarities and parallels become almost comically obvious — the hostage crises, the arms for hostage deals, the basic sociological communications divide between Americans and Muslims, the back-handed dealings, the political calculations and expediency, etc.

Keeping a Genre Alive

I'm not sure why, but they're Keeping a Genre Alive:

Now, two decades after the heyday of text-based games, people like Mr. Muñiz are trying to keep the genre alive. Fans post their own text-only adventures online for free, and meet in chat rooms dedicated to the craft.

And once a year, they participate in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. The contest, going on now and in its 11th year, serves as a sort of Super Bowl of the genre.
[...]
In the old days, a text adventure game was built to take about 20 hours to play, so that customers would feel that they were getting their money's worth. The rules of the new amateur competition dictate that games must be designed so they can be completed in under two hours. As a result, many writers have dumped the labyrinthine puzzles of the classic games in favor of a more literary approach. Some show off punchy language. Others highlight character development. Still others experiment with style: "Photopia," the winner of the 1998 contest, leaps back and forth through time and space, and between characters (it can be downloaded here). "Shade," an entry in the 2000 competition, is a dark, existential piece set in a one-room apartment (play it online here).

I suppose I should give Adam Cadré's Photopia a whirl.

Romancing the Globe

Romancing the Globe examines the amazing global popularity of telenovelas:

Accounts of the global impact of Latin American soap operas, or telenovelas, are now legion. In post-communist Russia, the Mexican hit Los Ricos Tambien Lloran (The Rich Also Cry) became the country’s top-rated show; roughly 70 percent of the Russian population, more than 100 million people, tuned in regularly. Latin American telenovela stars often find themselves mobbed at airports in places as distant as Poland, Indonesia, and Lebanon. In postwar Bosnia, U.S. diplomats intervened to ensure that the Venezuelan show Kassandra could stay on the air in the midst of a tug of war between Bosnian Serb factions for control of the media. In Israel, the Mexican novela Mirada de Mujer (The Gaze of a Woman) was broadcast with both Hebrew and Russian subtitles to ensure that recent Russian immigrants wouldn’t miss an episode. And in the United States, the Latin American shows have become top sellers on Spanish-language networks, which have themselves outpaced English-language networks in some major markets, such as Miami and Los Angeles.

In all, about 2 billion people around the world watch telenovelas. For better or worse, these programs have attained a prominent place in the global marketplace of culture, and their success illuminates one of the back channels of globalization. For those who despair that Hollywood or the American television industry dominates and defines globalization, the telenovela phenomenon suggests that there is still room for the unexpected. Indeed, the success of telenovelas is often celebrated as an example of reverse cultural imperialism or, as one academic memorably called it, “Montezuma’s Revenge.”

The Hummer Lives

I didn't realize exactly what an H2 was. From The Hummer Lives:

Hummer's odyssey as a consumer brand starts, as many know, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously adopted a civilian version of the military-grade Humvee troop vehicle, now sold as the Hummer H1. Intrigued by the mojo created by the combination of the Terminator and the Humvee's ultra-tough military look, GM bought the rights to the Hummer consumer brand. In 2002, Hummer launched the H2, which was basically a Chevy Tahoe in a chrome-trimmed Hummer suit. Early advertising for the H2 played up the hulking vehicle's intimidation factor, and the H2 became a cultural icon in the post-9/11 world.

But icon status can boomerang. As H2 sales boomed past GM's internal expectations during 2003, the H2 became a fat target for environmentalists and other social critics who saw the big truck as an emblem of Detroit's cockeyed priorities. Here, after all, was a 'family' vehicle so big that it was classified as a medium-duty commercial truck, and thus exempt from reporting estimated fuel economy on its window sticker. (That so many H2 buyers subsequently complained to market researchers at J.D. Power and Associates about poor fuel economy is one of those bits of data that keep alive P.T. Barnum's line about the frequency at which suckers are born.)

Then, as gasoline prices started to rise last year, H2 demand began to fall. Fortunately for GM, the company had already been working on a new, smaller Hummer, called the H3. Derived from the underpinnings of the Chevrolet Colorado pickup, the H3 had an unusual in-line, five-cylinder engine that even in the 5,850-pound SUV was rated at 16 miles-per-gallon city, 19 highway (with automatic transmission).

Pennsylvania May Let Hunters Use Prehistoric Weapon

Pennsylvania May Let Hunters Use Prehistoric Weapon:

The state Game Commission is currently drafting proposed regulations to allow hunters to use the atlatl, a small wooden device used to propel a six-foot dart as fast as 80 mph. The commission could vote to legalize its use as early as January.

It's unclear which animals atlatlists may be allowed to hunt, but the proposal is being pushed by people who want to kill deer with a handmade weapon of Stone Age design. The name, usually pronounced AT-lad-ul, is derived from an Aztec word for 'throwing board.'
[...]
To use an atlatl, throwers hook arrowlike hunting darts into the end of the atlatl, which is generally a wooden piece about 2 feet long. The leverage of the atlatl allows them to throw the 5- to 8-foot darts much farther than they could throw a spear.

At BPS Engineering in Manhattan, Mont., a leading manufacturer of atlatls, sales have averaged about 450 in recent years, said owner Bob Perkins. Customers pay $140 for his company's 2-foot maple production-line model, the Warrior, along with a set of five 5 1/2-foot aluminum darts.

Perkins has killed two deer with atlatls and, a couple weeks ago, got his first buffalo.

"Atlatls were the first true weapon system developed by the human race," he said. "They were used longer than any other weapon. Comparatively speaking, the bow and arrow was a recent development in projectile technology."

There is evidence that the weapons were used more than 8,000 years ago in Pennsylvania, said Kurt Carr, an archaeologist with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

I'm not surprised that enthusiasts would like to hunt with prehistoric weapons, but I am a bit surprised that they'd want to buy mass-produced prehistoric-style weapons that throw aluminum darts.

