Who pays for health care?

From Who pays for health care?:

Paul Krugman has a good column on rising healthcare costs and how to ration them. Krugman has been a frothing nutter for about 6 years now, so it's nice to see something honest and reasonable for a change.

On the topic of rising healthcare costs, Krugman correct identifies the main culprit: new (expensive) medical technology.

Krugman's prescription is to have the government step in and regulate pricing. He does not point out that this fix works by eliminating new (expensive) medical technology. This does not matter if you are an old person or someone with a treatable disease, but sucks if you are a young person or have a (currently) untreatable disease.

Be more productive

Aaron Swartz explains how to be more productive:

There are a lot of myths about productivity — that time is fungible, that focusing is good, that bribing yourself is effective, that hard work is unpleasant, that procrastinating is unnatural — but they all have a common theme: a conception of real work as something that goes against your natural inclinations.

And for most people, in most jobs, this may be true. There's no reason you should be inclined to write boring essays or file pointless memos. And if society is going to force you to do so anyway, then you need to learn to shut out the voices in your head telling you to stop.

But if you're trying to do something worthwhile or creative, then shutting down your brain is entirely the wrong way to go. The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you're hungry, to sleep when you're tired, to take a break when you're bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.

How Bad is Life in North Korea?

How Bad is Life in North Korea? Pretty bad. The government allows its "most loyal" citizens to work abroad — and keeps most of the hard currency they earn:

By far the largest number of North Koreans working outside their country are in Russia, where they do mostly logging and construction in military-style camps run by the North Korean government. When the camps were set up in the early 1970s, the workers were North Korean prisoners. But as the North Korean economy disintegrated in the late 1980s, doing hard labor in Siberia came to be seen as a reward because at least it meant getting adequate food.

One Laptop Per Child

One Laptop Per Child explains both what the $100 laptop will have and what it won't:

• fans or heat sinks (saving power, cost and weight)
• disk drive (they are fragile, expensive, and unreliable, and eat power)
• any I/O expandability other than USB
• any hardware/flash expandability

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not

The headline's a bit much — Fear destroys what bin Laden could not — but the article's not:

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.

That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.

What is there to say now?

All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ''Happy Holidays'' could be a disguised attack on Christianity.

I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke — speaking metaphorically now — mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate.

Milgram's Progress

Milgram's Progress describes the work of the scientiest responsible for the famous "shock" studies:

Milgram's contributions were remarkably numerous and varied during his abbreviated career (he died of a heart attack in 1984 at age 51). Some of the highlights: He conducted the experiments that led to the phrase "six degrees of separation" and devised methodological innovations such as the "lost letter" technique (pretending to accidentally lose letters addressed to various individuals or organizations and then seeing how many are picked up and mailed by people passing by). He also virtually invented the field of urban social psychology. And he conducted the largest-scale investigation ever on whether viewing violence on television leads to violent behavior, a study for which he persuaded CBS to modify the ending of a popular drama for showings in different cities.

But it is the obedience experiments (which he ran in the 1961–62 academic year, just after receiving his Ph.D.) for which Milgram will always be remembered, for better or for worse. The studies were inspired by Milgram's interest in the pathologies of the Holocaust. Specifically, he wondered why tens of thousands of ordinary German citizens willingly provided the manpower to carry out a massive killing program. He reasoned that when a type of behavior, no matter how evil, becomes "normal," an explanation for it can probably be found in features of the situation. In this case, he hypothesized, the toxic trigger for the behavior was obedience to authority.

Milgram recruited a diverse group of psychologically normal adult men to participate in a laboratory experiment supposedly designed to measure the effects of punishment on learning. Each subject was given the role of teacher and instructed to ask another ostensible subject (actually a research assistant who was a confederate of the experimenter) a series of questions. The subject in the role of teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock each time the "learner" made an error, beginning with a mild 15 volts and progressing in 15-volt intervals up to an eventual 450 volts, which was clearly marked as extremely dangerous. Although no shocks were actually administered, the situation was orchestrated to appear terrifyingly realistic. Midway through the experiment, the confederate, who was in an adjoining room where he could be heard but not seen, screamed out that he was having a heart attack; eventually, he ceased responding altogether. If the subject resisted administering shocks, the experimenter urged him on with statements like "It is absolutely essential that you continue" and "You have no choice. You must go on."

How many psychologically normal people would administer a 450-volt shock to someone who might be going into cardiac arrest as a result? When Milgram posed this question to others, the average estimate was no more than one in a hundred people. A group of psychiatrists guessed one in a thousand. Most people estimated that they themselves would break off at about 135 volts — at a point just before the supposed learner demands to be released. Almost none of those asked said that they would obey instructions to turn up the juice all the way to 450 volts.

