The Man Who Would Be le Président

Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard describes Sarko, Nicolas Sarkozy, as The Man Who Would Be le Président:

One thing Sarkozy does not resemble in the slightest is a traditional French politician. "I am a man of the right," he says over breakfast, "even if I'm not a conservative in the traditional sense." This is an extraordinary admission. No presidential hopeful in decades, even in the UMP created by Jacques Chirac in the wake of De Gaulle's RPR, has ever accepted the label. Never in his political life has Jacques Chirac made a similar statement. From his time as prime minister in the mid-seventies, when he described his goal as the creation of "a labor movement à la française," to his recent New Year's address, in which he again attacked American-style capitalism, Chirac has taken many positions, but none of them on the "right." Since Sarkozy's profession leaves him liable to accusations in the French press that he is the favored candidate of Americans or free-marketeers, he is anxious to spell out exactly what he means by a "temperament of the right." It is something he has obviously thought about a lot. "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."

Out of this value system come plans for everything. Between stints at the interior ministry, Sarkozy also spent time as minister of finance. He intends to shrink the state, reform the profligate, bureaucratic, and job-killing "French social model," cut taxes, promote ethnic harmony (through the controversial expedient of affirmative action), normalize Islam in French society, and shore up France's alliance with the United States. These plans amount to what supporters and detractors call la rupture. As Sarkozy told a roomful of journalists at UMP headquarters in January: "You can't run France on the ideas of 30 years ago." This may sound old hat. Since 1974, all French presidential elections have been run on the theme of "change."

Original Franklin Planner

LifeHacker points to the Original Franklin Planner — the one that didn't come in a faux leather binder:

Once upon a time, a young man at the tender age of 20 came up with a life plan which consisted of 13 guidelines. He kept a daily chart of these 13 goals, and placed a dot next to the ones he failed to abide by each day for the rest of his life.

His name was Benjamin Franklin. His 13 guidelines included:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

National Archives and Google Launch Pilot Project to Digitize and Offer Historic Films Online

National Archives and Google Launch Pilot Project to Digitize and Offer Historic Films Online:

Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin today announced the launch of a pilot program to make holdings of the National Archives available for free online. This non-exclusive agreement will enable researchers and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives via Google Video as well as the National Archives website.

(Hat tip to LifeHacker.)

Keep It Simple

Years ago, when I was first investing in mutual funds, I was shocked to find out that I'd be taxed on any capital gains made by the fund, as well as any capital gains I made by selling shares that had gone up in value. ETFs get around that problem:

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are an increasingly popular investment. ETFs are open-end mutual funds that, unlike traditional open-end funds, trade on exchanges, such as the NYSE and AMEX. The fact that they can be bought or sold throughout the day is one of their advantages over ordinary open-end funds, which only allow purchases and sales at the end of the day.

But the big advantage of ETFs is that the sale of securities inside the fund does not typically generate taxable capital gains for ETF shareholders.

In Keep It Simple, finance luminaries Fama and French argue to treat all mutual funds like ETFs:

We suggest a simplification of the tax code that levels the playing field for ETFs and ordinary funds. Taxation of distributed dividends continues. (It hits the shareholders of ETFs and ordinary funds in the same way.) But taxation of capital gains occurs only when fund shareholders redeem their shares. In other words, we suggest that mutual fund capital gains should be taxed in the same way as gains on other securities. This is the system in many other countries.

What Does a Chinese Keyboard Look Like?

Daniel Engber explains "How they type in the PRC" in What Does a Chinese Keyboard Look Like?:

How do you type Chinese characters on a keyboard?

You use a piece of software called an input method editor, which allows conventional-looking keyboards to produce the thousands of characters used in written Chinese. There's no standard system, though, so two Chinese keyboards may not look exactly the same and they may not function in the same way.

In the Peoples' Republic of China, most computer users type out their Chinese in transliteration, using the standard Roman alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard. To generate a character, you type out its sound according to the same spelling system — called Pinyin — that represents the name of China's capital with the word 'Beijing.' The computer automatically converts the Pinyin spelling to the correct Chinese characters on the screen.

Europe's chill linked to disease

From around 1500 to 1850, Europe endured a Little Ice Age. Europe's chill linked to disease presents an unusual explanation:

Europe's 'Little Ice Age' may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study.

Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says.

A French Daredevil Hopes to Live to Tell Tale of 25-Mile Jump

You may already know about Joe Kittinger's jump from a 20-story-tall helium balloon at the edge of space, 19 miles up, in 1960. I blogged on it recently. He reached 714 miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier without a vehicle, before a small stabilizing 'chute and a later, bigger parachute slowed his fall.

Now A French Daredevil Hopes to Live to Tell Tale of 25-Mile Jump:

Now a Frenchman named Michel Fournier aims to top the feat. In 1988, two years after the U.S. Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on ascent 11 miles up, managers of Europe's space program selected the paratrooper as one of three people to leap from 25 miles up. Scientists wanted to see whether an ejection higher than Col. Kittinger's jump is survivable. After doing initial tests with lifelike dummies, Europe abandoned its ambitions for manned spaceflight and scrubbed the jump.

Mr. Fournier wasn't so easily grounded, and in 1992 he retired to pursue the plunge solo. He has since amassed $12 million in gear — and impoverished himself. He sold his house, antique furniture and gun collection to buy the mothballed European jump equipment and a massive balloon capable of rising higher than planes can fly. He cajoled sponsors to pitch in high-tech gear, including a pressure suit and life-support system that took nearly three years to develop.

As Kittinger says, "Space is hostile":

Belly-flopping from the edge of space isn't just an incredibly long parachute ride. At that altitude, conditions quickly turn deadly. Above 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is so thin that unprotected people lose consciousness in around 12 seconds. Even with an air supply, nitrogen bubbles may form in the blood and soft tissue if the jumper hasn't prepared by inhaling pure oxygen for several hours. If the jumper is unprotected above 50,000 feet or so, saliva boils off the tongue, and body parts begin swelling painfully. Lungs may hemorrhage as they and the skull fill with liquid.

On Col. Kittinger's ascent to his record leap, his right glove broke, causing his exposed hand to balloon. A Soviet officer died two years later from pressure sickness in a similar attempt when his face mask cracked. An American sky diver died from decompression trying to beat the record in 1966.

Giraffe Manor

I may have to plan a trip to Giraffe Manor:

The Giraffe Manor, built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, is situated on 120 acres of land just a few miles from the centre of Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. In 1974 Jock Leslie-Melville, grandson of a Scottish earl, and his wife Betty, who also founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife (AFEW), bought the Manor. They then moved five babies of the highly endangered Rothschild giraffe to their property where they have been successfully reared and they now have their own babies.

When Jock died, Betty decided to open her house, now called the Giraffe Manor, to visitors. Exclusive, spacious and elegant, it is the only place in the world that you can feed giraffe from your second floor bedroom window, over the lunch table, and at the front door. Guests can feed and photograph the giraffe and the Warthogs at the Manor, and also wander through the adjoining primeval forest to view the bushbuck, dik dik, and more than 180 species of birds.

Is the left out of ideas?

Jane Galt asks, Is the left out of ideas?:

The left used to have a Big Idea: The free market doesn't work, so the government will fix it. The social democrats disagreed with the Socialists and the Scoop Jackson democrats about how much fixing was necessary, but they all agreed on a basic premise, and could sell that simple message to the public. Then, after fifty years or so, people noticed that the government didn't seem to work any better than the free market . . . worse, actually, in a lot of cases . . . and it was awfully expensive and surly. Conservatives stepped in with their Big Idea: the government screws things up, so let's leave more stuff up to individuals, which, if nothing else, will be a lot cheaper. Obviously, liberals disagree with this . . . but they have not come up with a Big, Easily Sellable, Idea With Obvious Policy Prescriptions to replace it. Some of them have just kept repeating the old Big Idea, which it seems to me that fewer and fewer people believe, as the US continues to pull ahead of its economic peers. Others have focused on coming up with lots of little ideas . . . but those take up too much time and energy to attract voters. Gore tried to whang up anger against pharmaceutical companies, and Kerry tried to stoke anger against Bush, as replacement. But in politics, there's just no replacement for the Big Idea.

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? "In the 1971 De Beers annual report, Harry Oppenheimer explained the unique situation of diamonds in the following terms":

A degree of control is necessary for the well-being of the industry, not because production is excessive or demand is falling, but simply because wide fluctuations in price, which have, rightly or wrongly, been accepted as normal in the case of most raw materials, would be destructive of public confidence in the case of a pure luxury such as gem diamonds, of which large stocks are held in the form of jewelry by the general public.

If normal people started selling their diamonds on the open market, the De Beers cartel would lose much of its monopoly power.

The Da Vinci Lode

The Drawn! blog calls it The Da Vinci Lode. It's a collection of Leonardo's drawings, from medical studies, to scientific diagrams, to flying machines.

