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 consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery or, worse, Puritanism." They sum up aptly the countercultural message of the film, American Beauty: "[It] is simply not possible to be a well-adjusted adult in our society…. The alternative [to perpetual adolescence] is to 'sell out,' to play by the rules, and thereby to become a neurotic, superficial conformist, incapable of experiencing true pleasure." To which they respond: "The greatest weakness of countercultural thinking has always been its inability to produce a coherent vision of a free society, much less a practical political program for changing the one we live in."

Raise Taxes on Savings? Tell Joe It Ain't So!

Martin Feldstein says, Raise Taxes on Savings? Tell Joe It Ain't So!:

Keeping the low rates on the income from savings should now be the highest priority of tax reform. Eliminating the tax on such income would be even better.

Here's why. A tax on interest, dividends and capital gains creates a major distortion in the timing of consumption, and also exacerbates the adverse effects of the income tax on all aspects of work effort and personal productivity. Such distortions create unnecessary economic waste that lowers our standard of living. The combination of a lower tax rate on the income from savings and a revenue-neutral rise in the tax on earnings can produce a higher net reward for additional work and productivity, as well as a reduction in the distortion between consuming now and in the future. That would reduce the economic damage caused by the tax system while collecting the same total revenue with the same distribution of the tax burden.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Russian Parkour

I've seen some crazy parkour in my time, but this Russian Parkour video is pretty wild.

(It starts out slow, but it definitely gets going.)

The Farm Fox Experiment

Lyudmila N. Trut examines The Farm Fox Experiment — and many other examples of domestication:

Early in the process of domestication, Belyaev noted, most domestic animals had undergone the same basic morphological and physiological changes. Their bodies changed in size and proportions, leading to the appearance of dwarf and giant breeds. The normal pattern of coat color that had evolved as camouflage in the wild altered as well. Many domesticated animals are piebald, completely lacking pigmentation in specific body areas. Hair turned wavy or curly, as it has done in Astrakhan sheep, poodles, domestic donkeys, horses, pigs, goats and even laboratory mice and guinea pigs. Some animals' hair also became longer (Angora type) or shorter (rex type).

Tails changed, too. Many breeds of dogs and pigs carry their tails curled up in a circle or semicircle. Some dogs, cats and sheep have short tails resulting from a decrease in the number of tail vertebrae. Ears became floppy. As Darwin noted in chapter 1 of On the Origin of Species, 'not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears' — a feature not found in any wild animal except the elephant.

Another major evolutionary consequence of domestication is loss of the seasonal rhythm of reproduction. Most wild animals in middle latitudes are genetically programmed to mate once a year, during mating seasons cued by changes in daylight. Domestic animals at the same latitudes, however, now can mate and bear young more than once a year and in any season.

Belyaev believed that similarity in the patterns of these traits was the result of selection for amenability to domestication. Behavioral responses, he reasoned, are regulated by a fine balance between neurotransmitters and hormones at the level of the whole organism. The genes that control that balance occupy a high level in the hierarchical system of the genome. Even slight alterations in those regulatory genes can give rise to a wide network of changes in the developmental processes they govern. Thus, selecting animals for behavior may lead to other, far-reaching changes in the animals' development. Because mammals from widely different taxonomic groups share similar regulatory mechanisms for hormones and neurochemistry, it is reasonable to believe that selecting them for similar behavior — tameness — should alter those mechanisms, and the developmental pathways they govern, in similar ways.

On foxes bred for tameness:

At seven or eight months, when the foxes reach sexual maturity, they are scored for tameness and assigned to one of three classes. The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. (Even Class III foxes are tamer than the calmest farm-bred foxes. Among other things, they allow themselves to be hand fed.) Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population.

Now, 40 years and 45,000 foxes after Belyaev began, our experiment has achieved an array of concrete results. The most obvious of them is a unique population of 100 foxes (at latest count), each of them the product of between 30 and 35 generations of selection. They are unusual animals, docile, eager to please and unmistakably domesticated. When tested in groups in an enclosure, pups compete for attention, snarling fiercely at one another as they seek the favor of their human handler. Over the years several of our domesticated foxes have escaped from the fur farm for days. All of them eventually returned. Probably they would have been unable to survive in the wild.

For an adorable photo of piebald fox kits, see my recent post.

If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?

Of OpenOffice, Andrew Brown asks, If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?:

Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond's aphorism that 'Many eyes make bugs shallow', suggesting that if lots of people can view a program's source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it's not true — certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.
[...]
The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it's a very different story.

This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can't. Most users just think: "The computer isn't doing what I want."
[...]
More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or even five.

Bluster and Satire: Stephen Colbert's 'Report'

NPR interviews Stephen Colbert about his Colbert Report. Some background on the man:

Colbert began his comedy career with Second City in Chicago. He helped create the HBO sketch comedy series Exit 57 — which won five Cable ACE awards in 1995 — and he also wrote and performed sketches on The Dana Carvey Show. Colbert is also the voice of Ace on the Saturday Night Live animated skits Ace & Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo.

But you already knew all that, because you get it; you're one of the heroes who watch the show.

All is fair in love and ...

Max Borders finishes the phrase All is fair in love and ...:

Nope. Not war. If you prevent enemy combatants from getting enough shuteye, make them sit in uncomfortable positions or mock their genitals, — you have crossed the line in the 21st century. No, war has gotten a conscience (unless, of course, you're a 'freedom fighter,' in which case strapping plastic explosives to yourself and walking into a school, market or mosque is fair).