Astonishingly, however, Milgram found that a full 65 percent of the men (26 out of 40) went to 450 volts. Milgram then conducted an equally remarkable and elaborate series of follow-up studies in which he investigated how the subject's obedience was affected by such factors as the proximity of the experimenter, the proximity of the victim, the subject's sex and the presence of peers. Obedience varied from one condition to another but in almost every case was frighteningly high. In a television interview in 1979, Milgram said that he eventually came to the conclusion that "If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

Bush reads up on Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. troops

From Bush reads up on Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. troops:

Bush was reading When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, by Patricia O'Toole, and Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, by Robert Kaplan while on holiday at his Texas ranch, said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

"Rogue" African elephants may soon hunt poachers

The headline sounds much more interesting than the actual story. "Rogue" African elephants may soon hunt poachers:

Tembo was a killer who faced the death sentence for his "crimes."

But the six-tonne bull elephant won a reprieve after a vet approached animal trainer Rory Hensman and asked him if he could mend Tembo's wild ways.

Now tourists are taking rides on Tembo's back in the bush at Dinokeng Game Reserve 100 km (60 miles) northeast of Johannesburg — proving that grown elephants can learn new tricks.

Tembo and some of his jumbo friends may also be put to work soon protecting their own kind as "all-terrain" vehicles in anti-poaching patrols.

But he'll remember, with advantages ...

But he'll remember, with advantages ... cites a fascinating passage from Robert Kaplan's The future of America — in Iraq:

If you want to meet the future political leaders of the United States, go to Iraq. I am not referring to the generals, or even the colonels. I mean the junior officers and enlistees in their 20s and 30s. In the decades ahead, they will represent something uncommon in U.S. military history: war veterans with practical experience in democratic governance, learned under the most challenging of conditions. For several weeks, I observed these young officers working behind the scenes to organize the election in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. ... Throughout Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become veritable mayors of micro-regions, meeting with local sheiks, setting up waste-removal programs to employ young men, dealing with complaints about cuts in electricity and so on. They have learned to arbitrate tribal politics, to speak articulately and to sit through endless speeches without losing patience.

I watched Lt. John Turner of Indianapolis get up on his knees from a carpet while sipping tea with a former neighborhood mukhtar and plead softly: "Sir, I am willing to die for a country that is not my own. So will you resume your position as mukhtar? Brave men must stand forward. Iraq's wealth is not oil but its civilization. Trust me by the projects I bring, not by my words." Turner, a D student in high school, got straightened out as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard before earning a degree from Purdue and becoming an Army officer. He is one of what Col. Michael Shields, commander of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Mosul, calls his "young soldier-statesmen."

Tech leaders tell of books offering insight, wisdom

USA Today's Kevin Maney asks tech industry leaders to write about two favorite books, one old and one new, and shares the results in Tech leaders tell of books offering insight, wisdom. Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, recommends Built to Last and The World is Flat.

Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, which created the avatar-filled online world of Second Life, recommends The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto, and On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat, recommends On Becoming a Leader and Massive Change.

Larry Downes, associate dean of the Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems, "keeps coming back to" Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and admires The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law.

Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline

Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline:

The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.

The results were based on a sample of more than 19,000 people 16 or older, who were interviewed in their homes. They were asked to read prose, do math and find facts in documents. The scores for "intermediate" reading abilities went up for college students, causing educators to question whether most college instruction is offered at the intermediate level because students face reading challenges.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Hollywood's New Year

In Hollywood's New Year, Edward Jay Epstein provides his predictions for 2006:

Before the invasion of television, the big screen (aka movie theaters) provided 100 percent of the studios' revenues. Now it accounts for less than 15 percent. The small screen — which includes computers, portable DVD players, and iPods as well as televisions — provides 85.6 percent.

According to Epstein, "the further migration of Hollywood into home entertainment will be greatly accelerated in 2006 by the following five events":

1. The success of Google's Wi-Fi experiment in San Francisco.
2. The further collapse of the video window.
3. The proliferation of digital video recorders.
4. The Blu-Ray DVD.
5. The mandated digital conversion of television.

The Burke Habit

In The Burke Habit, Jeffrey Hart looks at how The Conservative Mind has evolved since Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, published in 1953:

Both hard and soft utopianism ignore flawed human nature. Soft utopianism believes in benevolent illusions, most abstractly stated in the proposition that all goals are reconcilable, as in such dreams as the Family of Man, World Peace, multiculturalism, pacifism and Wilsonian global democracy. To all of these the Conservative Mind objects. Men do not all desire the same things: Domination is a powerful desire. The phrase about the lion lying down with the lamb is commonly quoted; but Isaiah knew his vision of peace would take divine intervention, not at all to be counted on. Without such intervention, the lion dines well.