Fernando Vargas Loses to Shane Mosley

Fernando Vargas Loses to Shane Mosley — and it looks really, really ugly:

Fernando Vargas reacts after losing to Shane Mosley during their junior middleweight boxing match at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas on Saturday, Feb. 25, 2006. The fight was called by referee Joe Cortez due to swelling on Vargas's left eye.

Drawn to the power of Pi

Drawn to the power of Pi:

In October, The Times and Canongate Books launched a competition to find an illustrator for a new edition of Yann Martel’s Man Booker-prizewinning novel Life of Pi. Today we feature the five shortlisted images, chosen by our judging panel out of some 600 entries. Five more artists have been selected from those who entered via The Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada, and another five from those who submitted their illustrations to The Age in Australia. All 15 shortlisted artists will submit three more illustrations each before an overall winner is chosen in April.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Autistic basketball player causes mayhem at game

Autistic basketball player causes mayhem at game:

Jason McElway, an autistic high school basketball team member in Rochester NY, served as the team manager and spirit coach for several years. On the final game of the season the coach let him finally put on a uniform with the rest of the team. Watch what happens then...

Elsewhere

I've seen this before, but if you haven't, follow Michael Blowhard's advice and "Wait for the guy in the orange shirt."

His name's David Bernal, and he goes by the nom de danse of Elsewhere.

Good for America

James K. Glassman thinks that letting the UAE's DP World run American ports is Good for America:

Using Schumeresque logic, the U.S. should ban flights into the U.S. by airlines from Arab countries, and we should certainly bar any cargo from being loaded in Arab ports and bound for the U.S. ('If you are worried about a bomb in a box going off in New York, you need to worry about who loads the container overseas rather than the terminal operator who unloads it in the U.S.,' says someone who actually knows something about port security, Theodore Price of Optimization Alternatives, a Texas company that provides terminal-operating software.) In fact, one would suppose that Dubai, with billions at stake, would be more careful — not less — about assisting in anti-terror activities at U.S. ports if it is actually operating them.

Word Cloud T-Shirts

SnapShirts is offering a free web service to "automatically generate a word cloud from your blog" — a word cloud that fits nicely on a brand new t-shirt from SnapShirts.

Free Parking versus Free Markets

In Free Parking versus Free Markets, Dan Klein reviews Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking:

The book is marvelous and wonderful. It explains that parking policy is stuck in a self-feeding cycle. It brilliantly criticizes the culture of parking policymakers. It tells all facets of the history. It provides theoretical underpinnings. It displays rich empirical evidence. It makes novel connections and illuminates old issues. It bubbles with illustrations, cultural allusions, and ripe quotations. And its 734 pages are gracefully written. It is one of the best policy books I know. The book represents a life-work in understanding the problem and enlightening the public.

The meat of the review:

Fundamentally, the policies in question are just two: city governments (1) mismanage curb parking and (2) require developers to provide extensive off-street parking.

Pesky policy-wonkery? Shoup shows that the magnitudes are huge. About 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are made by personal motor vehicles, and parking is free for 99 percent of these trips (p. 590). But free parking is not a spontaneous outcome. The required parking lot at a restaurant usually occupies at least three times as much land as the restaurant itself. Shoup reckons this a subsidy to parking, and estimates the U.S. total of such subsidy between $127 billion and $374 billion a year. “If we also count the subsidy for free and underpriced curb parking, the total subsidy for parking would be far higher.... Do we really want to spend as much to subsidize parking as we spend for Medicare or national defense?” (591)

Like freeways and free schooling, free parking isn’t free. “We don’t pay for parking in our role as motorists, but in all our other roles — as consumers, investors, workers, residents, and taxpayers—we pay a high price” (2). Meanwhile, when motorists drive downtown and cannot find a parking spot, they curse and increase congestion. Exactly like on freeways.

The extent of free parking is so enormous and so normal that people just think it nature’s endowment, like air. Everyone feels entitled to free air and free parking. Hence, “most people do not see it as being any subsidy at all” (591). “Because parking costs so much and motorists pay so little for it, the hidden subsidy is truly gigantic” (591).

(I've blogged on The High Cost of Free Parking before.)

Musings About the War on Drugs

George Melloan, of the Wall Street Journal, offers his Musings About the War on Drugs:

Milton Friedman saw the problem. To the extent that authorities curtail supplies of marijuana, cocaine and heroin coming into the rich U.S. market, the retail price of these substances goes up, making the trade immensely profitable — tax-free, of course. The more the U.S. spends on interdiction, the more incentive it creates for taking the risk of running drugs.

In 1933, the U.S. finally gave up on the 13-year prohibition of alcohol — a drug that is by some measures more intoxicating and dangerous to health than marijuana. That effort to alter human behavior left a legacy of corruption, criminality, and deaths and blindness from the drinking of bad booze. America's use of alcohol went up after repeal but no serious person today suggests a repeat of the alcohol experiment. Yet prohibition is still being attempted, at great expense, for the small portion of the population — perhaps little more than 5% — who habitually use proscribed drugs.

Believing in Belief

Michael Shermer reviews Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell in Believing in Belief:

In a 1997 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson discovers a fossil angel. Suspecting a hoax, she takes a piece of the fossil to the natural history museum where Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (playing himself) analyzes it. The age-old conflict between science and religion then plays out in this ne plus ultra of pop culture. The town evangelical Ned Flanders bemoans: “Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.” When Gould announces that the test results are “inconclusive,” Reverend Lovejoy boasts: “Well, it appears science has failed again, in front of overwhelming religious evidence.” Marge counsels Lisa’s skepticism with motherly wisdom: “There has to be more to life than just what we see Lisa. Everyone needs something to believe in.” Lisa’s rejoinder is classic skepticism: “It’s not that I don’t have a spiritual side. I just find it hard to believe there’s a dead angel hanging in our garage.” The Scopes-like trial that ensues ends when the judge issues a restraining order: “Religion must stay 500 yards from science at all times.”

This is, in fact, Gould’s conciliatory solution he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria), and it is the primary target of Tufts University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his latest book, Breaking the Spell. All restraining orders are off, as Dennett calls for “a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” The spell to be broken is the taboo that science will render incapable “the life-enriching enchantment of religion itself.”

PlayStation 3 Breaks the Bank

From PlayStation 3 Breaks the Bank:

In the videogame business, hardware makers generally sell new consoles at a loss, making their profits by charging licensing fees to videogame publishers. But according to an analysis by News.com, Sony is paying an unusually steep bill for its upcoming PlayStation 3 console. The system's components cost between $725 and $905, analysts estimate. The biggest culprit: Sony's new Blu-Ray disc drive, which will play high-definition movies as well as games. With the PS3 console expected to sell between $299 and $399, Sony will lose hundreds of dollars per console.

Don't be too surprised if the hardware hackers buy it for its parts.

Fossil Overturns Ideas of Jurassic Mammals

Fossil Overturns Ideas of Jurassic Mammals:

The discovery of a furry, beaver-like animal that lived at the time of dinosaurs has overturned more than a century of scientific thinking about Jurassic mammals.

The find shows that the ecological role of mammals in the time of dinosaurs was far greater than previously thought, said Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

The animal is the earliest swimming mammal to have been found and was the most primitive mammal to be preserved with fur, which is important to helping keep a constant body temperature, Luo said in a telephone interview.

For over a century, the stereotype of mammals living in that era has been of tiny, shrew-like creatures scurrying about in the underbrush trying to avoid the giant creatures that dominated the planet, Luo commented.

Now, a research team that included Luo has found that 164 million years ago, the newly discovered mammal with a flat, scaly tail like a beaver, vertebra like an otter and teeth like a seal was swimming in lakes and eating fish.

The team, led by Qiang Ji of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing, discovered the remains in the Inner Mongolia region of China. They report their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
[...]
The new animal is not related to modern beavers or otters but has features similar to them. Thus the researchers named it Castorocauda lutrasimilis. Castoro from the Latin for beaver, cauda for tail, lutra for river otter and similis meaning similar.

Willy the Hog Pairs With Antelope at Zoo

Pig-like animal meets deer-like animal in Willy the Hog Pairs With Antelope at Zoo:

This photo released by the Los Angeles Zoo shows Willy, a 10-year-old, 187-pound Red River porcine, right, nuzzling his new companion Nicole, a 16-year-old bongo antelope, in their exhibit at the zoo Feb. 13, 2006, in Los Angeles. Willy's mate Ruby died last summer of cancer and within a week the hog turned to the antelope for companionship.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan speaks for all of us when she attacks airport security:

This is a flying nation. We fly. And everyone knows airport security is an increasingly sad joke, that TSA itself often appears to have forgotten its mission, if it ever knew it, and taken on a new one — the ritual abuse of passengers.

Now there's a security problem. Solve that one.

gladwell.com

Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Blink) now has his own blog at gladwell.com:

In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker. What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written.

Scholar's Dictionary Of Aztec Language May Take a Lifetime

Scholar's Dictionary Of Aztec Language May Take a Lifetime:

Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.