Actually, the answer is politics. 'All is fair in love and politics.' Try it out. It may not sound right at first, but you'll warm to it. You'll have to, because this new maxim has more verity than the old one.

Baby Foxes Going to the Dogs

I've blogged on this before, but now I've got a photo. From Baby Foxes Going to the Dogs:

Young foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness — fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.

Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can 'read' human cues (pointing, for example) much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees, according to a new study published today in Current Biology. The study authors call such behavior social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals.

As you can see, selectively breeding foxes for tameness has led to animals that both look and behave like dogs.

Iraq and the Corruption Trap

Arnold Kling explains the Corruption Trap:

The World Bank's Philip Keefer says that young democracies are fragile because governments are weak. Weak governments, unable to sustain broad-based power, turn to corruption in order to retain narrow-based power. However, corruption discredits the government, making broad-based power even less available. This makes the government even more dependent on corruption for survival. I call this the Corruption Trap.

Untranslatable Word In U.S. Aide's Speech Leaves Beijing Baffled

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations emphasized that "we need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder" in the international system. Unfortunately, there's no word in Chinese for stakeholder — or many other words used in negotiations, as Untranslatable Word In U.S. Aide's Speech Leaves Beijing Baffled explains:

The dustup in China over 'stakeholder' recalls the consternation that followed President Bill Clinton's proposal of a U.S. 'engagement' with China amid a rough patch between the two sides in 1995. Chinese who spoke English were befuddled by a word that could mean 'both an exchange of fire and a marriage proposal,' notes Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The phrase 'win-win' was an enigma to many Chinese officials before negotiations in 1999 over the country's accession to the World Trade Organization. Now the phrase, whose Chinese translation is closer to 'twin win,' is ubiquitous in official Chinese speeches.

Then came talk in Washington over the past couple of years of 'hedging' against the risks of China's economic and military rise. 'That one wasn't too tough,' says Bonnie Glaser, a China scholar who often advises the Pentagon and State Department. 'China is a great gambling culture, so the Chinese gave it four characters that mean 'betting on both sides.'

China's choice of translation is sometimes tailor-made for political aims. In a 1982 joint communiqu�, one of three key documents that form the foundation of modern U.S.-China relations, the U.S. 'acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China' — at least according to the agreed-upon English version. But official Chinese translations use a word whose meaning is more like 'recognized,' which carries greater weight in diplomatic parlance.

In 2001, a U.S. spy plane collided in midair with a Chinese fighter, sending the Chinese pilot to his death and forcing the Americans to make an emergency landing. After tense negotiations, the U.S. issued a statement in English expressing 'regret' over the incident. Both sides agreed China could issue its own translation. The statement in Chinese used a word that means 'apology.'

A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official says there is no official Chinese translation yet of 'stakeholder.'

'Neutral' Rate Can't Be Known With Certainty, Greenspan Says

'Neutral' Rate Can't Be Known With Certainty, Greenspan Says — and the yield curve isn't much use either:

Mr. Greenspan reiterated his previously stated doubts about the predictive power of the yield curve. 'Although the slope of the yield curve remains an important financial indicator, it needs to be interpreted carefully,' Mr. Greenspan told Mr. Saxton. 'In particular, a flattening of the yield curve is not a foolproof indicator of future economic weakness. For example, the yield curve narrowed sharply over the period 1992-1994 even as the economy was entering the longest sustained expansion of the postwar period,' he said.

Many factors can affect the slope of the yield curve and these factors 'do not all have the same implications for future output growth,' Mr. Greenspan said. 'In judging the indicator value of any particular change in the slope of the yield curve, it is critical to understand the underlying forces that may be affecting the yield curve at that moment,' he said.

As the period between 1992 to 1994 illustrates, simply relying on an average statistical relationship estimated over a very long sample 'can be quite misleading,' Mr. Greenspan said.

The Christmas classic that almost wasn't

The Christmas classic that almost wasn't demonstrates that the network suits can be — gasp! — wrong:

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

The Greater of Two Evils

Tim Worstall uses the government provision of potable water to demonstrate The Greater of Two Evils — and to explain conservative ideology:

One of the main problems rightwing nutjobs like myself face is that we've never quite managed to get across a fundamental point about our mistrust of government action. People assume we just have a naïve faith that markets left untouched will magically make the world a better place in each and every case. People assume that our distaste for the jumped up little vote-stealers so eager to spend our money is some sort of mental aberration. Such is probably true of me, but there are quite a few thoughtful free market voices out there. Even among those as rabid as myself, none believes there ever has been or ever will be a totally free market. Markets have always been limited by laws, regulations and even by certain societal standards. Indeed, we would insist that markets and rules go hand in hand. Otherwise, without general agreement as to what property is and general rules for its ownership and transference, how could a market even exist?
[...]
When you describe a problem, I'm all ears. When you tell me how the world can be made a better place, I'm fascinated. And when you tell me about your desire for such improvements, I am right with you. But I do insist that your program be rather more developed than: "we'll let the Government do it." Because as we have seen time and again, such approaches can prove to be far worse than the one offered by the money-grubbing capitalists.

Alright. So I'll admit to being rabidly ideological, which brings me to that fundamental point I've always wanted to get across. With respect to the provision of any good or service: whether or not you agree with my standard "public provision is almost always a worse solution," surely you can accept "public provision is sometimes a worse solution." If you can't accept that, you're not living in the real world.