Density Is Destiny: On Politics and the Paperboy

In Density Is Destiny: On Politics and the Paperboy, Patrick Cox looks at rural versus urban views on government:

Historically, there has been a higher perceived and practical need for government in big cities. Sewer systems, for example, are a matter of life and death in cities where diseases spread rapidly through densely packed populations. In the country, outhouses worked fine for most people until septic tanks with indoor plumbing came along, and neither needed government involvement or assistance to install and use — except in so far as they might require permission from local regulators, who were therefore resented.

Clean and healthful running water in cities likewise entailed major public works programs as well as taxation in some form. Water in the country was usually a matter of drilling a well and was therefore untaxed. Garbage disposal in cities, required to prevent all sort of unpleasantness including vermin infestation and disease, has almost always involved government. In the country, you could burn or bury.

Crime rates, despite Hollywood's slander of the American West, have also traditionally been a more serious problem in big cities. When you can see people coming from far away and tend to know all those around you, those already accustomed to handling weapons and hunting have a different take on crime prevention than those who live among high-density strangers.

The Myth of Man the Killer

From The Myth of Man the Killer:

Human beings are social primates with social instincts. One of those instincts is docility, a predisposition to obey the tribe leader and other dominant males. This was originally adaptive; fewer status fights meant more able bodies in the tribe or hunting band. It was especially important that bachelor males, unmarried 15-to-25 year-old men, obey orders even when those orders involved risk and killing. These bachelors were the tribe's hunters, warriors, scouts, and risk-takers; a band would flourish best if they were both aggressive towards outsiders and amenable to social control.

Over most of human evolutionary history, the multiplier effect of docility was limited by the small size (250 or less, usually much less) of human social units. But when a single alpha male or cooperating group of alpha males could command the aggressive bachelor males of a large city or entire nation, the rules changed. Warfare and genocide became possible.

Actually, neither war nor genocide needs more than a comparative handful of murderers — not much larger a cohort than the half-percent to percent that commits lethal violence in peacetime. Both, however, require the obedience of a large supporting population. Factories must work overtime. Ammunition trucks must be driven where the bullets are needed. People must agree not to see, not to hear, not to notice certain things. Orders must be obeyed.

Good and Bad Procrastination

Paul Graham contrasts Good and Bad Procrastination:

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes — anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

His key point:

The reason it pays to put off even those errands [which get worse if you put them off] is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

More poetically:

People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "I don't have time to work," they say. And they don't; they've made sure of that.

As Richard Hamming asked, What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

The Other American Exceptionalism

Gerard Alexander describes The Other American Exceptionalism:

In most European countries, the median voter is both less religious and more dependent on government than the median voter in the United States. This tugs American politics to the right and European politics to the left.

Conservative views on Market vs. State:

American conservatives believe that a healthy modern economy is so complex and innovative that most economic decisions have to take place in the private sector, where scattered information is located, and risk may be rewarded or punished. Government is best at enforcing rules of the game and engaging in limited redistribution. When it does much more than that, it creates inefficient regulations and bureaucracies prone to expanding rather than learning.

Some numbers:

The result is that average U.S. per capita income is now about 55% higher than the average of the European Union's core 15 countries (it expanded to 25 in 2004). In fact, the biggest E.U. countries have per capita incomes comparable to America's poorest states. A recent study by two Swedish economists found that if the United Kingdom, France, or Italy suddenly were admitted to the American union, any one of them would rank as the 5th poorest of the 50 states, ahead only of West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Montana. Ireland, the second richest E.U. country, would be the 13th poorest state; Sweden the 6th poorest. The study found that 40% of all Swedish households would classify as low-income by American standards.

Conservative views on Predators versus leftist European views:

By and large, American conservatives believe that although international conflicts may arise from uncertainty, misunderstanding, and mutual threats, they usually result from simple predation, power-hunger, and hatred. Global cooperation is possible when would-be predators are deterred, which requires muscular firmness. Democracies are uniquely suited to be enforcers of international order because they are least likely to be its transgressors—which is the reason Americans have traditionally championed an integrated and assertive Europe, instead of seeing it as a threat.