Tyler Cowen calls Nahuatl "the most beautiful language" he's heard.

The Manwagon

It's not an SUV. It's not a minivan. It's The Manwagon:

Seeking to lure speed-crazy guys with kids, car makers are trying to transform the dowdy old family hauler into something new: the manwagon. In perhaps the most extreme sign of the industry's horsepower race, some of these wagons are quicker than a Porsche Boxster. They have monstrous engines, giant brakes, track-ready suspensions and race-car-style seats — plus prices up to $30,000 higher than the base versions. But unlike a sports car, these wagons can fit strollers and coolers in the back.

This melding of speed and sippy cups may seem unlikely, but car makers say their consumer research has unearthed a surprising number of family men who thought wagons could be cool, if only they had more guts. Dodge responded by rolling out its aggressively styled Magnum wagon in 2004 and just added a faster version, the 425-horsepower SRT8. Volvo's V70 R has 79% more power than the base V70 wagon, while Audi put together its S4 Avant by pairing an A4 wagon with a 340-horsepower V8 engine from its flagship A8 sedan. Mercedes-Benz recently began selling the supercharged E55 wagon for the first time in the U.S.: It boasts the same 469-horsepower engine that powers one of the fastest sedans Mercedes has ever built.

Soccer Ball Contact Lens

There's something both amusing and disturbing about a Soccer Ball Contact Lens:

A set of 'Magic Lens' contact lenses with images of one soccer ball and a German flag cost 45 euros.

Explosive-eating fungus

There's a fungus for almost any task, including eating explosives:

When explosives are used for mining or demolition, some may fail to detonate and get lost in the rubble. Riggs reckons the remedy could be to mix pellets of dormant fungal spores in with the explosive charge before inserting the wick into the explosive package.

The dry spores lie dormant while the explosives are in storage and, if the charge detonates as intended, will get blown to smithereens.

But if the explosive fails to detonate, water from the air should migrate down the wick and into the charge. The spores should then germinate and devour the charge, rendering it harmless.

The white-rot fungus Phlebia radiate is particularly fond of high explosives, according to the patent. And the speed at which it gobbles the stuff up depends on the number of pellets added: 5 pellets per stick for slow degradation or 30 to make it safe after just a few days.

(Hat tip to Defense Tech.)

Israeli Military Finds Perfect Vehicle For Special Ops Forces: The Llama

Israeli Military Finds Perfect Vehicle For Special Ops Forces: The Llama:

Israel's military has found the perfect vehicle for special operations forces—the llama.

After extensive tests, the uncomplaining workhorse animals were found to easily out-perform donkeys. What's more, they need refueling only every other day.

Llamas are dangerous, so if you see one where people are swimming, you shout...Look out, there are llamas! (From Monty Python's Flying Circus.)

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It makes a bold proposition about the country best known for Black Hawk Down:

Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming.

From the CIA factbook:

Despite the seeming anarchy, Somalia's service sector has managed to survive and grow. Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent. In the absence of a formal banking sector, money exchange services have sprouted throughout the country, handling between $500 million and $1 billion in remittances annually. Mogadishu's main market offers a variety of goods from food to the newest electronic gadgets. Hotels continue to operate, and militias provide security.

Van Notten, a Dutch lawyer who married into a Somali clan, holds that Somalia is a country based on customary law:

Customary laws develop in a country like Somalia in the absence of a central legislating body. Rules "emerge spontaneously as people go about their daily business and try to solve the problems that occasionally arise in it without upsetting the patterns of cooperation on which they so heavily depend" (Van Notten, 15: 2005). Van Notten contends that the Somali customary law closely follows the natural law and therefore should be preserved.

The extended family is the core of Somali society. Families descended from common great grandparent form a jilib, the basic independent jural unit, and a number of jilibs in turn form a clan. Each family, jilib, and clan has its own judge, whose role is to facilitate the handling of disputes by deciding where the liability lies and what compensation should be paid. For example if a man is murdered, the murderer's clan gives the victim's clan one hundred camels (the blood price). Verdicts are widely discussed, and a judge who does not base his decision on norms prevailing in the community is unlikely to be asked to settle further disputes. Thus while a judge may form his own principles, his customers will decide his competence as a judge.

What happens when you try to impose democracy on a tribal society?

When the electorate is composed of close-knit tribal, religious, linguistic or ethnic communities, the people invariably vote, not on the merits of any issue, but for the party of their own community. The community with the greatest numbers wins the election, and the minority parties then put rebellion and secession at the top of their political agenda. That is nothing but a recipe for chaos.

Libertarian Paradise

James H. Joyner Jr. calls the Netherlands a Libertarian Paradise:

I recently spent a few days in what a friend referred to as 'the land of debauchery.' Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands, is probably as famous for its openness toward prostitution and drug consumption than for wooden shoes, canals, or world class museums. Yet, strangely, it nonetheless seems to be a clean, functioning society.

While Holland has an exceedingly redistributionist economic policy, it is a libertarian's paradise on the social front.

Dogbert Explains "Fungible"

Dilbert doesn't understand what "fungible" means. Dogbert does.

1994, Year of the Newt

Brian Carney suggests that Newt Gingrinch, who led the Republican Party to victory in 1994, may be making a run for the presidency in 2008:

The party governed to maintain power, and so lost touch with its electorate. And here he adds a warning: 'Our natural majority in the country is a very reform majority. It's the taxpaying majority. It's the people who do not trust Washington, do not like seeing their money wasted, are not impressed with pork — if anything, they're irritated by it. And either the House and Senate Republicans are going to move substantially in the next few months or they're going to run a very real risk of losing the fall election.'

So what does 'substantial movement' look like? Unsurprisingly, Mr. Gingrich has a program. '[T]here are two layers. I'll give you things they can't do and things they can do.' First, the things they can do, such as cutting down on earmarks and pork-barrel spending. 'They should change the House rules so that any conference report that comes back is automatically filed on the Thomas system [the Web site where congressional actions are logged and made publicly available] and is not voted on for 72 hours so that every blogger in the country can go in and read it. That would immediately cut down on the most outrageous stuff because you wouldn't be able to pass it.'

This is Mr. Gingrich at his best — a swish of the sword when faced with a Gordian Knot.

Asymmetrical warfare, 1906

Asymmetrical warfare, 1906 looks at the long war against the Muslim Moros of the Philippines:

They had never been Filipinos: their identity pre-existed King Philip of Spain; their national consciousness had always been as Muslims. After the first Mohammedan missionary arrived in Sulu in 1380 parts of the island of Mindanao had constituted themselves into the Sultanate of Sulu. A succession of Europeans: the Portuguese, French, British, and Spaniards had attempted to incorporate it into their respective colonial schemes but the Muslim Malays, led by Imams who controlled ruthless kris killers, resisted implacably. When beaten on the battlefield they simply surrendered out of convenience, signed a peace treaty and disregarded it once the enemy force had left.

When the US acquired Mindanao after the beating Spain in the Spanish-American war, Americans came face to face with what came to be known as asymmetrical warfare. Here were attacks on civilians, beheadings, raids on schools. All the stuff of modern headlines. And in the pre-explosive era the ultimate weapon of Imams was the suicide bomber of the day: the juramentado.

To make his point, Wretchard cites a few colorful passages from Victor Hurley's Jungle Patrol:

Then all firing ceased as the men went at it in a furious bayonet to barong duel that was a fight to the finish. At the nearest cavalry tent a white soldier rolled out under the wall, rifle in hand. Before he could stand up a Moro was upon him. Another soldier crawled out and the Moro leaped to him. My Corporal Batiokan ran up to crush the Moro's skull with a rifle butt. Blood was squirting from two great gashes in the cavalrymen's back. Soldiers came running to carry away the wounded man. Their uniforms were red with blood. ... One of the men was past medical aid. He had been chopped to ribbons, with arms and legs severed and lying apart from his body. ...

Seven of the eight juramentados who had made the attack had succeeded in getting through the wire in the face of the fire. One lay dead outside the wire and seven were stretched out in the enclosure when morning came and we made inspection. The hospital was lined with terribly wounded men, slashed with barongs, and we were forced to kill many of the slashed horses who had been in the path of the charging Moros. The juramentados who had plunged through the wire in a desperate dive had left skin and clothes on the wire. They were horribly torn from head to foot by the long barbs. They were riddled with bullets, and many had heads bashed in and bayonet stabs. They lay there, with glittering eyeballs and bared black teeth. Their heads were shaven and their eyebrows were a thin line of hair.

Has the world become a better place?

GapMinder's goal is "to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics!"

Enjoy this animated presentation, Has the world become a better place?

Minister offers £6m to behead cartoonist

This is not reassuring. Minister offers £6m to behead cartoonist:

A minister in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has offered a £6m reward to anyone who beheads one of the Danish cartoonists who outraged Muslims by depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of minority welfare, said the killer would also receive his weight in gold. He made the offer during a rally in his constituency in Meerut, northeast of Delhi. Protesters then burnt an effigy of a cartoonist and some Danish flags.