Thermidor

Sometimes, citoyen, I forget just how "progressive" the French Revolution got. Not only did the revolutionaries introduce the metric system, they introduced a rational calendar, with months like Thermidor:

Thermidor was the eleventh month in the French Republican Calendar, which was used only in France and only for thirteen years. It was the middle month of summer (being named for heat), and started on the equivalent to July 19 or 20th in the Gregorian Calendar.

The Thermidorian Reaction, Revolution of Thermidor, or simply Thermidor refers to the coup of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) in which Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined and the Reign of Terror ended.

Consequently, for historians of revolutionary movements, the term Thermidor has come to mean the phase in some revolutions when the political pendulum swings back towards something resembling a pre-revolutionary state, and power slips from the hands of the original revolutionary leadership. Leon Trotsky, in his book The Revolution Betrayed, refers to the rise of Stalin and the accompanying post-revolutionary bureaucracy as the Soviet Thermidor.

The details of the French republican calendar are fascinating:

The first day of each year included the autumnal equinox. There were twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the tropical year were placed after the months at the end of each year. Each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds. Clocks were manufactured to display decimal time, but it did not catch on and was officially abandoned in 1795, although some cities continued to use decimal time as late as 1801.

A period of four years ending on a leap day was to be called a "Franciade".

The months:

• Vendémiaire (from Latin vindemia, "vintage") Starting Sept 22, 23 or 24
• Brumaire (from French brume, "mist") Starting Oct 22, 23 or 24
• Frimaire (From French frimas, "frost") Starting Nov 21, 22 or 23
• Nivôse (from Latin Nivosus, "snowy") Starting Dec 21, 22 or 23
• Pluviôse (from Latin pluviosus, "rainy") Starting Jan 20, 21 or 22
• Ventôse (from Latin ventosus, "windy") Starting Feb 19, 20 or 21
• Germinal (from Latin germen, "seed") Starting Mar 20 or 21
• Floréal (from Latin flos, "flower") Starting Apr 20 or 21
• Prairial (from French prairie, "meadow") Starting May 20 or 21
• Messidor (from Latin messis, "harvest") Starting Jun 19 or 20
• Thermidor (from Greek thermos, "hot") Starting Jul 19 or 20
• Fructidor (from Latin fructus, "fruits") Starting Aug 18 or 19
  

The ten days of the week:

• primidi (English: first day)
  
• duodi (English: second day)
  
• tridi (English: third day)
  
• quartidi (English: fourth day)
  
• quintidi (English: fifth day)
  
• sextidi (English: sixth day)
  
• septidi (English: seventh day)
  
• octidi (English: eighth day)
  
• nonidi (English: ninth day)
  
• décadi (English: tenth day)

Napoléon finally abolished the calendar.

Study Concludes Beethoven Died From Lead Poisoning

Study Concludes Beethoven Died From Lead Poisoning — and not from mercury:

By focusing the most powerful X-ray beam in the Western Hemisphere on six of Ludwig van Beethoven's hairs and a few pieces of his skull, scientists have gathered what they say is conclusive evidence that the famous composer died of lead poisoning.

The work, done at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, confirms earlier hints that lead may have caused Beethoven's decades of poor health, which culminated in a long and painful death in 1827 at age 56.
[...]
One metal that was clearly absent was mercury, Walsh said -- a detail that weakens the hypothesis floated by some that Beethoven had syphilis, which in those days was commonly treated with mercury.

"We found zero evidence of that," Walsh said, "so it was nice to exonerate him of that scurrilous possibility."

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)

How good were the good old days?

Jane Galt asks, How good were the good old days?:

But the fact that some of us have had to settle for jobs less lucrative or fulfilling than we expected does not mean that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. Yes, we probably can't rely on social security, but on the other hand, it's easier than ever to save for retirement, with Uncle Sam basically giving you a 30% match on every dollar you put into your 401(k). I think the most frightening thing for many of us is the feeling that we have no safety net--that we'll end up poor and abandonned in retirement. But for most of us, it would probably be easy to save for retirement if we were willing to live like your parents did — or at least like my parents did. One television, no stereo, no VCR, no cable, one (used) car, six rooms for four people, no eating out, no cell phones, no vacations other than visiting relatives, stretching meat out with egg and bread and noodle rings, jello as a salad, turn the light off when you leave the room and get off the phone — it's long distance!

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, looks at Texas Tech's unorthodox football coach, in Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep:

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior — like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

Leach was not working with top talent, but his unorthodox strategies led them to set offensive records:

But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart — on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots. "The offensive line splits — you look at them, and you're just shocked," Schwartz said. "It scares people to see splits that are that wide."

The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable — some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers — but he wasn't. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly. Leach spread out his receivers and backs too. The look was more flag than tackle football: a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them.

Leach sounds like a fascinating guy:

Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, "Under the Black Flag," by David Cordingly (the passages about homosexuality on pirate ships had been crossed out). The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just ... talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: "You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer."

Coach Leach never played football — he rode the bench as a high school junior — and got a law degree before asking himself ""Why do I want to be a lawyer?"" and deciding to coach.

How he confounds the opposing defense:

What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense - with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers - and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast. (When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed.) All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
[...]
"There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand."

It sounds like he's been reading Boyd. In fact, this sounds straight out of the Marine playbook:

Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's a ton of touchdowns to be had."