Some Europeans share this view, including most British and many Dutch and Danish conservatives, as well as Blair and other Laborites. Once upon a time, the Gaullists thought like this, and José María Aznar and other Spanish conservatives do so still. But most European governments now practice what Americans would recognize as a liberal foreign policy. This is not so much because Europeans inhabit what Robert Kagan calls a "post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity." Instead they insist on seeing misperception, insecurity, and pride as the root of most international conflicts, which accordingly are best defused by reassurance and the careful avoidance of confrontation, ultimatums, and threats. The Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings — hasty withdrawal from Iraq — was denounced as appeasement by most Americans, but not by most Europeans. Of course, the British response to the London bombings has been quite different, at least so far.

Some factoids:

American conservatives believe that the deterrent approach toward international predators should be firmly applied to would-be domestic predators as well. One might expect the same sensibility in Europe, given high crime rates there. Despite enduring stereotypes to the contrary, Europeans now match or surpass America in most crimes, including violent ones (except murder and, to a lesser degree, rape). In per capita terms, Belgium has more assaults than the U.S., the Netherlands nearly the same number, and France is rising fast. England and Wales have more robberies, the Dutch almost as many, and England and Denmark beat America in per capita burglaries and (here joined by the French) in theft and auto theft. After lecturing Americans that expensive welfare states would ensure social peace, many Europeans now find themselves saddled with both high welfare costs and high crime, while American crime rates have dropped. Western Europeans have met high crime rates with policing and prisons, of course, but more notably with multicultural appeals, jobs programs, and policies aimed at "social insertion" of the alienated. As Theodore Dalrymple explains, such policies transmit the message that criminals are victims, too, and their actions understandable responses to trying circumstances. The result, as in foreign policy, is a lack of resolve among the virtuous, wink-and-nod cynicism among offenders, and excuse-making by everyone.

Voting and the Feminine Mystique

Voting and the Feminine Mystique reports on a new study that shows that parents of daughters are more likely to vote left-wing:

Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee drew their data from the British Household Panel Survey, which has monitored 10,000 adults in 5,500 households each year since 1991 and is regarded as an accurate tracker of social and economic change. Among parents with two children who voted for the Left (Labour or Lib Dem), the mean number of daughters was higher than the mean number of sons. The same applied to parents with three or four children. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.

But it was the “switchers” who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.

Professor Oswald, the father of two daughters, sat on the results for three months. He decided to release them this week, after finding the same pattern in German households.

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!"

Kenyan economist James Shikwati pleads, For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!:

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

The Monarch and Henchmen 21 & 24 Sing the Christmas Blues

IGN Film Force's Holiday Havoc Day 13 features the Monarch and Henchmen 21 & 24 (from Venture Bros.) singing Hard Candy Christmas.

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

I'm not sure what to say about Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors:

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: 'I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.'
[...]
Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

The Undercover Economist on Wealth and Change

Nick Schulz interviews Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist, who explains that "if you would like to be rich and have nothing change, then you will be disappointed":

I start by looking at the medieval city of Bruges which was the richest city in Northwestern Europe, in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. And it was rich because of trade. People shipped goods from all over Europe. They were traded in Bruges. Bruges was the sight of the first stock exchange.

Tall ships sailed up and down the river’s (wind). And then one day the river Zwin started to silt up. And Bruges was cut off from the world economy and just didn’t change for 500 years. So this to the metaphor of what happens if the anti-globalizers get their wish. What happens if the protectionists get their wish? The river silts up. And basically all the trade moves to Antwerp.

Bruges is now bustling only because of tourists who come to see what a presently preserved 15th century city looks like. And they admire this beautiful architecture that these guys who were once incredibly wealthy, what did they put up? And now in Bruges basically you can get very nice chocolates and beer there. And it is a beautiful place. But it is just tourists sites.

So I say you can be rich like Bruges in the 13th to 15th centuries, or you can have nothing changed like Bruges from the 16th through the 20th centuries. But you know you can’t be rich and have nothing change. Because economic change is dynamic.

The takeaway message:

The way I like to think about the impact of trade -- you can point to a town where people are people are put out of work because what they did has now been shipped off to China. And the suffering is very real. But so was the suffering of secretaries who typed when they were all put out of business by Microsoft Word. We don’t look back and say, if only Word Perfect had never been invented. All those girls would still be down in the typing pool typing away. They would still have those jobs.

Those jobs have been lost. Well yes those jobs have been lost. But we don’t mourn the passing of those jobs even though the day when they got their unemployment slips was a painful day for them. And some people maybe never recovered. But a lot of people would have retrained, got better jobs. And certainly as a whole America was better off from not having erected high barriers against Microsoft.