Nobody goes to engineering school because of brilliance in writing

With Drucker's recent passing, I went back and read Wired's old interview with him from 1993. I enjoyed his point that nobody goes to engineering school because of brilliance in writing:

I ran an unscientific time check the other day on the brilliant engineering department of a big company. I just asked engineers to keep a time log for a few weeks. I learned they spend two-thirds of their time polishing reports. Nobody goes to engineering school because of brilliance in writing. On the other hand, the world is full of English majors who can do nothing else. It has taken me two years to get that company to accept the fact that you want your engineers to give you the data, and maybe even write the first draft. But since it takes five drafts before you have a decent report, you hire editors.

Peter Drucker, RIP

I can't believe I had to learn of Peter Drucker's passing from Boing Boing. He was 95. Wired interviewed him back in 1993, for their third issue.

Separation of Family and State

Arnold Kling views the recent French riots as a teenage rebellion against the state as parent. From Separation of Family and State:

One way to describe libertarianism is that we believe in the separation of family and state as strongly as the American Civil Liberties Union believes in the separation of church and state. In contrast, both the Left and the Right view government as a substitute parent. As pointed out by George Lakoff in Moral Politics, the Left wants government to be a nurturant parent and the Right wants government to be a strict parent.

Libertarianism does not want the government to act as a parent. What I want is for government to ensure that property disputes are resolved peacefully, according to rules. The rules themselves do not have to be perfect. They should reflect prevailing custom, which in turn may evolve gradually over time.

My Bionic Quest for Boléro

Michael Chorost tells his story of near-deafness, to sudden total deafness, and back again, in My Bionic Quest for Boléro:

And then, on July 7, 2001, at 10:30 am, I lost my ability to hear Boléro — and everything else. While I was waiting to pick up a rental car in Reno, I suddenly thought the battery in my hearing aid had died. I replaced it. No luck. I switched hearing aids. Nothing.

I got into my rental car and drove to the nearest emergency room. For reasons that are still unknown, my only functioning ear had suffered "sudden-onset deafness." I was reeling, trying to navigate in a world where the volume had been turned down to zero.

But there was a solution, a surgeon at Stanford Hospital told me a week later, speaking slowly so I could read his lips. I could have a computer surgically installed in my skull. A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear. It seemed drastic, and the $50,000 price tag was a dozen times more expensive than a high-end hearing aid. I went home and cried. Then I said yes.
[...]
In early September, the surgeon drilled a tunnel through an inch and a half of bone behind my left ear and inserted the 16 electrodes along the auditory nerve fibers in my cochlea. He hollowed a well in my skull about the size of three stacked quarters and snapped in the implant.

When the device was turned on a month after surgery, the first sentence I heard sounded like "Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?" My brain gradually learned how to interpret the alien signal.

His cochlear implant was software-upgradeable, and he eventually got back the ability to enjoy music.

The Mystery of the Green Menace

The Mystery of the Green Menace discusses absinthe, "celebrated as a muse and banned as a poison":

Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a 140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient, also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name — and its sinister reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based on the belief that it leads to absinthism — far worse than mere alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal dementia."

Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work.

He has studied samples of old absinthe using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry:

He takes a bottle of the liqueur, inserts a syringe through the cork (absinthe oxidizes like wine once the bottle is open), and extracts a few milliliters. He transfers the sample into a vial, which is lifted by a robotic arm into the gas chromatography tower. There it is separated into its components. Then the mass spectrometer identifies them and measures their relative quantities.

One of the ingredients is thujone, a compound in wormwood that is toxic if it's ingested, capable of causing violent seizures and kidney failure. Breaux hands me a bottle of pure liquid thujone. "Take a whiff," he says with an evil grin. I recoil at the odor - it's like menthol laced with napalm. This is the noxious chemical compound responsible for absinthe's bad reputation. The question that's been debated for years is, Just how much thujone is there in absinthe?

Some absinthe history:

Absinthe was first distilled in 1792 in Switzerland, where it was marketed as a medicinal elixir, a cure for stomach ailments. High concentrations of chlorophyll gave it a rich olive color. In the 19th century, people began turning to the minty drink less for pains of the stomach than for pains of the soul. Absinthe came to be associated with artists and Moulin Rouge bohemians. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Picasso were devotees. Toulouse-Lautrec carried some in a hollowed-out cane. Oscar Wilde wrote, "What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?" Soon absinthe was the social lubricant of choice for a broad swath of Europeans - artists and otherwise. In 1874, the French sipped 700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation that had devastated the wine-grape harvest. [...] By the end of World War I, the "green menace" was made illegal everywhere in western Europe except Spain. No reputable distillery still made it.

Breaux dismisses most modern "absinthes" as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil." A real absinthe has "a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor."

How to prepare your absinthe:

Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water, letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. "Pour it slowly," he says. "That's the secret to making it taste good. If the water's too warm, it will taste like donkey piss."

In case you're wondering, absinthe is still illegal in the US — "but American connoisseurs are able to find it," according to Breaux.

Incidentally, a little green fairy had this story to share:

The lore is that people would make a sachet [of wormwood], put it in a pillow, and sleep on it to promote colorful dreaming. So of course I did this. Yeah, it worked, but the dreams started to get a little surreal — not belladonna talking-to-imaginary-people weird, but on that same path to grandma's house.

It's a shame all these little snippets never end up in medical journals.

Peyote Won't Rot Your Brain

According to Wired, Peyote Won't Rot Your Brain:

Part of the problem is that many users — such as LSD aficionados — take a variety of other drugs, so it's hard to tease out the specific effects of psychedelic drugs.

Enter peyote, currently the only hallucinogenic drug legally allowed for use outside research labs (although that may change). Compared with LSD and mushrooms, peyote is a bit obscure, with its use — at least legally — limited to the sacramental rites of the Native American Church, which has as many as 300,000 members. Many peyote users don't take other drugs, making them ideal subjects for hallucinogenic research.

Peyote comes from the crowns of a cactus that grows in northern Mexico and parts of Texas. Harvesters cut off the crown, dry it and sell it in 'buttons,' Halpern said. Generally, users eat the buttons whole or grind them up into a powder that can be mixed into food or brewed into a tea.

When enough peyote is eaten, users enter a hallucinogenic state thanks to its active ingredient, the chemical mescaline. Halpern and colleagues recruited three groups of Navajos — 61 members of the Native American Church who regularly ate peyote, 36 alcoholics who have been dry for at least two months and 79 people who reported little or no use of alcohol or drugs. The researchers then gave mental-health and cognitive tests to the subjects.