The mentality he's fighting:

From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense, developed by Bill Walsh during his time as a coach for Stanford University and then the San Francisco 49ers. Now widely imitated, it emphasizes controlling the game with lots of short passes. Still, football's mixed feelings toward passing are ingrained. Bob Carroll, a leading football historian, summarizes the attitude of the game's rule makers to the forward pass: "We're going to allow it because we know it makes the game safer. But we're going to make it difficult for you, because we don't approve of it." A whisper of the old antipass bigotry can be heard in football's conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can't pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to "control the clock"; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.

Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach's view, doesn't come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball. "Our notion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season."

I love this anecdote — any football fan should:

"Thinking man's football" is a bit like "classy stripper": if the adjective modifies the noun too energetically, it undermines the nature of the thing. "Football's the most violent sport," Leach says. "And because of that, the most intense and emotional." Truth is, he loves the violence. ("Aw, yeah, the violence is awesome. That's the best part.") Back in the early 1980's, when he was a student at B.Y.U., he spotted a poster for a seminar, "Violence in American Sports." It was given by a visiting professor who bemoaned the influence of football on the American mind. To dramatize the point, the professor played a video of especially shocking blows delivered in college and pro football. "It had all the great hits in football you remembered and wanted to see again," Leach recalls. "Word got around campus that this guy had this great tape, and the place was jammed. Everybody was cheering the hits. I went twice."

Let Your PC Do the Investing

I'm a bit surprised that Wired's Let Your PC Do the Investing presents automated trading as cutting edge:

As a stock-futures trader, George Pruitt used to spend the day hovering over his computer screen.

Now, he just stays within earshot. When his computer identifies an attractive time to buy or sell, it emits a horn blast. It does this often, including once last week while Pruitt was on the phone discussing his approach to automated trading.

"You hear that going off in the background? That's saying the price of the e-mini just went up to a certain level," said Pruitt, director of research at Futures Truth, a trading company and magazine publisher in Henderson, North Carolina. The e-mini, a futures contract that tracks the S&P 500 Index, is one of several securities the company monitors almost exclusively online.

While successful trading strategies still usually involve some subjective human analysis, traders are entrusting a growing share of the work to their PCs. Most of the time, individual investors authorize each trade before it goes through. In some cases, however, even solo investors are cobbling together systems that are 100 percent automated.

Call it the age of the machine trader.

Humor Formula

Scott Adams (Dilbert) shares his Humor Formula:

The core of humor is what I call the 2-of-6 rule. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:

1. Cute (as in kids and animals)
2. Naughty
3. Bizarre
4. Clever
5. Recognizable (You’ve been there)
6. Cruel

I invented this rule, but you can check for yourself that whenever something is funny it follows the rule. And when something isn’t, it doesn’t.

One of the reasons comics are such a popular form of humor is that they often get the cute part automatically. Calvin and Hobbes is widely considered the best comic ever, but the few times it featured the parents doing the main action, it fell flat. Whenever it combined Calvin and Hobbes (both exceedingly cute), with some witty dialog (clever), a dangerous wagon ride (cruel), Calvin acting like a typical kid (recognizable), and thinking about adult philosophy (bizarre) it fired on 5-of-6 humor elements, which is virtually unheard of.

One could argue that all of the elements of Calvin and Hobbes are borrowed from Peanuts, Dennis the Menace and Winnie the Pooh (Hobbes is essentially Tigger). Originality doesn’t count for much with humor. I should know, since Dilbert has been compared to Charlie Brown grown up. And I certainly didn’t invent talking cartoon dogs. Execution is everything.

Google's Ten Golden Rules

Google's Ten Golden Rules for getting the most out of knowledge workers:

1. Hire by committee.
2. Cater to their every need.
3. Pack them in.
4. Make coordination easy.
5. Eat your own dog food.
6. Encourage creativity.
7. Strive to reach consensus.
8. Don't be evil.
9. Data drive decisions.
10. Communicate effectively.

Chinese Doctors Tell Patients To Pay Upfront, or No Treatment

It's shocking to see how a socialist nation like China doesn't provide the few services widely socialized in the West (i.e., education and medical care) and doesn't avail itself of capitalist solutions either (e.g., insurance and loans). From Chinese Doctors Tell Patients To Pay Upfront, or No Treatment:

As soon as the money dries up, doctors warn, so will the drugs that could save the life of Cui Guangshun's 7-year-old son, Dejie, in the leukemia unit of Beijing Children's Hospital.

Such are the rules of China's pay-as-you-go health system: cash upfront, or no treatment.
[...]
A year ago, Sam Lin, a prosperous factory owner, took his pregnant wife to a hospital in the southern boomtown of Shantou to give birth. As he recalls it, the couple were startled in the waiting room of the maternity wing by a commotion. A woman who had just delivered her baby was bleeding profusely and needed an emergency blood transfusion. Mr. Lin heard nurses screaming at the bleeding woman's husband. "If you don't have any money, we don't operate," one yelled, according to Mr. Lin. He says he rushed up to the man, counted out a stack of banknotes and thrust them on him. He never found out whether his charity saved the woman's life.

Raising the Bar: Even Top Lawyers Fail California Exam

From Raising the Bar: Even Top Lawyers Fail California Exam:

Kathleen Sullivan is a noted constitutional scholar who has argued cases before the Supreme Court. Until recently, she was dean of Stanford Law School. In legal circles, she has been talked about as a potential Democratic nominee for the Supreme Court. But Ms. Sullivan recently became the latest prominent victim of California's notoriously difficult bar exam. Last month, the state sent out the results of its July test to 8,343 aspiring and already-practicing lawyers. More than half failed — including Ms. Sullivan.