A new technology is actually just the same as a new trade. China might just as well be some futuristic factory just off the coast of California for all its economic effects. We just ship all our stuff off the coast of California. It goes into the factory that is just floating outside Los Angeles. And all this great stuff comes back. For the economic effects on the United States, it makes no difference.

So we shouldn’t be afraid of trade any more than we are afraid of technology. It has real effect. It does hurt people. But overall the effects are very positive.

Tim Harford also looks at economic development and the effectiveness of foreign aid, because, frankly, we don’t know which aid agencies are doing a good job:

What about randomized trials? You could -- say you want to improve school performance in Kenya. Well, you could give out textbooks to half the schools. And measure the results. This is the half that got the textbooks and the half that didn’t.

One charity actually did this as a randomized control trial the same way that you would evaluate a new pharmaceutical product. And they found textbooks didn’t really help. So they tried again. They said OK, we’re going to supply teachers with flip charts, whiteboards, and marker pens. That didn’t work either. They tried something else. They said OK, we’re going to give the kids de-worming tablets so that the tapeworm that infects a lot of these kids is going to be killed. The kids are going to be better nourished. They will be able to better concentrate in schools. Now that worked. That worked big time.

And to me those two failures of the textbooks and the flipcharts, they were tremendously successful failures. Because we learned something.

The Rock Star's Burden

In The Rock Star's Burden, Paul Theroux says that Bono "not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers":

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers.

King Kong, the Ultimate Fighting Champion

I first saw King Kong — the original — at age 14 or so, well before I knew anything about real martial arts. (I believe I had a couple years of strip-mall McDojo kempo under my brown belt.) It struck me as a better movie than I expected, with much better special effects than I expected for a movie from the 1930s.

Years later I found myself at a ritzy party where the host was playing classic movies throughout the house, when I started watching Kong's famous bout with the T-Rex — and I noticed that Kong had just shot in for a single-leg takedown.

And he circled to take Rex down. He was using legitimate grappling techniques! Naturally I couldn't stop watching.

Throughout the match Kong ties up Rex. I suppose the head-and-arm tie-up has unique strengths and weaknesses against a dinosaur with very big teeth and very small arms.

At one point he actually steps in and hip-tosses the big lizard.

After taking Rex down with a sagging headlock, he goes for the ground-and-pound, but Rex gets his legs in — classic jiu-jitsu — and pushes him away. (OK, it's not quite a black-belt's open guard, but it's something.)

In the subsequent scramble, Kong hops on Rex's back and goes for the rear naked choke. (Note: "naked" because it doesn't use the opponent's collar or lapel; known as mata leão or kill the lion in Portuguese.)

Finally, after snapping Rex's jaw and breaking his neck, Kong stands victorious, roaring and beating his chest — just like any good mixed-martial arts (MMA) victor in UFC or Pride.

I recommend watching the whole fight (7.45 MB).

Edit: I'd been wondering how and why that fight scene was so well choreographed. I had assumed that the stop-motion animators were working from footage of pro wresters (back when the bouts were fairly credible). It turns out there's an even better explanation (from IMDB):

Both Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had been wrestlers, and they acted out the fighting moves for the battle between the T Rex and Kong in the effects studio, before the animators shot the scene.

Edit: A Danish jiu-jitsu purple-belt by the name of Christian Berger Graugart has posted the footage to YouTube — with no reference to this page. Sigh.

Edit 2: Christian Berger Graugart has updated his post to reference to this page. Huzzah!

Media Photoshop Retouching

Media Photoshop Retouching explains that "the number of tricks used to achieve the increasingly exaggerated ideals is growing," and demonstrates all the work done on a typical magazine cover photo, stepping through the eyes, lips, nose, hair, breasts, waist, etc.

Illustration Magazine

I just discovered Illustration Magazine, via Boing Boing, and their archive includes PDF versions of their older issues and thumbnails of their more recent issues.

As they say:

Illustration is a beautiful, educational, and scholarly magazine devoted to the history of American illustration art. Published quarterly and printed in full color, each issue features the highest quality printing, photography and color reproductions of original art available anywhere.

For those with an interest in popular culture, commercial art and design, publishing history, comic books, paperbacks, pulp magazines, or collecting original art, Illustration is the best source for new information on the illustrators of the past.

ESPN Courts Female Viewers With World's Emotionally Strongest Man Competition

ESPN Courts Female Viewers With World's Emotionally Strongest Man Competition:

The hour-long weekly show, which will run opposite ABC's Monday Night Football, features an international cast of powerfully caring, emotionally resilient, deeply sensitive men pushing themselves and each other to the limit with astounding feats of inner strength in domestic settings around the country.