Only the alcoholics showed signs of brain problems. On the psychological front, Native American peyote users were actually in better shape emotionally than those who didn't use the drug.

Spain's Gory Pastime Creates Bull Market For Star Surgeons

The economics of fantastic emergency medical care play out as Spain's Gory Pastime Creates Bull Market For Star Surgeons:

As elite surgeons such as Dr. Villamor grow more skillful at treating complicated gorings and bone fractures, matadors are taking more chances to earn praise from fickle audiences. This season has been one of the bloodiest in memory.

In the past, gorings often meant death or long-term disability, especially in small-town rings far from trained surgeons or well-equipped operating rooms. In 1984, a famous Spanish matador, Francisco Rivera, bled to death during a bumpy two-hour drive to a hospital in Cordoba. Most matadors used to play it as safe as they could. Many still won acclaim from less-sophisticated spectators by going through the motions in front of the bulls.

The new ringside medical wizardry has bred a deadlier dynamic. Matadors can get sewn up and be back in action in days, even after horrific injuries. As a result, crowds expect performances that constantly push the envelope. Bullfighters take more chances than ever to impress fans, such as deliberately working on the side of the bull's more dangerous horn.

All of Spain's top matadors have been gored this year, some on several occasions, a toll longtime observers say they haven't seen in years. Most of today's active bullfighters have each suffered four or five gorings that would have been fatal a few generations ago, experts say.

Go to Church or Play a Game?

Bryan Caplan asks, Go to Church or Play a Game?:

Studying data from the General Social Survey, it's clear that people who attend church more are a bit happier. On a three-step scale (very happy/pretty happy/not too happy) people who attend church several times per week are about a quarter of a point happier than people who never attend. (And that's quite a bit smaller than the effect of income, which most happiness researchers think is over-rated).

However, it's striking that controlling for attendance, religious beliefs do little or nothing for happiness. In particular, it doesn't matter how firmly you believe in God — or if you believe; and it doesn't matter if you believe there's an afterlife.

This strongly suggests that the psychological benefits people get from religion stem from the social aspect, and not the doctrine. So while people often use findings like this to make a pragmatist's case for religion, a better interpretation is that people would be happier if they joined a group of some sort with regular meetings. It doesn't have to be a church; it could just as well be a regular gaming group.

History's Worst Software Bugs

Wired magazine shares History's Worst Software Bugs

July 28, 1962 – Mariner I space probe.
1982 – Soviet gas pipeline
1985-1987 – Therac-25 medical accelerator.
1988 – Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon.
1988-1996 – Kerberos Random Number Generator.
January 15, 1990 – AT&T Network Outage.
1993 – Intel Pentium floating point divide.
1995/1996 – The Ping of Death.
June 4, 1996 – Ariane 5 Flight 501.
November 2000 – National Cancer Institute, Panama City.

The Chemistry of Great Coffee

GeekPress points to The Chemistry of Great Coffee:

When it comes to great flavor, coffee chemistry boils down to roasting and brewing.

When the inside of the bean reaches about 400 degrees, it begins to turn brown. Oil locked inside the beans begins to emerge. This is when the flavor takes shape. The more oil, the stronger the flavor.

Roasted coffee is a perishable food. The flavor peaks a few days after roasting and fades once the coffee is exposed to air, light or moisture. For this reason, aficionados keep their beans or fresh grounds in an airtight container at room temperature.

If you're one of the many people who drink coffee for the pick-me-up, you might think an espresso or cappuccino would be most effective. Not necessarily so. Caffeine content goes up as the water spends more time in contact with the grounds. Espresso brewing takes 25 seconds. Other methods take several minutes. Darker roasts also yield more caffeine.

Flavor is the combination of aroma, acidity and body.

Body is the sensation of heft or viscosity, something like oil, on the palate. Longer roasting yields more body. But that also decreases acidity, the tingly taste on your tongue. So there's a trade-off between body and acidity.

Acidity isn't bitterness though. Bitterness comes from skimping on grounds when you brew, brewing for too long, and brewing in a pot or machine with residual grounds left from hours, days or weeks ago.

Barrio Study Links Land Ownership To a Better Life

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's ideas are being studied. From Barrio Study Links Land Ownership To a Better Life:

The Argentine study followed 1,800 squatter families who in 1981 occupied a one-square-mile piece of what they assumed was public land. It had once served as a garbage dump. Through a quirk of the legal system, roughly half of the settlers in the heart of the neighborhood gained title to their properties, while the other half didn't. The researchers found that over the course of two decades, the title holders surpassed those without them in a host of key social indicators, ranging from quality of house construction to educational performance to rates of teenage pregnancy.

Households with titles didn't earn more money than those without them and had access to only a modest amount more credit. Nevertheless, they adopted a more entrepreneurial mindset and shucked the fatalism and fear of being tossed off their land that mark the poor throughout the region. They believed hard work would pay off for their families.

"You give people titles and they start to feel they belong to society," says Harvard-trained economist Ernesto Schargrodsky of the Torcuato Di Tella University, who studied the barrio with Sebastián Galiani of University of San Andrés and Rafael Di Tella of Harvard Business School.

Phi Beta What?

Phi Beta What? describes the falling fortunes of the once-famous honor society:

Phi Beta Kappa may be America's most famous honor society, but these days it's a club not everyone wants to join. Enrollment rates have plummeted at some schools: Last year when Phi Beta Kappa sent out invitations to qualifying undergraduates nationwide, just three-quarters of them responded; at Colorado State University, two-thirds said no. Many members have no idea what the society actually does or what their initiation fees really pay for. Phi Beta Kappa also is facing competition from soundalike societies with lower requirements, including some on the Internet with names like Phi Sigma Theta. (All you need to get in is a friend's recommendation.)
[...]
To anyone who graduated more than 10 years ago, the idea that a student would turn down a Phi Beta Kappa invitation may sound ludicrous. Founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, it was originally a sometime-drinking, sometime-debating all-male secret society that over time devoted itself to recognizing students who excelled in liberal arts. Charters at Harvard and Yale were followed by Dartmouth, Bowdoin and Brown. For about 100 years, most members attended small, private colleges. Phi Beta Kappa then opened up to many public universities — though it remained a calling card to the vestibules of power. Chapters usually admit only students in the top 10% of their class.