Although she is licensed to practice law in New York and Massachusetts, Ms. Sullivan was taking the California exam for the first time after joining a Los Angeles-based firm as an appellate specialist.

You can almost taste the Schadenfreude.

Colorization Using Optimization

Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, and Yair Weiss demonstrate Colorization Using Optimization:

Colorization is a computer-assisted process of adding color to a monochrome image or movie. The process typically involves segmenting images into regions and tracking these regions across image sequences. Neither of these tasks can be performed reliably in practice; consequently, colorization requires considerable user intervention and remains a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task.

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

Definitely check out the video examples.

Heavin Services 2004 National Entrepreneur of the Year

Last year Ernst & Young declared Heavin Services, the company behind Curves, its National Entrepreneur of the Year in the Services Category:

Heavin designed Curves to allow women to exercise in the comfort and camaraderie of a club designed exclusively for them. The Curves structure combines a 30-minute circuit-training workout, comprising 16 to 20 stations, with fun and friendship, allowing women to support one another in weight loss, fitness and creating a community. Curves International uses average-sized women in its advertisements to reflect its membership more accurately, but word-of-mouth remains its best source for new clients.

Heavin’s franchisees — 90 percent of which are women — typically receive their return on investment in two to three months and have a 94 percent success rate. Curves International is the first fitness chain with a flat franchise fee, creating a low-price, high-volume profit scenario.

Who would have imagined the secret to gym success: women-only, a set routine on eight machines placed in a circle, in a room with no mirrors?

John J. Miller on Stan Berenstain

John J. Miller on Stan Berenstain and the one Berenstain Bears book he might recommend to conservatives:

Want to use bedtime stories to teach conservative values? You could crack open a copy of The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk, and review the “six canons of conservative thought.” One of them states:

Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Wise and well put — and guaranteed to put your children to sleep, if they don’t start squawking for a Berenstain Bears book instead.

Alternately, you could go straight to Old Hat New Hat. In it, Father visits a hat shop with the intention of replacing his old hat. He tries out a bunch of new hats, but each one has a problem: It’s too big, too small, too flat, too tall, too loose, too tight, too heavy, too light, too red, too dotty, too blue, too spotty, too fancy, too frilly, too shiny, too silly, too beady, too bumpy, too leafy, too lumpy, too twisty, too twirly, too wrinkly, too curly, too holey, too patchy, too feathery, too scratchy, too crooked, too straight, or too pointed.

If you made it through that last sentence, then you’ve practically read the whole book. In the end, of course, Father decides that his old hat is “Just right!” He sticks with the tried and true. As Kirk might say, he practices prudence.

This Is What Textbooks Should Be Like

Of Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist, Arnold Kling says This Is What Textbooks Should Be Like:

In fact, the substance of UE is so strong, that I am tempted to review it as if it were a textbook. Not because it resembles the freshman textbooks that are commonly used today, but because it resembles what I believe such books ought to be. In fact, it is not far from the book that I argued for five years ago. If the Ivy League economics courses were designed for the benefit of students rather than the convenience of professors, then Harford, not Greg Mankiw, would be the $1.4 million man.

The traditional freshman economics textbook says little or nothing about economic growth and development, asymmetric information, and tactical price discrimination. Harford covers those important topics, while omitting the usual long, boring, and not-so-enlightening discourse on cost functions and industrial organization.

In the five-year old essay he cites, Kling argues that "In putting a whole semester of macroeconomics into the freshman course, the profession is leading with its chin," and suggests five other subjects more appropriate for a second semester of intro econ:

1. The stock market and modern finance theory
2. Statistical Modeling and Risk Management
3. History and growth
4. Intergenerational transfers
5. Information economics

For the Love of Narnia

Michael Nelson, former editor of The Washington Monthly and professor of political science at Rhodes College, defends C. S. Lewis's works against Philip Pullman's attacks, in For the Love of Narnia:

In articles, interviews, and speeches, Pullman has described The Chronicles not just as "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in," but also as guilty of advancing views such as, "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on." And those are just Pullman's G-rated charges. He also has blasted The Chronicles in public forums as "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read," "propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology," "blatantly racist," "monumentally disparaging of girls and women," and marked by a "sadomasochistic relish for violence."

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner finds Ayn Rand As Astonishing as Elvis — but not in a good way:

Objectivism is at least modern, with no harking back to thatched cottages or yeoman militias; and it does claim a horror of political violence, and nationalism and racism, the last denounced as ‘collectivism of the very lowest sort’. You can see, in a way, how it might offer a sense of life’s grandeur, coupled with a thrilling disdain for guilt, duty, service and so on. One can just about see how such ideas might have struck small-town 1950s teenagers — as astonishing as Elvis, in their way.

The Not-So-Secret History of 'Aeon Flux'�

Mike Russell explains The Not-So-Secret History of 'Aeon Flux'�. (Hat tip to Drawn.)

Supermoine

Supermoine translates from French as Supermonk. That's all I'll tell you. Just watch the video.

(Oh, and John at Drawn says that vikings will be the new pirates. How long until ninjas are the new vikings?)