A Pakistani cleric has also offered a $1m reward — and a car — as a “prize” to anyone who kills one of the cartoonists. Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi made his announcement after Friday prayers in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar.

The Age of Corporate Environmentalism

In The Age of Corporate Environmentalism, Katherine Mangu-Ward says, Surprise — big business has learned that it’s pretty easy being green:

The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.

But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.

Hottest Fitness Trends

Some of the new year's Hottest Fitness Trends:

• The newest offering at Crunch Fitness Gyms across the U.S. not only makes their female members look good in high heels, they make them exercise in them. Recently introduced, 'Stiletto Strength' classes consist of a 30-minute routine of Pilates and strength training, with the last 15 minutes spent strutting around in 3-inch heels.
• At Equinox Fitness, new offerings include a sword-wielding class called Forza.
• At Clay Health Club in New York City, members can tighten their abs with an Indian dance called Masala Bhangra.
• In Bikram yoga studios, clients follow a series of yoga techniques in a room of 90 to 120 degrees.

You're Never Too Old for Dodgeball shares some more fitness trends:

• Chelsea Piers' 25,000-square-foot gymnastics facility advertises the largest adult gymnastics program in the country, attracting both first-timers and professionals. Classes are split nearly evenly between men and women, instructors said. Participants hail the sport's almost meditative effects, but the regulars' sharply defined muscles point up other benefits.
• The Seattle-based group Underdog Sports offers adult leagues for elementary-school staples — dodgeball, kickball and flag football.
• The Sports Clubs Network — which has 135 U.S. health centers — offers hip-hop dance, a ballet workout and "urban rebounding," exercises on miniature trampolines.
• The ballet class offered by the Sports Clubs Network, the NYC Ballet Workout, can be done at home, too. Since it was created in 1997, more than half a million copies of its videos and DVDs have been sold, along with 100,000 instructional books.
• With the influence of the
  Winter Olympics and the Fox TV network show "Skating with Celebrities," figure skating is becoming particularly popular among adults.

Hidden Passageways

I may have to remodel the house. From HiddenPassageway.com:

Creative Home Engineering is a registered contracting company that adds value to homes by integrating silent, automated hidden passageways.

I'm not surprised that they have sample hidden doors triggered by pulling books on a bookshelf or twisting candles on a mantle; I'm surprised that they don't have one triggered by a button in a bust of Shakespeare.

Go With Your Gut

Harriet Brown says Go With Your Gut — because it's better for you:

I'd like to make a radical suggestion: instead of wringing our hands over fat grams and calories, let's resolve to enjoy whatever food we eat.

Because, as it turns out, when you eat something you like, your body makes more efficient use of its nutrients. Which means that choking down a plateful of steamed cauliflower (if you hate steamed cauliflower) is not likely to do you as much good as you think.

In the 1970's, researchers fed two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai, a spicy Thai meal. The Thai women — who presumably liked the meal more than the Swedish women did — absorbed almost 50 percent more iron from it than the Swedish women. When the meal was served as a mushy paste, the Thai women absorbed 70 percent less iron than they had before — from the same food.

The researchers concluded that food that's unfamiliar (Thai food to Swedish women) or unappetizing (mush rather than solid food) winds up being less nutritious than food that looks, smells and tastes good to you. The explanation can be found in the digestive process itself, in the relationship between the 'second brain' — the gut — and the brain in your head.

The Father Without a Son

Lee Harris celebrates President's Day — Washington's Birthday — by praising The Father Without a Son:

So here was the problem. Washington had to be given the kind of powers normally reserved only for kings and military dictators — yet it was politically impossible to declare him either one or the other. After all, America was a Republic, and Republics could not be governed by kings or dictators. Therefore, a solution was found in devising an hitherto unheard of office, namely, the Presidency. Though the word 'president' had been used before to designate various appointed officials, it had never been used to designate a Head of State.

By a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, the man for whom this office was designed was also a man who was profoundly aware of the potential dangers inherent in the office that had been specially designed for him. Washington was keenly aware just how easily the Presidency could degenerate back to a monarchy, or worse; and, shrewd man that he was, he clearly saw that there was nothing in the written Constitution that could prevent such a process from occurring.

For example, there is a remarkable letter that Washington wrote, before assuming the Presidency, in which he argues that he is peculiarly qualified to be President because he has no son. Now imagine a candidate for the Presidency today making such a claim: Vote for me, because I have no son. How strange it would sound to our ears. Yet Washington regarded this as virtually an indispensable desideratum in a President — or, at least, in the first President. Nor is it difficult to see why this mattered to him so much. He did not want the office of the Presidency to become the possession of a dynasty.

The Saintly Sinner

In The Saintly Sinner, Joan Acocella looks at Mary Magdalene and the stories that rose around her.

From the Bible itself, we know two things about Mary Magdalene: she was crazy — Jesus cast "seven devils" out of her — and she saw the angel who announced His resurrection.

Later stories conflated her with Luke's "sinner" — it all made sense, after all — and Mary Magdalene was declared a whore:

As such, she was a tremendous success. Europe, once it was converted to Christianity, was not content to have all those holy people in the Bible confine their activities — or, more important, their relics — to the Middle East. And so the Magdalene, among others, was sent west. After the Crucifixion, it was said, infidels placed her in a rudderless boat and pushed it out to sea, in full confidence that it would capsize. But, piloted by the hand of God, the Magdalene’s bark arrived at Marseilles, whereupon she undertook a career of strenuous evangelism and converted southern Gaul. Eventually, however, she tired of preaching and retreated to a cave in a mountain near Marseilles, where she wept and repented her foul youth. She wore no clothes; she was covered only by her long hair (or, in some paintings, by an appalling sort of fur). Nor did she take any food. Once a day, angels would descend to carry her to Heaven, where she received “heavenly sustenance,” and then fly her back to her grotto. This went on for thirty years. Then, one day, her friend Maximin, the bishop of Aix, found her in his church levitating two cubits above the floor and surrounded by a choir of angels. She promptly expired.

This is a summary of various stories, but most of them can be found in The Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives written by a thirteenth-century Dominican, Jacobus de Voragine, who later became the archbishop of Genoa. After the Bible, The Golden Legend is said to have been the most widely read text of the Middle Ages. On its basis, sermons were composed, plays written, altarpieces painted, stories told by the hearth fire. The Magdalene, according to some sources, became France’s most popular saint after the Virgin Mary.

This story made me a bit queasy:

The crucial development in Magdalene scholarship was the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. Biblical scholars had understood for a long time that the orthodox Church was just the segment of the Church that won out over competing Christian sects, notably the so-called Gnostics. But, apart from what could be gathered from the Church fathers’ denunciations of these supposed heretics, students of early Christianity knew little about them. Then, one day in December of 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman drove his camel to the foothills near the town of Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, to collect fertilizer for his fields, and as he dug he unearthed a clay jar about three feet high. Hoping that it might contain treasure, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found only a bunch of papyrus books, bound in leather. He took the books home and tossed them in a courtyard where he kept his animals. In the weeks that followed, his mother used some pages from the books to light her stove; other pages were bartered for cigarettes and fruit. But eventually, after a long journey through the hands of antiquities dealers, black marketers, smugglers, and scholars, Samman’s find was recognized as a priceless library of Gnostic writings—thirteen codices, containing fifty-two texts—recorded in Coptic (an early form of Egyptian) in the fourth century but translated from Greek originals dating from between the second and fourth centuries. In time, the books were confiscated by the Egyptian government and moved to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where they remain today. (They were published in 1972-77.) Actually, they were not the first Gnostic texts to be discovered. Others had come to light in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but most of them were not published until after the time of the Nag Hammadi discovery.

The Mary Magdalene of the Gnostic texts is far from a lowly prostitute; she's a fount of wisdom.

Shining Tree of Life

In Shining Tree of Life, Adam Gopnik explains why the Shakers made such fabulous furniture:

Most of the elements of Shakerism are common to orders and sects: the Dervishes whirled, Dominican monks renounced the flesh. What seems distinctive is, first, their feminism and its insistence on coed monasticism, which made much of the sexual while also denying it. Theirs was a genuinely radical feminism. Shaker communities, though not specifically matriarchal in rule—there were plenty of male elders, too — were among the few American communities of nearly perfect sexual equality. There is even a sense, perceptible in the letters and other writings, that this made a Shaker colony a welcome place for “effeminate” men — a surviving letter reveals a code of homoerotic innuendo that is as easy to decrypt as pig Latin.

The Lessons of Counterinsurgency

When the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province, but its recent tour in Tall Afar has been judged "a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done." Here are some of The Lessons of Counterinsurgency:

The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.