Paying money for a certificate and a cheap "gold" key isn't nearly as exciting as joining a "sometime-drinking, sometime-debating all-male secret society."

Why are French muslims rioting?

Jane Galt answers the question, Why are French muslims rioting?:

Let me suggest another possibility: Muslim youth are rioting in France because breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun.

Everyone who has ever taken their .22 out to the back forty and shot up a line of old bug spray cans knows this. Seeing things break, disintegrate, or explode, at absolutely no personal risk to yourself, lights up some primitive reptilian part of our brain with searing glee. I've often thought there would be big money for the firm that figured out how to build an adult recreation center where frustrated Americans could go to have a beer, take a sledgehammer to a used computer, and throw some glassware at the walls.

Bonfire of the Vanities

France is arguably too easy a target for Theodore Dalrymple's wry wit. From his Bonfire of the Vanities:

When it comes to rioting, there's no 35-hour week in France.

His argument:

A Martian observing France dispassionately, without ideological preconceptions, would come to the conclusion that the French had accepted with equanimity a kind of social settlement in which all those with jobs would enjoy various legally sanctioned perks and protections, while those without jobs would remain unemployed forever, though they would be tossed enough state charity to keep body and cellphone together. And since there are many more employed people than unemployed people in France, this is a settlement that suits most people, who will vote for it forever. It is therefore politically unassailable, either by the left or the right, which explains the paralysis of the French state in the present impasse.

The only fly in the ointment (apart from the fact that the rest of the economies of the world won't leave the French economy in peace) is that the portion of the population whom the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so tactlessly, but in the secret opinion of most Frenchmen so accurately, referred to as the "racaille" — scum — is not very happy with the settlement as it stands. It wants to be left alone to commit crimes uninterrupted by the police, as is its inalienable right.

Unfortunately, to economic division is added ethnic and cultural division: For the fact is that most of Mr. Sarkozy's racaille are of North African or African descent, predominantly Muslim. And the French state has adopted, whether by policy or inadvertence, the South African solution to the problem of social disaffection (in the days of Apartheid): It has concentrated the great majority of the disaffected paupers geographically in townships whose architecture would have pleased that great Francophone (actually Swiss) modernist architect, Le Corbusier, who — be it remembered — wanted to raze the whole of Paris and rebuild it along the lines of Clichy-sous-Bois (known now as Clichy-sur-Jungle).

If you wanted to create and run a battery farm for young delinquents, you could hardly do better. But as one "community leader" put it when asked whether he thought that better architecture might help, there's no point in turning 15-story chicken coops into three-story chicken coops.

What would happen if the riots got really bad? They'd send in the CRS (think SWAT, only meaner):

A few years later, there would be a spate of books about the violence of the repression, and everyone would express his shock and horror that such a thing could have happened in the land of les droits de l'homme, but then everyone would forget it all again until a further 20 years had elapsed, when there would be another spate of such books to arouse the tender conscience of the French intelligentsia.

Ship Blasted Pirates With Sonic Weapon

This sounds more like an episode of Jonny Quest than a real news story. Pirates? Sonic weapons? From Ship Blasted Pirates With Sonic Weapon:

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday.

The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems, said Bruce Good, a spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line. The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard.

The subsidiary of Carnival Corp. was investigating whether the weapon was successful in warding off the pirates, he said. The ship's captain also changed its course, shifted into high speed and headed out into the open sea to elude the pirates, who were in two small boats, he said. He had no further details.

Device maker American Technology Corp. said earsplitting 'bangs' were directed by trained security personnel toward the pirates. That, combined with ship maneuvers, caused the attackers to leave the area, the company said.

The LRAD is a so-called 'non-lethal weapon' developed for the U.S. military after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.

The military version is a 45-pound, dish-shaped device that can direct a high-pitched, piercing tone with a tight beam. Neither the LRAD's operators or others in the immediate area are affected.

American Technology, based in San Diego, compares its shrill tone to that of smoke detectors, only much louder. It can be as loud as about 150 decibels, while smoke alarms are about 80 to 90 decibels.

The devices have been deployed on commercial and naval vessels worldwide since summer 2003, the company said.

As Industry Profits Elsewhere, U.S. Lacks Vaccines, Antibiotics

According to As Industry Profits Elsewhere, U.S. Lacks Vaccines, Antibiotics, "By itself, Lipitor, an anticholesterol drug, brings in more revenue — about $12 billion this year — than the entire vaccine market." That's because vaccines are drugs with low profit margins, infrequent use and a high likelihood of liability lawsuits. Some history:

Wyeth, Madison, N.J., started making smallpox vaccine in 1885 and was a principal supplier of childhood vaccines in the U.S. for most of the 20th century. But beginning in the 1980s it became the target of lawsuits linking vaccines to a wide range of illnesses without obvious causes such as epilepsy and attention deficit disorder. Wyeth estimates the industry has spent more than $200 million defending itself against hundreds of lawsuits alleging that a preservative in some vaccines called thimerosal causes autism and other diseases. Scholarly studies have failed to find a thimerosal-autism link. The lawsuits haven't gone to trial.

In 2000, Wyeth discontinued its vaccine against diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and soon after began to reassess flu vaccines. Vaccines against flu take months to produce and have to be reformulated each year depending on which flu strains are deemed most dangerous. When Wyeth failed to get its vaccine on the market first, it often was forced to discard millions of doses of unsold product.

All this would have been a manageable burden if Wyeth could have charged a high price for its flu vaccine. But government intervention in the market made that impossible. The federal government has long played a big role in mandating use of vaccines and paying for them. [...] In 1993 a federal program was created to provide vaccines to families who couldn't afford them. The federal government now buys 60% of all pediatric vaccines in the U.S., and it has often used its buying power to drive down prices. It pays just $16.67 a dose to Merck for a triple vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The price for private buyers is $40.37.

Wyeth could charge only $6 a dose for its flu vaccine, says Dr. Paradiso, who is vice president for scientific affairs and research strategy. It pulled out of the market, which left the U.S. vulnerable when contamination at Chiron's flu-vaccine plant in England forced it to shut down last year.