Open Source Paradigm Shift

In his discussion of the Open Source Paradigm Shift, Tim O'Reilly describes open source as an expression of three deep, long-term trends:

• The commoditization of software
• Network-enabled collaboration
• Software customizability (software as a service)

On the commoditization of software:

What are some of the implications of software commoditization? One might be tempted to see only the devaluation of something that was once a locus of enormous value. Thus, Red Hat founder Bob Young once remarked, 'My goal is to shrink the size of the operating system market'. (Red Hat however aimed to own a large part of that smaller market!) Defenders of the status quo, such as Microsoft VP Jim Allchin, have made statements such as 'open source is an intellectual property destroyer', and paint a bleak picture in which a great industry is destroyed, with nothing to take its place.

On the surface, Allchin appears to be right. Linux now generates tens of billions of dollars in server hardware related revenue, with the software revenues merely a rounding error. Despite Linux's emerging dominance in the server market, Red Hat, the largest Linux distribution company, has annual revenues of only $126 million, versus Microsoft's $32 billion. A huge amount of software value appears to have vaporized.

But is it value or overhead? Open source advocates like to say they're not destroying actual value, but rather squeezing inefficiencies out of the system. When competition drives down prices, efficiency and average wealth levels go up. Firms unable to adapt to the new price levels undergo what the economist E.F. Schumpeter called 'creative destruction', but what was 'lost' returns manyfold as higher productivity and new opportunities.

Microsoft benefited, along with consumers, from the last round of 'creative destruction' as PC hardware was commoditized. This time around, Microsoft sees the commoditization of operating systems, databases, web servers and browsers, and related software as destructive to its core business. But that destruction has created the opportunity for the killer applications of the Internet era. Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, eBay — to mention only a few — are the beneficiaries.

Toy soldiers

Toy soldiers looks at military-themed computer games:

So why is the US computer games industry, as compared to, say, music, movies or television, so explicitly gung-ho?

Partly it is the lure of 'problem-solving' projects for a class of digital expert. They are so compelled by the challenges that they bracket out any distracting context, often involving wider ethical or political questions. Steven Johnson's recent book Everything Bad Is Good For You made a case for the cognitive benefits of computer games. Though the content may be violent, the mental gymnastics involved in negotiating these complex worlds had to be recognised, and not demonised, he argued.

What's intriguing is that this is exactly what senior military games people such as Jeff Wilkinson, a program manager at the US army's Simulation & Training Technology Center, want. In return for their investment, they want a higher level of cognitive performance. 'We are frequently looking for 'first-person thinker' environments and not 'first-person shooter' environments,' says Wilkinson. 'This provides a significant opportunity for gamemakers to focus their resources in new ways.' He says the benefits of investment will accrue mostly to education, not entertainment.

Epigrams on Programming

Alan J. Perlis's Epigrams on Programming, first published in SIGPLAN Notices, in September 1982, "attempt to capture some of the dimensions of this traffic [the incredible growth of the computer's influence] in imagery that sharpens, focuses, clarifies, enlarges and beclouds our view of this most remarkable of all mans' artifacts, the computer":

1. One man's constant is another man's variable.
2. Functions delay binding: data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the
programming process.
3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.
4. Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.
5. If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does so in a small number of ways.
6. Symmetry is a complexity reducing concept (co-routines include sub-routines); seek it everywhere.
7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
8. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
9. It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data
structures.
10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
11. If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
12. Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
13. If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put in micro-code and then they
certainly won't be the same.
14. In the long run every program becomes rococco - then rubble.
15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
16. Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
17. If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
18. A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.
19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
20. Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information
implies a need to check communication.
21. Optimization hinders evolution.
22. A good system can't have a weak command language.
23. To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.
24. Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them.
25. One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow
or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
26. There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages
can only be said poorly.
27. Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
28. Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some
cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
29. For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an edge that creates a cycle,
not just an additional node.
30. In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general - and often we know
it too quickly.
31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
32. Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of
their case analysis.
33. The 11th commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.
34. The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process.
It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.
35. Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is
with the great programmers.
36. The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics - it merely
demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.
37. The most important computer is the one that rages in our skulls and ever seeks that satisfactory
external emulator. The standardization of real computers would be a disaster - and so it probably won't happen.
38. Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.
39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any
sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
40. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
41. Some programming languages manage to absorbe change, but withstand progress.
42. You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
43. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
44. Sometimes I think the only universal in the computing field is the fetch-execute-cycle.
45. The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our
analytic ones.
46. Like punning, programming is a play on words.
47. As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
48. The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's
the best book on anything for the layman.
49. Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use
squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
50. When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before - except our finger-tips will
have been singed.
51. Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.
52. Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad finitum - which is
why we're always starting over.
53. So many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the semantic gulf.
54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
55. A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
56. Software is under a constant tension. Being symbolic it is arbitrarily perfectible; but also it is
arbitrarily changeable.
57. It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
58. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
59. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
60. Dana Scott is the Church of the Lattice-Way Saints.
61. In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
62. In computing, invariants are ephemeral.
63. When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't.
64. Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when
goal structures crumble.
65. Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our
understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity.
66. Making something variable is easy. Controlling duration of constancy is the trick.
67. Think of all the psychic energy expended in seeking a fundamental distinction between "algorithm"
and "program".
68. If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing.
For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
69. In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the
5 year period will begin.
70. Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that
doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on their ponies.
71. Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it
depends on its benefits.
72. An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.
73. It is not a language's weaknesses but its strengths that control the gradient of its change:
Alas, a language never escapes its embryonic sac.
74. It is possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole
point is to always see it as soap bubble?
75. Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality
soothes our nerves.
76. It is the user who should parametrize procedures, not their creators.
77. The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs:
The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the three standing ill at ease.
78. If your computer speaks English it was probably made in Japan.
79. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
80. Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.
81. In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
82. We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem!
83. What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that
between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on its peak.
84. Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
85. Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.
86. We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can
be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.
87. We have the mini and the micro computer. In what semantic niche would the pico computer fall?
88. It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor.
89. One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic.
90. Computation has made the tree flower.
91. The computer reminds one of Lon Chaney - it is the machine of a thousand faces.
92. The computer is the ultimate polluter. Its feces are indistinguishable from the food it produces.
93. When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,"
give him a lollipop.
94. Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: Functions do.
95. Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
96. Computers don't introduce order anywhere as much as they expose opportunities.
97. When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
98. In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
99. In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
100. We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.
101. Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved
the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
103. Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
104. The proof of a system's value is its existence.
105. You can't communicate complexity, only an awareness of it.
106. It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.
107. The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?
108. Whenever two programmers meet to criticize their programs, both are silent.
109. Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq.cm.
110. Editing is a rewording activity.
111. Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?
112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
113. The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.
114. Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
115. Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.
116. You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
117. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in
making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning tobe self-critical?
118. If you can imagine a society in which the computer-robot is the only menial, you can imagine
anything.
119. Programming is an unnatural act.
120. Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like
old ones.
121. In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.