Understanding that the key to counterinsurgency is focusing on the people, not the enemy, he said he changed the standing orders of the regiment to state that in the future all soldiers would 'treat detainees professionally.' During the unit's previous tour, a detainee was beaten to death during questioning and a unit commander carried a baseball bat that he called his 'Iraqi beater.'

'Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy,' McMaster said he told every soldier in his command. He ordered his soldiers to stop using the term hajji as a slang term for all Iraqis, because he saw it as inaccurate and disrespectful. (It actually means someone who has made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.)

One out of every 10 soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges with Iraqis. McMaster, who holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina and is an expert on the Vietnam War, distributed a lengthy reading list to his officers that included studies of Arab and Iraqi history and most of the classic texts on counterinsurgency. He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who didn't seem to understand that such changes were necessary.

I recommend reading the whole article.

Integration and “Savage Liberalism”

Theodore Dalrymple discusses Integration and “Savage Liberalism”:

My mother arrived in Britain penniless, but fortunately for her—and for Britain—no one sought to persuade her that she need not learn English, and no one set up expensive and ineffective services for her in case she did not. She was not obliged to give up her tastes or conform in private respects, but she was expected (de facto) to blend into society as much as possible, rightly and reasonably, in my opinion. There was no ideology seeking to Balkanize the sensibilities of the population, enclose people in ghettoes and so forth, in the process acting as an employment opportunity for hordes of officials and bureaucrats.

Although it is not a complete answer, a flexible labor market is very important, because there is nothing like work to integrate people.

How to Get Condi to Power

In How to Get Condi to Power, Uriah Kriegel explains how "the notion of a Rice presidency is appealing to three different groups within the GOP":

First and foremost is the moderate wing of the party. Secretary Rice combines an unwavering hawkish foreign policy with socially moderate positions on abortion, race relations, etc. She is a deeply religious person who is nonetheless not, politically speaking, guided by religion. And as such, she appeals to Republicans worried about the rise of Evangelicals evident during the Bush presidency.

Obviously, Rice not only represents, but also embodies, the socially inclusive element in the Party of Lincoln.
[...]
This is also part of her appeal to a second Republican group — the libertarian/meritocratic wing headed by anti-regulation, small-government Republicans and associated Big Business interests. Despite the challenges presented by her racial and socioeconomic background, Rice ascended to her current stature on the merit of her intellectual and moral character.
[...]
This also ties to the third group Rice appeals to, the "Emerging Majority" Republicans and the pragmatically-oriented apparatchiks and wonks in conservative think-tanks throughout the country. This wing may value Rice's moderation (and competence) not only for its own sake, but also for its political potential.

There are obstacles though:

First of all, successful presidential candidates who have never been previously elected to office are extremely rare in American history, and tend to be retired generals (e.g. Eisenhower).

Second, Rice has been able to sustain her unblemished integrity precisely because she has never run for office. As long as she speaks in favor of freedom and democracy, she is bound to look dignified; once she speaks in favor of herself, sustaining the image of integrity would require some political skill we simply don't know whether she has.

Third, personal facts about Secretary Rice are likely to present a challenge to her candidacy. Rice is a strong and independent single woman in her fifties who has never been married.

Holy Flying Cow!

In Holy Flying Cow!, Nick Schulz interviews Randy Cerveny, author of Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, about man's effect on the weather, starting with the "heat island" effect:

Right, the urban heat island effect. Here in Phoenix, Arizona for example, the temperature that we have in the airport which is in the center of town, is generally about five to seven degrees warmer at night than it is out at the surrounding areas. And that's due to the fact that the concrete and the asphalt absorb all of this heat and then release it during the night, so that that central part of the city becomes much warmer. Now, that's solely due to us, I mean, that's not a natural type phenomenon.
[...]
That's at the local level. I also, as I started to say, had done some research with a colleague of mine where we demonstrated that people are apparently having an impact at a regional level. That off the coast of the United States, the Eastern seaboard of the United States, we demonstrated pretty conclusively, that it rains more on the weekends than it does on the week days. And this is due to human activity.

And the reason is because in nature there is no such thing as a seven day cycle. The seven day cycle is manmade. It's something that we created as part of our civilization.

So, if you find seven day cycles in nature, the likelihood is that it's something that we've done. Well, we've found seven day cycles in rainfall off the Eastern seaboard. We were able to link it back to pollution. That as pollution during the week builds up and reaches a maximum towards Friday and Saturday and then gets pushed off into the Atlantic Ocean, that pollution acts to produce more rainfall, so it's kind of odd, but at a regional scale, all along the Eastern seaboard we tend to find that just off shore, weekends are going to be rainier.

At the global level, things aren't so clear.

Inigo Montoya On Broadway

David Hornik says we may see Inigo Montoya On Broadway. From Guettel and Goldman to Team on Princess Bride Musical:

Composer Adam Guettel and screenwriter William Goldman will collaborate on a musical version or the hit fairy tale film 'The Princess Bride,' the New York Post reported.

Candy Makers Cater to the Health-Conscious

Candy Makers Cater to the Health-Conscious with flavanol-rich dark chocolate:

Mars Inc., maker of Milky Way, Snickers and M&M's candies, next month plans to launch nationwide a new line of products made with a dark chocolate the company claims has health benefits.

Called CocoaVia, the products are made with a kind of dark chocolate high in flavanols, an antioxidant found in cocoa beans that is thought to have a blood-thinning effect similar to aspirin and may even lower blood pressure. The snacks also are enriched with vitamins and injected with cholesterol-lowering plant sterols from soy.

Saint Valentine

According to The Golden Legend (Aurea Legenda), which records many fanciful stories of the lives of the saints, Saint Valentine was a martyr, executed by Emperor Claudius for denying the Roman gods.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there were at least three such Saint Valentines, all martyrs, all "mentioned in the early martyrologies under date of 14 February."

None of them had any particular relevance to lovers — except for that date:

The popular customs associated with Saint Valentine's Day undoubtedly had their origin in a conventional belief generally received in England and France during the Middle Ages, that on 14 February, i.e. half way through the second month of the year, the birds began to pair. [...] For this reason the day was looked upon as specially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers' tokens. Both the French and English literatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain allusions to the practice.

The Politics of Economic Nationalism

Arnold Kling decries The Politics of Economic Nationalism:

As Boudreaux points out, debts accumulated by our government are indeed collective debts. But if someone from the private sector borrows from overseas, that is his debt, not your debt or our debt. In and of itself, a trade deficit — or a Capital Account Surplus, as the Economic Report refers to it — would have no collective implications. With private transactions, those who borrow are in debt, and those who don't — aren't.

On "our" oil dependence:

The United States gets much of its oil from Canada and Mexico. Still, we are "dependent" on Middle Eastern oil, because oil is traded in a world market. Any time there is a shock to demand or supply, the price is affected.

"We" are not doing anything wrong by using oil instead of a more-expensive fuel. "We" are not funding terrorism. If you think that Saudi Arabia and Iran are doing bad things with the money they earn, then the place to go to get that fixed is the State Department or the Pentagon, not the Department of Energy. The Energy Department only affects our collective interests by increasing government indebtedness.

On "our" health care:

Nearly all discussions of health care policy are framed in the rhetoric of economic nationalism. We spend too much on health care. Our system emphasizes acute care rather than preventive care. We have too many uninsured.

When we hear this litany, we should ask skeptical questions. Who spends too much on health care? If I choose to spend a lot on my health care, how does that hurt anyone else? How is the "system" stopping me from getting preventive care? Isn't prevention my personal responsibility? Why don't the uninsured buy catastrophic health insurance? Is it because health insurers won't take them, or is it because the individuals don't really want health insurance unless someone else gives it to them?

Tucker took winding road to "Transamerica"

From Tucker took winding road to "Transamerica":

New York-based Tucker had always wanted to direct movies. After years of odd jobs as a starving photographer/painter and a stint in business with his financial whiz of a brother, he wrote 'Transamerica,' a story about Bree, a preop transsexual woman who finds out right before her scheduled surgery that she once sired a son. She rescues the troubled teenager from a lockup, and together they drive cross-country, where he eventually learns her secret and meets her family. 'Transamerica' is more of a healing family comedy than a threatening exploration of transgender issues. 'I know what it feels like to be an outsider,' Tucker says. 'I have felt misunderstood. Bree feels so unloved and born into the wrong body.'

At first the project met with nothing but slamming doors, but Tucker finally raised a little less than $1 million from family, friends and his credit cards. 'Once I took the risk of being in debt for the next 15 years, the gates opened in a nice way,' he says.

"Once I took the risk of being in debt for the next 15 years, the gates opened in a nice way." I'd love to see interviews with the dozen daring young filmmakers for whom the gates did not open in a nice way.

Who We Are & Why

Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, explains Who We Are & Why, in her new book, No Two Alike:

Basically, Mrs. Harris believes there are three 'perpetrators' at work in the formation of the human personality, each associated with an aspect of a modular brain. One is the 'relationship system,' designed to maintain favorable relationships in society.Another is the 'Socialization System,' where the goal is to be a member of a group. The third is the 'Status System,' where we compete with our peers for status.