Mainstream Media Meltdown

Chris Anderson spells out the Mainstream Media Meltdown:

Down:

• Box Office: down by 7% this year (tickets per capita have fallen every year since 2001). 
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year. 
• Music: Sales are down another 5.7% this year; although digital downloads (still just 6% of the business) are climbing nicely. 
• Radio: down 4% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• Books: down by 7% in 2004 (but see comments  below for discussion)

Mixed:

• DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.
• TV: Total viewership is still rising, but as channels proliferate and the audience fragments the rating of the average show continues to decline.
• Magazines: Ad revenues are up a bit although the number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Circulation is also flat, while newsstand sales are at an all-time low. 
• Videogames: it's the final few months of the current generation of consoles, which tends to the trough of the buying cycle. Sales were down 20% in Sept, but will probably pick up by Christmas with the launch of the Xbox 360.

Up:

• Internet advertising:
  • Banners: Up 10% this year
  • Keywords: Google revenues up 96%

Is There Always Another Way To Get Information?

Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) asks, Is There Always Another Way To Get Information?:

Abu Ghraib has hurt the American mission in Iraq more than any insurgent bombing or beheading. So it is terribly important that we not accept mistreatment as inevitable, and we should do everything in our power as a nation to make sure that those who break the rules are appropriately disciplined. Congress ought to pass Sen. McCain's provision and the president ought to make a great public show out of signing it. But we also need to realize that prisoner abuse, like collateral damage in a bombing campaign, is one of those things that will happen whenever the country — any country &mdsash; goes to war. 'Atrocities follow war as the jackal follows a wounded beast,' wrote John Dower, author of 'War Without Mercy,' an unflinching look at racial hatred and atrocity on both sides between America and Japan in World War II.

The White House's objection to Sen. McCain's provision has little to do with Abu Ghraib or widespread prisoner abuse; it concerns the smaller piece of the torture debate, the 'ticking bomb' scenario. The administration wants to protect the flexibility of the CIA, and of military special ops interrogators, to coerce intelligence from rare captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, chief engineer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and operations chief for al Qaeda.

Despite the moral assurance of a television show like 'Commander in Chief,' this question also has no easy answer. If there were 'always another way' to get vital, potentially life-saving intelligence, as the show suggested, or if coercion always yielded bad information, cruelty would be completely unnecessary and virtue would cost nothing. We could treat all captured terrorists as honored guests without sacrificing a thing. But in certain singular instances coercion is necessary and appropriate.

The point the White House is missing here is that even with important captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, official authorization for severe interrogation is not necessary. Just as there is no way to draw a clear line between coercion and torture, there is no way to define, a priori, circumstances that justify harsh treatment. Any attempt to codify it unleashes the sadists and leads to widespread abuse. Interrogators who choose coercive methods would, and should, be breaking the rules.

That does not mean that they should always be taken to task. Prosecution and punishment remains an executive decision, and just as there are legal justifications for murder, there are times when coercion is demonstrably the right thing to do.

The Real Global Virus

Victor Davis Hanson calls Islamism The Real Global Virus:

At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the new imperial Roman?

In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they’re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles’s silence about Iran’s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).

We can, of course, learn from this.

Olivia Judson on evolution in progress

Olivia Judson on evolution in progress in a provocative NY Times article:

But the most important point is this: viruses and other pathogens evolve in ways that we can understand and, to some extent, predict. Whether it's preventing a flu pandemic or tackling malaria, we can use our knowledge of evolutionary processes in powerful and practical ways, potentially saving the lives of tens of millions of people. So let's not strip evolution from the textbooks, or banish it from the class, or replace it with ideologies born of wishful thinking. If we do, we might find ourselves facing the consequences of natural selection.

Physics of cow tipping

According to David Pescovitz over at Boing Boing, "Cow-tipping may be far more difficult than dumb jocks might lead you to believe." He cites a recent study:

Ms (Tracy) Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to exert the required force to bowl it over.

A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, equivalent to 4.43 people, she wrote.

Of course, a "dumb jock" — like, oh, say, a wrestler — would know not to let the cow keep its legs straight and planted.

Les Misérables

Les Misérables explains why so few immigrants to France find jobs:

Alas, the obvious, probably easiest, solution is taboo. Absent a major overhaul, Europe's welfare state continues to make it difficult for low-skill, low-wage laborers to find work. In a system like France's that protects the people already in jobs and keeps unemployment stuck at 10% (nearly triple that for the young), it's little wonder that the banlieues are burning. No better way exists to make someone feel part of a society than to give him a job in it.

Liberia: From Barbarity to Hope

Last month, Liberia held its first free and fair election. Richard S. Williamson hopes that just one step on the journey From Barbarity to Hope:

Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in 1847. Liberia continues to be divided by the Americo-Liberian minority comprising only 5% of the people and the overwhelming majority of indigenous Liberians that come from 16 different ethnic groups. For over a century, Liberia was dominated by the Americo-Liberian True Whig Party that directed Liberian politics from 1871 to 1980.

In April, 1980, indigenous Liberian Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe seized power in a coup d'etat in which President Talbert was butchered in cold blood and 13 ministers were stripped to their underwear, staked to posts on the beach and executed.

A civil crisis flared up and the ensuing 25 years of conflict have led to senseless violence, four transitional governments, and a non-functioning state apparatus.

One observer described the past quarter century in Liberia as a period of 'public executions on the beach, drug crazed young thugs terrorizing citizens at roadblocks, rampant theft of national resources, corruption, nepotism, abuse of human rights, tribalism, blood diamonds and warlords.'

Many indigenous Liberians believe in a spiritual world of unseen forces and the visible world of everyday life. In war, when killing occurred, the victor could take on the power of his enemy by ingesting part of his body, his heart or liver, and thus his spirit. During periods of intense violence in Liberia there were regular reports of 'ritual killings.' Witchdoctors were reported to have scrutinized potential victims prior to ripping their living hearts out of their bodies. Then the person who 'commissioned' the deed consumed the heart in whole or in part to gain the power of the victim and to intimidate others.