I haven't been keeping up with The Onion.

The Great Xbox Shortage of 2005

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) explains Why you can't buy the one present you really need, in The Great Xbox Shortage of 2005, and explains what Microsoft should have done:

Microsoft has got it wrong, too, but they have missed out on a far more obvious opportunity. Why didn't they sell their initial supply of Xbox consoles, packaged as a 'limited edition,' using online auctions? All the while they would promise $300 consoles as soon as stocks were available. Since at an auction the price is set by the buyers, not the seller, Microsoft could have made a killing, absolutely guilt-free, and created no more annoyed, empty-handed customers than they have with their current strategy.

Mightier Than the Pen

In Mightier Than the Pen, Matt Pottinger explains why he left his position as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in China to join the Marines:

It's a cliché that you appreciate your own country more when you live abroad, but it happens to be true. Living in China for the last seven years, I've seen that country take a giant leap from a struggling Third World country into a true world power. For many people it still comes as a surprise to learn that China is chasing Japan as the second-largest economy on the globe and could soon own a trillion dollars of American debt.

But living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I've seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I've been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I've been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I've been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company's sale of nuclear fuel to other countries.

When you live abroad long enough, you come to understand that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule. They feel alien to us, but from the viewpoint of the world's population, we are the aliens, not them. That makes you think about protecting your country no matter who you are or what you're doing. What impresses you most, when you don't have them day to day, are the institutions that distinguish the U.S.: the separation of powers, a free press, the right to vote, and a culture that values civic duty and service, to name but a few.

The Marines generally don't take on 31-year-old desk-jockies as officers:

He said if I wanted a shot at this I'd have to ace the physical fitness test, where a perfect score consisted of 20 pull-ups, 100 crunches in two minutes, and a three-mile run in 18 minutes. Essentially he was telling me to pack it in and go home. After assuring him I didn't have a criminal record or any tattoos, either of which would have required yet another waiver (my age already required the first), I took an application and went back to China.

Can computers predict which movies will flop?

Can computers predict which movies will flop?:

Sharda, an expert in information systems, has been working on the model for seven years and analyzed more than 800 films before publishing a paper that appears in the February 2006 issue of the journal Expert Systems With Applications.

Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.

Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from 'flop,' meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to 'blockbuster,' meaning more than $200 million.

The results of the study showed that 37 percent of the time the network accurately predicted which category the film fell into, and 75 percent of the time was within one category of the correct answer. Among the correct predictions: 'Spider-Man' and 'Shrek' were rated as blockbusters, while 'Waking Up in Reno' and 'Running Free' were pegged as flops.

Stoic Redheads

Should we be surprised that the descendents of Vikings have a high pain tolerance? From Stoic Redheads:

Redheads have long been portrayed in literature and art as strong-willed and fiery. Now there may be a scientific explanation for these traits. The key, according to researchers at McGill University in Montreal, is a gene that is linked both to red hair coloring and to higher levels of pain tolerance. It has been known since the mid-1990's that mutations of the MC1R gene are responsible for hair color — and fair skin and freckles — in about 70 percent of redheads.
[...]
When animals and humans experience pain, their brains release natural opiates similar to morphine. In most cases, however, the MC1R gene produces a protein that interferes with the efficacy of those substances as well as of artificial painkillers. What Mogil found is that the variant of MC1R that causes red hair also appears to allow these opiates to work unimpeded. As a result, redheads can withstand up to 25 percent more pain than their blond and brunet peers do before saying 'stop.'

Feeling Good Differs Between Men and Women

While I'm not surprised that Feeling Good Differs Between Men and Women, I am a bit surprised by the particulars:

Researchers put 25 men and 16 women through a 12-week strength-training program. Participants were asked about their body image before and after, and were also given objective tests, such as bicep curls and body fat measurements.

Body images improved for both men and women, but the reasons were different between the sexes. Men tended to cite criteria like feeling thinner or stronger. That was important to women too, but they also were into numbers, such as measurements showing stronger arms and legs, according to the study being published in the journal Body Image.

Hedge Funds Are New Sheriffs of Boardroom

According to Alan Murray, Hedge Funds Are New Sheriffs of Boardroom:

Hedge funds are the counterweight. While Sarbanes-Oxley forced companies to play defense, hedge funds force them to play offense. Any risk-averse company that wants to sit on a big pile of cash waiting for a rainy day is likely to find itself under quick attack from these fast-moving pools of money that will come in, buy up stock, and agitate for change. The hedge funds have become the new sheriffs of the boardroom. But they are less concerned with legal processes and accounting procedures and more with returns to shareholders.