Low-Complexity Art

Jürgen Schmidhuber presents Low-Complexity Art:

Many artists when representing an object try to convey its essence. In an attempt to formalize certain aspects of depicting the essence of objects, the author proposes an art form called low-complexity art.
It may be viewed as the computer-age equivalent of minimal art. Its goals are based on concepts from algorithmic information theory. A low-complexity artwork can be specified by a computer algorithm and should comply with two properties: (1) the drawing should "look right," and (2) the Kolmogorov complexity of the drawing should be small (the algorithm should be short) and a typical observer should be able to see this. Examples of low-complexity art are given in the form of algorithmically simple cartoons of various objects. Attempts are made to relate the formalism of the theory of minimum description length to informal notions such as "good artistic style" and "beauty."
[...]
The ancient Greeks considered the circle to be the ideal two- dimensional geometric form. Without necessarily agreeing with the Greeks I have used circles as the basis for designing drawings. One reason is that a circle can be drawn by a very short algorithm. Another reason is that circles are something most humans can relate to: most people know something about circles and their properties.

Homeless Rather Get Handouts Than Work

I suspect this will surprise some people. Homeless Rather Get Handouts Than Work:

A Phoenix news crew with hidden cameras went around the city to see if the homeless people would actually accept work as their cardboard signs claimed. They offered $20 to each homeless person in exchange for one hour of landscaping work.

The result is not surprising.

Watch the video.

Why Jews Don't Farm

Steven E. Landsburg offers up an explanation for Why Jews Don't Farm:

Skilled urban jobs have always paid better than farming, and that's been true since the time of Christ. But those jobs require literacy, which requires education — and for hundreds of years, education was so expensive that it proved a poor investment despite those higher wages. (Botticini and Eckstein have data on ancient teachers' salaries to back this up.) So, rational economic calculus dictated that pretty much everyone should have stayed on the farms.

But the Jews (like everyone else) were beholden not just to economic rationalism, but also to the dictates of their religion. And the Jewish religion, unique among religions of the early Middle Ages, imposed an obligation to be literate. To be a good Jew you had to read the Torah four times a week at services: twice on the Sabbath, and once every Monday and Thursday morning. And to be a good Jewish parent you had to educate your children so that they could do the same.

The literacy obligation had two effects. First, it meant that Jews were uniquely qualified to enter higher-paying urban occupations. Of course, anyone else who wanted to could have gone to school and become a moneylender, but school was so expensive that it made no sense. Jews, who had to go to school for religious reasons, naturally sought to earn at least some return on their investment. Only many centuries later did education start to make sense economically, and by then the Jews had become well established in banking, trade, and so forth.

The Joy of Conservatism: An Interview with Roger Scruton

In The Joy of Conservatism: An Interview with Roger Scruton, Scruton explains why he wrote The Meaning of Conservatism:

I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy — or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist.

At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of 'resentment politics,' other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them.

It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Without The Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left — whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition — would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.

One of his key points:

It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority — teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.

What's the proper question?

The City Comforts blog asks, What's the proper question? with respect to sprawl. I enjoyed Will Cox's comment:

People drive across the parking lot from Wal-Mart to Applebee's because its dangerous to walk. They drive across the parking lot from Wal-Mart to Applebee's because there are no sidewalks. They drive between each individual store's immediately adjacent parking lot because it is dangerous to walk. They drive between each individual store's immediately adjacent parking lot because there are no sidewalks.

There are no sidewalks because the zoning regulations did not require them. There are multiple, disconnected parking lots because the zoning regulations did require them.

This is not an economic problem.

The Great Escape

In The Great Escape, Nick Schultz interviews Robert Fogel on The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death:

One of the points I make is that it took 4000 years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse. And it took 65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon. Not only did that happen in such a short period of time, but over a billion people all over the world watched it happen. So we had communications revolution in a very short period of time.
[...]
Look, 1000 years ago, nothing happened. Each generation experienced life more or less as the previous ones had, with maybe some random factor thrown in for weather and pestilence. But, it's only in the past 300 years that science has become so powerful that it could influence the course of events. And it has, and I expect it to do it in an accelerating rate.