During this past quarter century the quality of life grew more bleak. Competent civil administration and the rule of law disappeared. The infrastructure deteriorated, the economy collapsed and, today, most of Liberia has no electricity, no running water and no public health services.

Liberia's life expectancy is 47 years. Illiteracy is near 85%. Unemployment in the formal sector is over 70%.

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

With the recent riots on the outskirts of Paris, it's time to revisit Theorore Dalrymple's The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, which describes modern France's criminal-infested housing projects (cités). The parallels to American housing projects are uncanny:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them — a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, �official,� society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust — greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years — is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements.
[...]
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti — BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
[...]
[Pit bulls were] the only breed of dog I saw in the cit�s, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
[...]
Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
[...]
The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets, for example, I observed two dealers openly distributing drugs and collecting money while driving around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent, one wore a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair, contrasting dramatically with his complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those of potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere at maximum speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves if they tried. They didn�t fear the law: rather, the law feared them.

(I originally blogged on this piece a couple years ago.)

West Coast Woman To Build Crash Pad Out of an Old 747

I feel so terribly conventional, sitting in my wood-frame house. From West Coast Woman To Build Crash Pad Out of an Old 747:

Unusual homes are nothing new along the coast of Southern California, long a magnet for eccentrics and free spirits. The 'cyclotron house' in Malibu is shaped like an atom smasher. The 'eyeball house' in Woodland Hills is a wooden silo with four giant glass eyes affixed to it. The 'Chemosphere' looks like a flying saucer perched on a toothpick at the edge of a cliff in the Hollywood Hills.

Ms. Rehwald, whose family founded the first Mercedes-Benz dealership in southern California, is intent on adding to the genre. She has reserved a junked jet to purchase, charmed local planning officials and spent $200,000 on consultants.

Empires of the World

John Derbyshire shares some of the questions answered by Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the World:

Most of us have, at one time or another, puzzled over such historical-linguistic conundrums as: Why did only Britain, of all the Roman provinces overrun by Germans, end up speaking a Germanic language? Why did the Portuguese language “take” in Brazil, but not in Africa, while Dutch “took” in Africa but not in Indonesia? If the Phoenicians were so important in Mediterranean history, how is it that they left not a single work of literature behind? Since we know of no nation named Aramaia, whence came Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth? What actually happened to Sumerian? Or Mongolian, the language of a vast medieval empire?

Diagnosis: Decadence

In Diagnosis: Decadence, Stefan Beck laments that more people don't read the works of Theodore Dalrymple — whose recent City Journal essays have been compiled into Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses:

Dalrymple has seen more and done more than most people, and whatever topic he brings that to bear on — sex, drugs, serial murder, poetry, or public morality — he tells the tale with great style and humane wit. If only his work were wider read by those not already disposed to his arguments.

Very cool illusion

Michael Blowhard points to a Very cool illusion:

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you're lucky! It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.

Not Enough Togetherness

Robin Hanson notes the key issue of urban economics: Not Enough Togetherness:

I'm teaching urban economics now for the first time. There is still a lot I don't know, but it seems clear to me that there is one big overall market failure in urban economics, one that the textbooks don't seem to make clear.

Land in populated areas is valuable mostly because other people live nearby; people with whom one can have social, job, and shopping relationships. While our neighbors often hurt us, their net (and marginal) effect is on average positive, and huge.

This externality, however, mainly comes from the people on nearby land, and not from their gardens. So when we consider how much land to use for our homes or offices, we do not consider the gains to others from our using less land, and so allowing more people to be nearby. We also neglect the benefits we provide others when choosing to live at the edge of the populated area, versus living in an unpopulated area.

Does government help? Not so much:

Local governments are in a position to reduce this externality, but they seem to mostly make matters worse. Minimum lot sizes, maximum building heights, maximum densities, and barriers to development at the populated edge are far more common than their opposites.

How to Manage Geeks

Russ Mitchell of Fast Company asks Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell, How to Manage Geeks:

• You've got to have your own geeks
• Get to know your geek community
• Learn what your geeks are looking for
• Create new ways to promote your geeks
• Create new ways to promote your geeks
• Either Geeks are part of the solution — or they're the problem
• The best judges of geeks are other geeks
• Look for the natural leaders among your geeks
• Be prepared for when the geeks hit the fan
• Too many geeks spoil the soup

I recommend reading the whole article.

The Anti-PDA

Fast Company has just discovered The Anti-PDA:

At first glance, a Moleskine couldn't be simpler: a plain black cover encasing plain or ruled pages, available in a variety of sizes. But a closer look reveals several doodad-y details — a built-in bookmark, an elastic strap, an expandable inner pocket — that combine to create the feel of a gadget. Perhaps more important, Moleskines, which cost around $10 for pocket versions, are being marketed as the 'legendary notebook of European artists and intellectuals,' originally manufactured by 'small French bookbinders' and favored by the likes of Hemingway, Matisse, and Picasso — all of which imbues the booklets with an air of romantic sophistication and creativity.

320 people arrested for sorcery

You just can't make up stories like this. From 320 people arrested for sorcery:

Police in Papua New Guinea have arrested 320 people for practicing sorcery and religious cults, the National newspaper reported Thursday.

Belief in sorcery is widespread in this jungle-clad, mountainous South Pacific island nation where some villages only encountered Western civilization in the 1930s.

Police raided three villages Monday near the city of Lae on the north coast and arrested leaders of a 'cargo cult' and their followers, the newspaper said. Those arrested were aged between 20 and 70.

Cargo cults believe that Western goods or cargo, first encountered through missionaries and explorers, are created by ancestral spirits. They have been known to build airstrips in the jungles in the belief that planes would land with cargo.

One group led by two women used menstrual blood as 'sacred water' to enable them to see 'invisible things,' said the newspaper in the capital, Port Moresby.

One of the female cult leaders, Malamba Kifea, said the sorcery improved the livelihood of the people in Kasin village, a remote settlement some eight hours walk from the main highway.

'We read the Bible and in the book of Leviticus, we found strange teachings about women and their monthly period,' Kifea told The National.

'We were not sure and did not consult our pastor but kept the secret to ourselves after having revelations and seeing cargo and money being given to us.'

Another group in Sadau village used skeletons from ancestors to summon 'supernatural powers' to predict the future and bring prosperity.