The interplay among these systems accounts for the emergence of differences between individuals. So it is that even identical twins develop different personalities because the members of their community see them as unique individuals and treat them differently. Their individual striving for status propels them into different modes of competing, which in turn differentiates their personalities.

Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science

Peter Lawrence, a biologist and fellow of the Royal Society, accused Science of being "gutless" after it went back on its plan to publish his Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science:

Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were opened and all discrimination ended, the different sexes would be professionally indistinguishable. The dream is sustained by a cult of political correctness that ignores the facts of life—and thrives only because the human mind likes to bury experience as it builds beliefs. Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different. Yet even we scientists deny this, allowing us to identify the “best” candidates for jobs and promotions by subjecting men and women to the same tests. But since these tests favour predominantly male characteristics, such as self-confidence and aggression, we choose more men and we discourage women. Science would be better served if we gave more opportunity and power to the gentle, the reflective, and the creative individuals of both sexes. And if we did, more women would be selected, more would choose to stay in science, and more would get to the top.

Muhammad on museum walls

From Muhammad on museum walls:

While lethal riots persist in the Middle East and American cartoonists and editors wring their hands over what it means to publish pictures of Muhammad, the Western world's curators of Islamic art whisper and wonder.

As they understand it, the Koran does not forbid representations of Muhammad, though other revered texts have led millions of Muslims to scorn the idea. They know that many Islamic artists have taken on the subject. And they know that pictures of Muhammad — not caricatures, but respectful representations, executed by and for Muslims, sometimes with the prophet's face shrouded by a veil, sometimes not — can be found in museums throughout Europe and North America.

(Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.)

Toyota in Nascar

The last thing that GM or Ford needed to see — Toyota in Nascar:

As if the Big Three automakers didn't already have enough competition from Toyota, this Sunday will mark the last all-American Daytona 500.

Starting with the 2007 season Toyota will have cars in the nation's premier Nascar auto race, as the Japanese automaker tries to make further gains in U.S. auto sales. To date, only Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge have had cars in the race.

The Most Important Nielsen Rating

You can only eat so many Danish butter cookies in support of Denmark and its cartoonists. In The Most Important Nielsen Rating, Lee Harris recommends "a simple and less fattening way of standing firm with Denmark":

Buy one of the marvelous symphonies of the Danish composer, Carl Nielsen (1865-1931).

Are Russian male figure skaters as gay as American ones?

Steve Sailer publically asks questions many Americans privately ask in their own living rooms — like Are Russian male figure skaters as gay as American ones?

Wealthy African-Americans are using DNA kits to trace their roots

Gary Younge explains that Wealthy African-Americans are using DNA kits to trace their roots:

Oprah is a Zulu. Never mind that she was born and raised in Mississippi and her great grandparents hailed from no further away than Georgia and North Carolina, Ms Winfrey, the queen of the televised confessional, is not just suggesting her lineage might stretch back thousands of years to a specific African tribe. She is asserting it as a definitive fact. "I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African. I feel so at home here ... Do you know that I actually am one?" she told an audience of 3,200 in Johannesburg last year. "I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu."
[...]
Whatever Oprah's belief about her ancestry, her assertion that she is Zulu is no less misleading [than James Frey's fictionalized memoir].

According to most historical accounts, the Zulu nation was consolidated only after the departure of slaves from West Africa to the Americas. Moreover, there is little in the way of genetic lineage that comes close to matching a particular linguistic group such as the Zulu nation. When Oprah had her DNA tested for the programme, the results suggested her most likely match was from the Kpelles tribe of Liberia. Indeed she was told that she could not have come from South Africa. None of this is likely to stop her claiming the Zulus as her kith and kin. "I'm crazy about the South African accent," she said. "I wish I had been born here."

Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

Rufus, a tan-and-white bull terrier, was declared Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show — and was treated to a meal at Sardi's restaurant in New York.

The Not-So-Legendary Chimera

Jane is The Not-So-Legendary Chimera:

Imagine if you discovered one day that two of your three children were genetically not yours. Recriminations, marital troubles, perhaps a divorce, right? Now add a twist. What if you were these children’s mother? Suddenly the question becomes not “Who?” but rather “Huh?”

Yet that’s what happened to “Jane”. At the age of 52 when her children were full-grown, she and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers.

Jane, it turns out, is a human Chimera.

The Chimera is primarily known as a creature of Greek legend – a fire-breathing monster with parts of a goat and a lion with a serpent for a tail. In biology the term has come to refer to any organism that contains more than one set of genes. There are chimera African violets, where the core of the plant is genetically distinct from the outer layers. Animal chimeras, or mosaics, as they can also be called, don’t usually divide so neatly.

The most common form of human chimera is called a blood chimera. This happens when fraternal twins share some portion of the same placenta. Blood and blood-forming tissue is exchanged, and takes up residence in the bone marrow. Each twin is genetically separate except for their blood, which has two distinct sets of genes, and even two distinct blood types. Up to 8% of fraternal twins are blood chimeras, and as the incidence of fraternal twins in the general populace increases with the popularity of in vitro fertilization, the number of blood chimeras should rise proportionately.

What happened to Jane is a much rarer. Rather than a simple exchange of blood, she and her fraternal twin merged in utero, leaving only one fetus. The cells in her body are a mosaic of genes from both of the original embryos. The cheek cells from which the genetic testing was done were from one of those embryos, but at least some of the cells in her ovaries came from the other.

Mexico admits hostage rescue was staged for TV

This could hurt the credibility of the Mexican government — if it weren't the Mexican government. Mexico admits hostage rescue was staged for TV:

The Mexican government has admitted to staging a dramatic kidnap rescue for the benefit of a prime-time television audience.

The raid, televised on December 9, in which Mexico's equivalent of the FBI burst into a farmhouse at dawn, guns at the ready, to subjugate four alleged kidnappers and liberate three victims, had been presented by the government as proof that it was winning the battle against organised crime.

This week a presidential spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, accepted it was staged and called it a mistake.

Lights, water, freedom. Now that's entrepreneurial.

Lights, water, freedom. Now that's entrepreneurial.:

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world—and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

"Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water," says Kamen. "The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns."
[...]
During the test in Bangladesh, Kamen's Stirling machines created three entrepreneurs in each village: one to run the machine and sell the electricity, one to collect dung from local farmers and sell it to the first entrepreneur, and a third to lease out light bulbs (and presumably, in the future, other appliances) to the villagers.

Kamen thinks the same approach can work with his water-cleaning machine, which he calls the Slingshot. While the Slingshot wasn't part of Quadir's trial in Bangladesh, Kamen thinks it can be distributed the same way. "In the 21st century, water will be delivered by an entrepreneur," he predicts.

The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water — even raw sewage — and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.

Compared to building big power and water plants, Kamen's approach has the virtue of simplicity. He even created an instruction sheet to go with each Slingshot. It contains one step: Just add water, any water. Step two might be: add an entrepreneur.

"Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists," says Kamen. "You don't need any -ologists. You don't need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies."
[...]
Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

"Isn't that better for democracy?" Quadir asks. "We see a shortage of democracy in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of people, you will foster real democracy."

Lights, water, freedom. Now that's entrepreneurial.

Bedrock of a Faith Is Jolted

If you're not familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you may not know that the Book of Mormon describes modern Native Americans as descendents of a lost tribe of Jews. But the scientific evidence says that Indians aren't Jews. From Bedrock of a Faith Is Jolted:

From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago.

'We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people,' said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. 'It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God.'

A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East.

'I've gone through stages,' he said. 'Absolutely denial. Utter amazement and surprise. Anger and bitterness.'

For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.

Of course, this isn't the first scientific attack on Mormonism:

Critics of the Book of Mormon have long cited anachronisms in its narrative to argue that it is not the work of God. For instance, the Mormon scriptures contain references to a seven-day week, domesticated horses, cows and sheep, silk, chariots and steel. None had been introduced in the Americas at the time of Christ.

Sleeping on it best for complex decisions

From Sleeping on it best for complex decisions:

In one of the tests, half of the participants were asked to ponder on the information they were given and then decide which among similar products to buy. The other half were shown the information but then made to perform a series of puzzles including anagrams and simple arithmetic. At the end of the puzzle session, the participants were asked to make a snap decision about the products.

“We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions — ones that they remained happy with — if they consciously deliberated over the information,” says Dijksterhuis.

“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”

However, the unconscious mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one,” Dijksterhuis told New Scientist.

If they were told that none of what they had been shown was important before being given the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices.

“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says.