Mushroom Life

If you're familiar with John Conway's Game of Life — or even if you're not — you should enjoy Mushroom Life.

Unusual technical images of WWII technology

Drawn points to some Unusual technical images of WWII technology:

In the Second World War people at home with loved ones spread far away around the world with the forces were fed a diet, often government backed, of “how it works” or “how we will win” technical information leaflets. Very often these would have contained superb cut away and sectioned diagrams, showing the “insides” or as was said at the time “the works!” of the machines that were winning the war for us!

How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science

Rodney Stark explains How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science — and along the way he explains how Christianity led to Capitalism:

Capitalism was developed by the great monastic estates. Throughout the medieval era, the church was by far the largest landowner in Europe, and its liquid assets and annual income probably exceeded that of all of Europe's nobility added together. Much of that wealth poured into the coffers of the religious orders, not only because they were the largest landowners, but also in payment for liturgical services — Henry VII of England paid a huge sum to have 10,000 masses said for his soul. As rapid innovation in agricultural technology began to yield large surpluses to the religious orders, the church not only began to reinvest profits to increase production, but diversified. Having substantial amounts of cash on hand, the religious orders began to lend money at interest. They soon evolved the mortgage (literally, 'dead pledge') to lend money with land for security, collecting all income from the land during the term of the loan, none of which was deducted from the amount owed. That practice often added to the monastery's lands because the monks were not hesitant to foreclose. In addition, many monasteries began to rely on a hired labor force and to display an uncanny ability to adopt the latest technological advances. Capitalism had arrived.

Still, like all of the world's other major religions, for centuries Christianity took a dim view of commerce. As the many great Christian monastic orders maximized profits and lent money at whatever rate of interest the market would bear, they were increasingly subject to condemnations from more traditional members of the clergy who accused them of avarice.

Given the fundamental commitment of Christian theologians to reason and progress, what they did was rethink the traditional teachings. What is a just price for one's goods, they asked? According to the immensely influential St. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), the just price is simply what 'goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale.' That is, a just price is not a function of the amount of profit, but is whatever uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Adam Smith would have agreed — St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) did. As for usury, a host of leading theologians of the day remained opposed to it, but quickly defined it out of practical existence. For example, no usury was involved if the interest was paid to compensate the lender for the costs of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities, which was almost always easily demonstrated.

Good as gold

Jane Galt cites James Hamilton in Good as gold:

Under a pure gold standard, the government would stand ready to trade dollars for gold at a fixed rate. Under such a monetary rule, it seems the dollar is 'as good as gold.'

Except that it really isn't — the dollar is only as good as the government's credibility to stick with the standard. If a government can go on a gold standard, it can go off, and historically countries have done exactly that all the time. The fact that speculators know this means that any currency adhering to a gold standard (or, in more modern times, a fixed exchange rate) may be subject to a speculative attack.

Games Tackle Disaster Training

We should expect to see more and more serious games. From Games Tackle Disaster Training:

The first game, which took three months to develop, trains health workers to respond to an anthrax outbreak. A massive flu pandemic simulation is in the works.

Players learn how to set up MASH sites, evaluate patients and dispense drugs. They also are trained to distribute medications to health-care sites and notify the public, instructing people on what to do — without instilling panic.

Throughout the game, trainees' responses are scored for speed and appropriateness.

Why should you deprive yourself today for the benefit of tomorrow?

Jane Galt explains her fiscal philosophy in Why should you deprive yourself today for the benefit of tomorrow?:

Don't buy a car, or a house, because you like what people will think of you for owning it. Do you really care about the opinions of people who judge you based on your material possessions?

Why, yes, you do. We all do; it is in the nature of primates to seek status. But status-hunting via material goods is a zero-sum game, and unless you're Bill Gates, the odds are you're going to lose. With a little mental discipline (okay, a lot) you can stop playing that game, and force yourself to concentrate on the things that really give you joy, rather than simply creating a transitory gleam of envy in someone else's eye.

What are the things that give me joy? Family. Friends. Travel. Writing. Reading. My dog. Eating good food. Being healthy. So I've rearranged my budget to emphasize those priorities — a gym membership, expensive dog food to cater to my dog's allergies, trips hither and yon, giving parties, buying good food to cook. But I've also recognized that many of these things don't cost me money, and that by cutting out the tempting inessentials, I have more time and energy to devote to the things I care about, as well as the peace of mind that comes from putting money in the bank.