'We can invoke blessings for protection, hunting, luck and to increase wealth,' said elderly cult leader Erbu Kuriong.

Kuriong said the sorcerers charged for their fortune telling, with the proceeds used to build a home for the group.

About 80 percent of PNG's 5.4 million population ekes out subsistence lives in villages.

Ideas for Startups

Paul Graham discusses Ideas for Startups:

The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea.

The initial idea is just a starting point — not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn't. If you say: I'm going to build a web-based spreadsheet, then critics — the most dangerous of which are in your own head — will immediately reply that you'd be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn't give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn't want to have their data on your servers, and so on.

A question doesn't seem so challenging. It becomes: let's try making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone knows that if you tried this you'd be able to make something useful. Maybe what you'd end up with wouldn't even be a spreadsheet. Maybe it would be some kind of new spreasheet-like collaboration tool that doesn't even have a name yet. You wouldn't have thought of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.

What I Did this Summer

In What I Did this Summer, Paul Graham describes how hard the young entrepreneurs worked at his Summer Founders Program:

People this age are commonly seen as lazy. I think in some cases it's not so much that they lack the appetite for work, but that the work they're offered is unappetizing.

The experience of the SFP suggests that if you let motivated people do real work, they work hard, whatever their age. As one of the founders said 'I'd read that starting a startup consumed your life, but I had no idea what that meant until I did it.'

I'd feel guilty if I were a boss making people work this hard. But we're not these people's bosses. They're working on their own projects. And what makes them work is not us but their competitors. Like good athletes, they don't work hard because the coach yells at them, but because they want to win.

We have less power than bosses, and yet the founders work harder than employees. It seems like a win for everyone. The only catch is that we get on average only about 5-7% of the upside, while an employer gets nearly all of it. (We're counting on it being 5-7% of a much larger number.)

Paul Graham strongly believes in the agility and speed of small entrepreneurial firms:

Here's a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. And it certainly doesn't matter how many of them there are, any more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners are behind him.

"It's a crowded market," I remember one founder saying worriedly.

"Are you the current leader?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Is anyone able to develop software faster than you?"

"Probably not."

"Well, if you're ahead now, and you're the fastest, then you'll stay ahead. What difference does it make how many others there are?"

Net Startups Tell VCs: 'We Don't Need You'

"Netstrapping" — bootstrapping a net-based venture without venture capital — is alive and well. From Net Startups Tell VCs: 'We Don't Need You':

Internet start-ups and venture capitalists are back in vogue in Silicon Valley. But now the two don't necessarily go together.

Consider Flickr, the innovative online-photo service launched by a small Canadian company early last year. Like many Web start-ups today, it was built on a dime: Husband-and-wife founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake used cheap software to construct the Flickr site, eschewing pricey computers. Some gear, such as computer storage, was 'about 100 times cheaper' than it would have been even five years ago, says Mr. Butterfield. It cost only about $200,000 to pay salaries and get the site up and running, he says.

By last year, several top venture-capital firms were clamoring to invest in Flickr through its parent company, Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. In December, Mr. Butterfield had a funding offer from Accel Partners of Palo Alto, Calif. But the entrepreneur decided instead to sell to Internet giant Yahoo Inc. for what people familiar with the matter say was about $25 million, significantly higher than the value Accel had put on the company and Accel's proposed investment.

Plane Geometry: Scientists Help Speed Boarding of Aircraft

Passengers board airplanes half as quickly as they used to — down from 20 passengers per minute to nine — in part because they bring along more (and heftier) carry-on luggage. (I suppose it doesn't help that passengers are larger than they used to be.)

Scientists are trying to help. From Plane Geometry: Scientists Help Speed Boarding of Aircraft:

Mr. van den Briel's research has led to an innovative boarding system at America West Airlines called 'reverse pyramid.' The first economy-class passengers to get on the plane are those with window seats in the middle and rear of the plane. Then America West gradually fills out the plane, giving priority to those with window or rear seats, until it finally boards those seated along aisles in the front.

Anthony V. Mulé, senior vice president for customer services, says the system, introduced in 2003, has saved at least two minutes in boarding time. 'This is a great illustration of how science helped improve both efficiency and customer service,' says Mr. Mulé.

Mr. van den Briel is one of a small cadre of experts in the science of airline boarding. Their research has upset much of the conventional wisdom about how to get people quickly into their seats. Boarding from the rear to the front, still standard practice at many American airlines, is almost certainly not the fastest way, these scientists say. Among the faster methods may be letting everyone board randomly or calling out each individual seat number.

The Physics of Bras

From The Physics of Bras:

One side effect of the obesity epidemic in America is rarely noted: Women's chests are expanding nearly as fast as their bellies. Poor eating habits, as well as breast implants and the estrogens in birth-control pills, have led to an increase in the past 15 years of more than one bra size for the average American woman — from a 34B to a 36C. For many women, this has been a burdensome trend. A pair of D-cup breasts weighs between 15 and 23 pounds — the equivalent of carrying around two small turkeys. The larger the breasts, the more they move and the greater the discomfort. In one study, 56 percent of women suffered from breast pain when jogging.

Naturally, scientists had to research this very, very carefully.

(Hat tip to GeekPress.)

The Value of Control Groups in Causal Inference (and Breakfast Cereal)

Gary King demonstrates The Value of Control Groups in Causal Inference (and Breakfast Cereal):

A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter's kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.

To start, I hold up some nails and ask 'does everyone likes to eat nails?' The kindergarten kids scream, 'Nooooooo.' The graduate students say 'No,' trying to look cool. I say I'm going to convince them otherwise.

I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn't stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn't stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.

From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; 'iron, 100 percent' is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say 'yes'; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say 'yes' (almost the same percent in both classes!).

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

The greatest postmodern art film ever

Aidan Wasley calls Star Wars: Episodes I-VI "The greatest postmodern art film ever."

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

Wartime "sluts" caused diplomatic waves

From Wartime "sluts" caused diplomatic waves:

London's 'young sluts' wreaked such havoc among U.S. troops during World War Two that the British government feared Anglo-American relations would suffer, files released Tuesday showed.