Misunderestimating Moktada al-Sadr

Lee Harris feels we may be Misunderestimating Moktada al-Sadr:

Sadr not only controls the largest bloc within the Shiite alliance; he is also the head of a paramilitary organization, the Mahdi army. In this respect, his position is identical to that of Hitler, before he came to power. Hitler, on the one hand, had the Nazi party, a tight-knit organization that was happy to use the parliamentary system in order to bring about the destruction of the Weimar Republic, and thus to end the parliamentary system itself. On the other hand, Hitler also commanded his own paramilitary organization, the famous "brown-shirts" of the SA, whose membership, at its height, may have included between three to four million young German toughs, whose usefulness to the success of the Nazi Party Hitler himself repeatedly stressed. They were invaluable in their ability to intimidate and threaten anyone who seriously opposed the Nazi party.
[...]
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, often said that Hitler's rise to power was like a fairy tale. Al-Sadr's rise to power, on the other hand, seems suspiciously like a fable from A Thousand and One Nights. What Hitler did was merely improbable; what al-Sadr has done verges on the seemingly impossible. After having twice led bloody uprisings that killed American troops, Sadr is now the most powerful man in an Iraqi government that the American people have created at great sacrifice to themselves, both in lives and in money. Even more bizarrely, Sadr has made it clear that he will use every bit of power he gets in order to fight against us, and to help spread fanatical anti-Americanism through the Muslim world. We could have stopped him early and effectively; but we didn't. And now it is too late for us to do anything except to wonder what new surprise this twisted tale of Scheherazade will next unfold.

US and Canadian skiers get smart armour

US and Canadian skiers get smart armour made from something called d3o:

The resulting material exhibits a material property called "strain rate sensitivity". Under normal conditions the molecules within the material are weakly bound and can move past each with ease, making the material flexible. But the shock of sudden deformation causes the chemical bonds to strengthen and the moving molecules to lock, turning the material into a more solid, protective shield.

The ultimate goal is flexible ballistic protection.

In John They Trust

Happy John Frum Day! From In John They Trust:

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men — clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms — appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded “drill sergeant,” the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

Chief Isaac Wan, a slight, bearded man in a blue suit and ceremonial sash, leads the uniformed men down to open ground in the middle of the village. Some 40 barefoot 'G.I.’s' suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo “rifles” on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters “USA,” painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

I've blogged on cargo cults before.

Cane toads in Australia develop longer legs

Cane toads, which were introduced to Australia 70 years ago to control insect pests in sugar can fields, have developed longer legs to enable them to invade more territory:

'We find that toads with longer legs can not only move faster and are the first to arrive in new areas, but also that those at the front have longer legs than toads in older populations,' Shine said in a report in the journal Nature.

The researchers studied toads leading the invasion about 60 km (37 miles) east of the northern city of Darwin. They discovered that the first toads to arrive in new areas had longer hind legs than those that came later.

The scientists believe the toads evolved longer legs to conquer new territory to get to better food supplies.

Near the city of Darwin? Hmm...

Early Calif. was Native American killing field

Much of what we "know" about Native Americans comes from after they were almost wiped out by European diseases. From Early Calif. was Native American killing field:

University of Utah anthropologist Jack Broughton concluded in a paper published this month that California wasn't always a lush Eden before settlers arrived in the 1700s to find an astonishing abundance of wildlife.

Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to localized extinction and wildlife returned to 'fabulous abundances' only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s.

By the mid-1800s, geese and ducks "were so abundant you could kill them with a club or stick."

Why Toyota Won

James P. Womack explains Why Toyota Won:

Toyota is leading the charge against Detroit — largely from inside the U.S. — with a fundamentally different approach to business that my MIT research team in the 1990s labeled 'lean' enterprise. Compared with these Toyota practices, GM and Ford's approach has five fatal weaknesses:

• GM and Ford can't design vehicles that Americans want to pay "Toyota money" for.
• GM and Ford are clueless as to how to work with their suppliers.
• GM and Ford have miasmic management cultures.
• GM and Ford cling to their wide range of brands.
• GM and Ford still treat customers as strangers engaged in one-time transactions.

Womack points out that he doesn't blame "creaky factories, vast pension obligations, and cranky unions."

In India, Women Work to Preserve The Craft of Lace

In India, Women Work to Preserve The Craft of Lace:

India's lacemaking tradition started as a way to help young women earn a living, when nuns from Europe began arriving in India as missionaries. Lace had long been a form of sustenance for women of the church and charity institutions: It was wholesome toil at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home. There were no costly materials involved — just thread, bobbins and needles. Moreover, making lace requires extremely hygienic conditions; dirt or dust is ruinous. So the occupation was thought to promote cleanliness, virtue and good health.

The nuns in India taught poor women — though only unmarried or widowed ones — to make lace and other fine embroideries that would be shipped overseas. Even as the popularity of lace declined throughout the 20th century, lacemaking continued to provide women with a livelihood in rural pockets of India.

This of course created an entrepreneurial opportunity: hire married women.

The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed

The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed opens with number 10:

The 'Real' Alien 3
1992, Directed by, oh, let's say Ridley Scott

A World of Warcraft World

A World of Warcraft World opens with these stats:

There are more people playing World of Warcraft in the U.S. today (two million) than had indoor plumbing 100 years ago. There are more people with blogs today (31 million) than had internet connections ten years ago.

If You Can't Have Bread, At Least Have a Circus

If You Can't Have Bread, At Least Have a Circus builds on this passage from Bush's recent State of the Union speech:

Raising up a democracy requires the rule of law, and protection of minorities, and strong, accountable institutions that last longer than a single vote.

Of course, his pro-democracy follow-up sounds a bit like one of those arguments for "real" Communism, unlike the kind practiced anywhere on earth:

But democracy didn't fail in Palestine. As with capitalism in Latin America, real democracy wasn't tried. Our models failed, our analyses failed, and our assistance programs failed. But democracy didn't fail.

His point:

If we measure success by equating democracy with voting, and prosperity with money, the logic of our actions compels us to arrange elections and to give poor people those things which mark a modern society; roads and bridges, schools and clinics. But a modern society is not simply the GDP — it is the institutions of capitalism and democracy. And only good laws can create these institutions. If we want to poor countries to modernize, we have to help them establish the underlying legal structures of modernity.

America's Long War

America's military is shifting from the Cold War to the Long War — which, until recently, was known as the War on Terror — and has identified four priority areas:

1. Defeating terrorist networks
2. Defending the homeland in depth
3. Shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads
4. Preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction

This shift requires quite a few changes:

Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3,700 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units — an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.

How to make Garfield funny....remove his thought balloons

William Goldman (The Princess Bride) once said that network television is much more interesting when you come in partway through a show. It's too on-the-nose otherwise.

Now someone called theblackw0lf offers this suggestion: How to make Garfield funny...remove his thought balloons. Check out the examples.

Armies of the Night

In Armies of the night, Wretchard of the Belmont Club reports "one of best items of news in a long time" — Batman has joined the fight against al-Qaeda:

Miller proudly announced the title of his next Batman book, which he will write, draw and ink. Holy Terror, Batman! is no joke. And Miller doesn't hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it "a piece of propaganda," where 'Batman kicks al Qaeda's ass."

The reason for this work, Miller said, was "an explosion from my gut reaction of what's happening now." He can't stand entertainers who lack the moxie of their '40s counterparts who stood up to Hitler. Holy Terror is "a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we're up against."

It's been a long time since heroes were used in comics as pure propaganda. As Miller reminded, "Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That's one of the things they're there for."

"These are our folk heroes," Miller said. "It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you've got Al Qaeda out there."

As Frank Miller points out, Captain America punched out Hitler — on the cover of his very first issue. In 1940.

(For the history-impaired, that's almost two years before we entered the war.)

Low Sierra

Low Sierra cites yet another example of good intentions going awry:

There are few things more distressing than aid intended to help the poorest actually causing them harm. For example, it is a sad irony that aid for HIV care is actually displacing far more valuable child immunization work in the wretched West African country of Sierra Leone. Rather than adding to capacity, the few competent staff are simply drawn away from these basic but vital services toward the high-profile, higher-paying HIV program. An integrated approach to aid giving must occur or more will die needlessly from good intentions.

Peekaboo, the Constitution Doesn't See You

I didn't realize that Sarbanes-Oxley spawned a new entity with a hokey name. From Peekaboo, the Constitution Doesn't See You:

The Free Enterprise Fund, an activist think tank, has filed a law suit claiming that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB, nicknamed "Peekaboo") created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is unconstitutional.

Jury Duty No More

Alex Knapp suggests a heretical idea in Jury Duty No More:

One reason the jury system can't simply be scrapped is the Bill of Rights, which provides the right to a jury trial in both criminal and civil cases. Nowhere in the Constitution, though, is it demanded that such juries be comprised of 12 random people who may have few critical thinking skills, no knowledge of the scientific method, and a skewed understanding of today's evidence gathering techniques. The Constitution merely demands that juries be impartial. So there is one possible reform of the jury system that should be able to pass constitutional muster.

Professionalize juries.