Quoted Often, Followed Rarely

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month admits that his seminal software engineering book is a bit like the Bible — Quoted Often, Followed Rarely:

Some people have called the book the 'bible of software engineering.' I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.

Cute Overload

Is there such a thing as Cute Overload? Yes, definitely:

At Cute Overload, we scour the Web for only the finest in Cute Imagery. Imagery that is Worth Your Internet Browsing Time. We offer an overwhelming amount of cuteness to fill your daily visual allowance. Drink it in!

Cut Emissions and Pump More Oil

The energy industry has found a new way to both Cut Emissions and Pump More Oil:

The energy industry has found a new way to dispose of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: pump it back into the underground oil reservoirs from whence much of it came.

Five million tons of CO2 has been successfully pumped underground into the Weyburn oil field in a pilot project in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The CO2 is piped from the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, a giant 'gasification' plant near Beulah, North Dakota.

Not only does the project dispose of the nasty CO2, the pressure from the gas helps to extract more oil. The field's oil-recovery rate has been doubled, and its life extended for another 20 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Le Papillon

As Ward at Drawn says,

By all means, please check out Le Papillon, this absolutely gorgeous animated short film by animators Antoine Antin & Jenny Rakotomamonjy. Animated watercolors and sumi brushwork never looked so good.

The Price of Motherhood

The Price of Motherhood asks, Ready to have a baby? You'll earn 10 percent more if you wait a year:

On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she'll earn higher wages — about 3 percent higher — for the rest of her life; the rest is because she'll work longer hours. For college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet — for these women, the wage hike is not 3 percent, but 4.7 percent.

So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you're giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There's an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth — right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s. Once you're in your 30s, there's far less reward for continued delay. Surprisingly, it appears that none of these effects are mitigated by the passage of family-leave laws.

It's Miller's clever methodology that makes this all so interesting:

So, professor Miller did something very clever. Instead of comparing random 24-year-old mothers with random 25-year-old mothers, she compared 24-year-old mothers with 25-year-old mothers who had miscarried at 24. So, she had two groups of women, all of whom made the same choices regarding pregnancy, but some of whom had their first children delayed by an act of chance. That's a fairer comparison — and it confirmed the 10 percent earnings hit.

But the comparison was still imperfect. Maybe miscarriages and high wages have a common cause — a propensity for risk-taking, for example. Miller noted that it appears that most miscarriages are not caused by risky behavior. Then she also performed the statistical equivalent of a second experiment. She compared 25-year-old mothers with those 24-year-old mothers who conceived while using birth control. Now you've got two groups of women, none of whom wanted to be pregnant at 24. Some became pregnant by chance, which gives us something like a controlled experiment.

Again, the experiment is imperfect. Getting pregnant while on birth control might be a symptom of carelessness, and carelessness can be a liability in the workplace. So, she tried yet again. She started with a bunch of women who all reported that they'd been trying to get pregnant since they were 23. Some succeeded at 24; others at 25. Insofar as those successes are random (or at least not caused by anything that also affects wages) we have yet a third controlled experiment.

Tolerance or Death!

In Tolerance or Death!, Bruce Bawer argues that "European culture leaders should smack down fanatical Islamists," rather than "bend over for them":

Defenders of this many-fronted assault on free speech routinely tag critics of Islam as racists. Of course, Islam is not a race but a religion whose ideology should, in a democratic society, be entirely open to criticism — and, for that matter, to parody and mockery. Outraged by the House of Commons measure, comedian Rowan Atkinson (who plays the character Mr. Bean on television) commented: 'For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.' Atkinson was nearly alone among British authors, artists, and entertainers in his vocal criticism of the bill.

Everybody's An Expert

Everbody's An Expert notes that media experts don't actually predict things better than non-experts:

No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

Read the article.

Canned Truth

Canned Truth explains how the pineapple used to be "the ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit":

Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered — a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time — the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about �80, or �5,000 in today’s money. No wonder a single pineapple was often “made to last for some time, passed on from party to party until it began to rot so much it smelt out the whole household”. By Victorian times, one horticulturalist claimed he had heard of a “single pineapple going the round of west-end dinner parties for some weeks”. Beauman does not mention a similar assertion which I have come across elsewhere, that poorer middle-class families would even take to hiring pineapples for occasions when they wished to entertain, in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice.

Rebels Without a Clue

Rebels Without a Clue looks at Nation of Rebels, a new book by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, men of the left with a certain conservative sensibility:

Above all, though, Heath and Potter are as dismissive of the modern Left's worldview as P.J. O'Rourke is. "You can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints," they tell us. "Consumerism…always seems to be a critique of what other people buy…. [The] so-called critique of