Thousands of prostitutes and 'good-time girls' were drawn to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square in search of young American men in uniform.

They took advantage of blackouts, which plunged London into darkness during Nazi night air attacks, to evade the police.

The government was so concerned by the problem that it asked the Metropolitan Police to write a report on it in 1942.

The report described how prostitutes working in upmarket Mayfair tended to be French and caused few problems while those around Piccadilly Circus were 'a lower type of prostitute, quite indiscriminate in their choice of client.'

By early 1943, with thousands of U.S. soldiers pouring in to Britain ahead of the allied invasion of Europe, the Foreign Office was growing increasingly worried.

'Our attention has been drawn to the scale on which the American troops are subjected to accosting by prostitutes and we are beginning to be apprehensive about the long-term effect it may have on Anglo-American relations,' Junior Foreign Office Minister Richard Law wrote in a letter to the police.

'If American soldiers contract venereal disease while in this country, they and their relatives in the United States will not think kindly of us after the war.'

The government organized a conference to address the issue and mulled a ban on women in certain notorious London streets, according to the police files, which have been secret for 50 years but have now been released by the National Archive.

Britain was worried the Nazis would use the issue to undermine morale by goading British soldiers into believing their wives were cheating on them.

Admiral Sir Edward Evans, head of London's Civil Defense unit, wrote to the police in September 1943 to complain that 'Leicester Square at night is the resort of the worst type of women and girls...'

'Of course the American soldiers are encouraged by these young sluts, many of whom should be serving in the forces,' he fumed. 'At night the square, with its garden, is apparently given over to vicious debauchery.'

The police and many government officials played down the issue, saying it was nothing new.

One old-timer at the Home Office recalled the streets and brothels of Paris during World War One.

'London at the moment is by comparison a Sunday school,' he wrote.

The "Vanity of the Philosopher"

From The "Vanity of the Philosopher":

'What does the price of tea in eighteenth century China have to do with Bishop Berkeley's theory of vision?' If you have to ask such a question, you haven't spent enough time around my colleague David M. Levy. David combines expertise in Adam Smith, ancient Greek democracy, non-normal distributions, Victorian literature, and advanced Monte Carlo techniques.

OK, I'm hooked. I may have to check out Levy's book.

Books on the Environment

Michael Crichton recommends a number of Books on the Environment:

1. Playing God In Yellowstone
By Alston Chase
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986

2. The Culture Cult
By Roger Sandall
Westview, 2001

3. Man in the Natural World
By Keith Thomas
Oxford, 1984

4. The Skeptical Environmentalist
By Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2002

5. The Logic of Failure
By Dietrich Dörner
Perseus, 1998

Five Big Reasons Why Teams Win

Russell Adams explains Five Big Reasons Why Teams Win:

In the past offseason, teams spent more money on average in bonuses (about $2 million per player) for offensive tackles, the men who protect the quarterback from the defense's most dangerous pass rushers, than on any other position besides quarterback.

In 2001, players at almost every other position on the field were getting higher average bonuses than offensive linemen; this year, linemen (offensive tackles, guards and centers) rate fourth overall in average bonus money.

Broader changes in the NFL are behind this new premium on the big lugs on the line. Teams are throwing the ball more than ever — 10 teams are calling for passes on more than 60% of their plays this year — so glamour-boy quarterbacks are spending more time standing and looking for an open receiver while large, angry men try to tackle them. Those angry men on defense are getting faster, too, as coaches are increasingly favoring speed over size in defenders. As defenders rush from unexpected parts of the field in more complex blitz schemes, it's largely up to the offensive linemen to block them.

At a time when virtually every athletic endeavor is evaluated using statistics, concocting a recipe for an effective offensive line remains a highly subjective science. Two common traits link the top blocking units: Quick feet and brains. (Yes, brains. Forget the stereotypes.) A long pair of arms also helps to keep defenders at a distance; scouts and general managers now put a premium on offensive linemen with arms at least 35 inches long.

Martinis Only? Not James Bond

Eric Felten gives a surprisingly thorough run-down of James Bond's drink selections in Martinis Only? Not James Bond:

Bond's first drink on record occurs some 30 pages into Fleming's debut novel, 'Casino Royale.' He strolls into a bar at a French resort hotel and orders ... an Americano.

A what? An Americano is made of Campari, sweet vermouth, and soda water over ice in a highball glass. One of my favorite cocktails, with its perfect balance of bitter and sweet, the Americano is admittedly an acquired taste. Yet it was so popular among Americans visiting Italy at the turn of the last century that it was named after them. Nowadays it is obscure enough to be a fair test of your favorite bartender's skills.

Bond's taste for Americanos is explained in the short story 'From a View to a Kill,' which starts with Bond licensed to kill time in Paris. 'One cannot drink seriously in French cafes,' Fleming writes. 'Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin.' Instead, one makes the best of the 'musical comedy drinks' appropriate to the venue, in which case 'Bond always had the same thing — an Americano.'

Fleming knew that in drink no less than food, it pays to play to an establishment's strength. When Bond grabs a roadhouse lunch with Felix Leiter in 'Diamonds Are Forever,' he doesn't waste time elucidating the comparative virtues of shaking vs. stirring; he just orders a beer (a Miller High Life, at that).

When in Jamaica, 007 favors gin-and-tonics extra heavy on juice from the island's fresh limes. When Bond trails Auric Goldfinger to Geneva, he relaxes with a tot of Enzian, "the firewater distilled from gentian," the root of an Alpine wildflower. In the Athens airport he knocks back Ouzo; in Turkey it's Raki. At Saratoga racetrack, he drinks Old-Fashioneds and "Bourbon and branch" (i.e., water). And when Bond goes out to lunch in London, he orders one of the most distinctively British of drinks, a Black Velvet. Equal parts champagne and Guinness stout, a Black Velvet might sound awful, but proves to be startlingly good in the drinking — I find it tastes curiously and deliciously like hard cider.

But 007 doesn't always bow to local custom. In "Casino Royale" Bond for the first and only time invents a drink, a "special martini." He specifies to the barman, "Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?" Later, he names it a "Vesper," for his doomed love-interest, fellow British agent Vesper Lynd. When he learns she'd been working for the Russkies, the cocktail is as dead to him as the girl.