Through Charities, Drug Makers Help People – and Themselves

Drug companies have discovered a new way to price-discriminate. From Through Charities, Drug Makers Help People – and Themselves:

Nancy Oliva hadn't paid much attention to her insurance plan's requirement that she pay half the cost of prescription drugs. Then the cashier at ShopRite told her she owed $636 for seven pills.

Ms. Oliva, 60 years old, was diagnosed with a rare type of brain tumor earlier this year. She was prescribed a new drug to be taken in combination with radiation. The retail price of a one-week supply of the pill, called Temodar, is $1,272.

Ms. Oliva, who earns about $40,000 a year managing a clothing store in Long Beach Island, N.J., pulled out her American Express card that day in September and paid, unsure where she was going to find the money for the next week's supply. Fortunately, the nurse at her doctor's office found help for her from a charity, Patient Services Inc., which picked up her drug co-payments — $3,800 for a six-week course of treatment.

The twist: The money for her co-payments came from Schering-Plough Corp., the drug's maker.

'Oprah' Is Attracting Young, Female Viewers To TV in Saudi Arabia

Oprah is, apparently, unstoppable. 'Oprah' Is Attracting Young, Female Viewers To TV in Saudi Arabia:

More than a year after the pan-Arab satellite station MBC started broadcasting 'Oprah' on its channel 4, it made a discovery: The show's ratings were higher than those of any other English-language show. The interest was coming from an untapped audience in the largest country in their coverage area: young Saudi Arabian women. And what these young women wanted was even more 'Oprah,' as well as other programs like it.

Oil-Rich Norway Hires Philosopher As Moral Compass

Only in Scandinavia... From Oil-Rich Norway Hires Philosopher As Moral Compass:

Henrik Syse, a professional philosopher, says he gets ribbed by his family that 'five of my 10 best friends are dead Greeks.' But this fall he put aside writing a book on Plato to ponder a more practical puzzle: what to do with around $190 billion?

Mr. Syse started work in September as the in-house ethicist for the Norwegian government's Petroleum Fund, one of the world's largest pools of investment capital. 'It has been a steep learning curve,' says the 39-year-old academic. 'I'm a philosopher. I'm not a banker.'

With a new office in the Norwegian Central Bank, he gets paid to ruminate on how, at a time of surging energy prices, the world's third-biggest oil exporter can best match profit and principle. Investment, he says, 'is teeming with ethical issues.' He has begun trying to figure out how the Petroleum Fund, the custodian of Norway's oil earnings, can use its investments to get companies to behave more ethically.

Confessions of a Car Salesman

From Confessions of a Car Salesman:

We hired Chandler Phillips, a veteran journalist, to go undercover by working at two new car dealerships in the Los Angeles area. First, he would work at a high-volume, high-pressure dealership selling Japanese cars. Then, he'd change over to a smaller car lot that sold domestic cars at 'no haggle' prices.

A taste of his training at the high-pressure dealership:

The process begins by asking the customer how much they want for a monthly payment. Usually, they say, about $300. "Then, you just say, '$300... up to?' And they'll say, 'Well, $350.' Now they've just bumped themselves $50 a month. That's huge." You then fill in $350 under the monthly payment box.

Michael said you could use the "up to" trick with the down payment too. "If Mr. Customer says he wants to put down $2000, you say, "Up to?" And he'll probably bump himself up to $2500." Michael then wrote $2,500 in the down payment box of the 4-square worksheet.

I later found out this little phrase "Up to?" was a joke around the dealership. When salesmen or women passed each other in the hallways, they would say, "Up to?" and break out laughing.

Meet the Life Hackers

Meet the Life Hackers examines our modern, multi-tasking work environment:

A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?
[...]
The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration — like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly — and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity.

How to Make a Million Dollars, by Marshall Brain

Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works and author of The Teenager's Guide to the Real World — both of which I would recommend from what I've seen — recently gave a presentation at Duke on How to Make a Million Dollars:

An entrepreneur is someone who starts successful businesses. People are not very kind to those who start unsuccessful businesses. The instant you are successful, however, you are a hero and they start calling you an entrepreneur.

What Not to Do

John Osher has developed hundreds of consumer products and has started several successful companies. Here's his 17-point What Not to Do list of mistakes:

1. Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable.
2. Miscalculating market size, timing, ease of entry and potential market share.
3. Underestimating financial requirements and timing.
4. Overprojecting sales volume and timing.
5. Making cost projections that are too low.
6. Hiring too many people and spending too much on offices and facilities.
7. Lacking a contingency plan for a shortfall in expectations.
8. Bringing in unnecessary partners.
9. Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements.
10. Neglecting to manage the entire company as a whole.
11. Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily rather than finding a way.
12. Focusing too much on sales volume and company size rather than profit.
13. Seeking confirmation of your actions rather than seeking the truth.
14. Lacking simplicity in your vision.
15. Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose.
16. Lacking focus and identity.
17. Lacking an exit strategy.

Free Programming Tips are Worth Every Penny.

Wil Shipley gives his free programming tips in Free Programming Tips are Worth Every Penny. He calls his programming style The Way of the Code Samurai:

Now, I don't actually know much about real samurai, but the basic thing I've heard is they stand and stare at each other for hours, and then suddenly BAM strike once and the other guy is down.

That's how you should code.