Consensus About Consensus

In A Consensus About Consensus, George H. Taylor, the State Climatologist for Oregon and past President of the American Association of State Climatologists, looks at scientific consensus:

That survey involved responses from 530 scientists worldwide. They were asked: 'To what extent do you agree or disagree that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes?' Only 9.4% strongly agreed, while 9.7% strongly disagreed. Another 19.3% were in general disagreement.

But even if there actually were a consensus on this issue, it may very well be wrong. I often think about the lives of three scientists who found themselves by themselves, on the 'wrong side of consensus.' There have been many in the history of science, but I singled out Alfred Wegener (Continental Drift), Gilbert Walker (El Niño), and J. Harlan Bretz (Missoula Floods). None is well-known now among members of the public, and all of them were ridiculed, rejected, and marginalized by the 'consensus' scientists — and each of the three was later proven to be correct, and the consensus wrong. As a well-known writer once said, 'if it's consensus, it isn't science — and if it's science, it isn't consensus.'

Elephant Trunk Heart

It's hard not to smile at this Elephant Trunk Heart: "Nam Choke, an 8-year-old bull elephant (L), and Boonrawd, a 7-year-old cow elephant, form a heart shape with their trunks while the sun sets in the background at an elephant camp in the former Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, 70 km (44 miles) north of Bangkok February 12, 2006."

Intelligent Tuberculosis

I haven't read Doonesbury in years, but this Intelligent Tuberculosis bit deserves some eyeballs.

Tour de Quoi?

Tour de Quoi?:

Earlier this week, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, the mayor of London unveiled the route for the 2007 Tour de France. That's no misprint. What the French call la Grande Boucle, the pride of Gaul, will spend its first three days in perfidious Albion, opening at Trafalgar Square. The prologue time trial, a day later, will send the caravan of gaudy advertising floats, mad photojournalists atop motor scooters, cars stuffed with VIPs, even a couple hundred bicycle racers wedged in between, past Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. And then the first stage of the race begins on the Mall and finishes up, 125 miles later, in Canterbury, before crossing back to the Continent.

London won the right to give the 103-year-old bicycle race a distinctly English flavor with a £1.5 billion bid to the organizers, setting off Tour de l'Angleterre fever, of a sort, and for good reason. A London-to-Paris race, from The Mall to the Champs-Elysées, will link the greatest of Europe's capitals for the first time. "When the Grand Départ gets here next summer, it will receive the biggest welcome from the fastest growing cycling city in Europe," Mayor Ken Livingstone said in unveiling the itinerary Thursday.

Woman Carrying Human Head Arrested in Florida

Wow. Woman Carrying Human Head Arrested in Florida:

Airport baggage screeners found a human head with teeth, hair and skin in the luggage of a woman who said she intended to ward off evil spirits with it, authorities said Friday.

Myrlene Severe, 30, a Haitian-born permanent U.S. resident, was charged Friday with smuggling a human head into the U.S. without proper documentation.

Note that the crime is smuggling a human head into the U.S. without proper documentation.

3 Arrests Cap Probe of Poached Mushrooms

As they say, real life is stranger than fiction. From 3 Arrests Cap Probe of Poached Mushrooms:

Last week, deputies arrested three men — all of Eastern European origin — who allegedly used global positioning satellite units to plot the location of chanterelle colonies, communicated by walkie-talkie and kept meticulous records of back-door sales at gourmet restaurants.

Whale Attack!

Stephen Bodio's Querencia shares this crazy Whale Attack story:

Last Wednesday evening at just before sunset, Gerald Gormley left Santa Barbara harbor in his new 27 ft Bayliner boat. It was a brand-new boat, only the second time he had taken it out, and two friends accompanied him for a planned sunset run. They were off Leadbetter Beach and Santa Barbara Point when a 30 ft long gray whale suddenly breached - came completely out of the water - and landed on top of the boat. The weight of the whale crushed the cabin (see photo above) and it rolled off the boat back into the water. Just to show this wasn't a clumsy whale accident, the beast came around and took another run at the Bayliner and slammed the boat with its tail. This damaged the boat's rail and injured Gormley's friend Robert Thornburgh. The whale's tail broke some of his ribs, cut his hand, and imbedded some barnacles in his back. Finally the whale made a third run at the boat, rolled one of its eyes out of the water and stared at the boaters.

''You can look into most animals' eyes and see nothing,'' Mr. Gormley said. ''But not this one.''

Greeks find largest Macedonian tomb of nobles

Greeks find largest Macedonian tomb of nobles:

The eight-chamber tomb rich in painted sculpture dates to the Hellenistic period between the 3rd and 2nd century BC and offers scholars a rare glimpse into the life of nobles around the time of Alexander's death.

'This is the largest, sculptured, multi-chambered tomb found in Greece, and is significant in that it is a new architectural style -- there are many chambers and a long entrance arcade,' the chief archaeologist at Pella, Maria Akamati, told Reuters.

Why the Net Is So Libertarian

Why the Net Is So Libertarian is an old essay, from 1995, when the Net was new — and full of computer scientists:

Let me tell a story that is typical of those I heard from the TAs who worked for me at the computing center. A student comes up to the TA and says that his program isn't working. The numbers it prints out are all wrong. The first number is twice what it should be, the second is four times what it should be,and the others are even more screwed up. The student says, 'Maybe I should divide this first number by 2 and the second by 4. That would help, right?' No, it wouldn't, the TA explains. The problem is not in the printing routine. The problem is with the calculating routine. Modifying the printing routine will produce a program with TWO problems rather than one. But the student doesn't understand this (I claim because he isn't reasoning about what state his program should be in as it executes various parts of the program). The student goes away to work on it. He comes back half an hour later and says he's closer, but the numbers are still wrong. The TA looks at it and seems puzzled by the fact that the first two numbers are right but the others don't match. 'Oh,' the student explains, 'I added those 2 lines of code you suggested to divide the first number by 2 and the second by 4.' The TA points out that he didn't suggest the lines of code, but the student just shrugs his shoulders and says, 'Whatever.' The TA endeavors to get the student to think about what change is necessary, but the student obviously doesn't get it. The TA has a long line of similarly confused students, so he suggests that the student go sit down and think through his calculating procedure and exactly what it's supposed to be doing. Half an hour later the student is back again. 'While I was looking over the calculating procedure, a friend of mine who is a CS major came by and said my loop was all screwed up. I fixed it the way he suggested, but the numbers are still wrong. The first number is half what it's supposed to be and the second is one-fourth what it's supposed to be, but the others are okay.' The TA considers for a moment whether he should bring up the student on an honor code charge for receiving inappropriate help, but decides that it isn't worth it (especially since that line of similarly confused students is now twice what it was an hour ago). He asks the student whether he still has those lines of code in the printing routine that divide by 2 and 4 before printing. 'Oh yeah,' the student exclaims, 'those lines you said I should put in. That must be the problem.' The TA once more politely points out that he didn't suggest the two lines of code, but the student again shrugs and says, 'Whatever. Thanks, dude!'

The student in my hypothetical story displays the classic mistake of treating symptoms rather than solving problems. The student knows the program doesn't work, so he tries to find a way to make it appear to work a little better. As in my example, without a proper model of computation, such fixes are likely to make the program worse rather than better. How can the student fix his program if he can't reason in his head about what it is supposed to do versus what it is actually doing? He can't. But for many people (I dare say for most people), they simply do not think of their program the way a programmer does. As a result, it is impossible for a programmer to explain to such a person how to find the problem in their code. I'm convinced after years of patiently trying to explain this to novices that most are just not used to thinking this way while a small group of other students seem to think this way automatically, without me having to explain it to them.

Let me try to start relating this to libertarian philosophy. Just as programmers have a model of computation, libertarians have what I call a model of interaction.

Yellow-Legged Frog Faces Extinction

There seem to be a lot of dying-frog stories in the news these days. From Yellow-Legged Frog Faces Extinction:

There are about 650 populations left in Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, but most lakes have only one to five frogs — not enough to guarantee survival — and 85 percent are infected with the lethal fungus.

The frogs were once so thick that tadpoles frothed in shallow waters, and it was hard not to step on a frog on shore.

Their decline began with the artificial stocking of trout in Sierra lakes — first carried in buckets by mule and then dropped by plane — for sport fishing. The voracious predator pushed the frogs into isolated lakes.

The remaining frogs can't withstand the fungus and can't travel far enough in trout-infested streams to repopulate depleted habitat.

The frog population has dropped by 10 percent a year for five years, Rachowicz said at a gathering last month of 24 experts trying to save the frog.

The chytrid fungus, linked to the extinction of amphibians from Australia to Costa Rica, grows on frog skin, making it hard to use their pores and regulate water intake. The frogs die of thirst in the water, Rachowicz said.

Egypt Offers First Peek at New Tomb

From Egypt Offers First Peek at New Tomb:

The painted 3,000-year-old face of a woman — her eyes lined in black kohl — stared from a funerary mask as authorities on Friday revealed to the world the first tomb discovered in eight decades in the Valley of the Kings.

The five mummies inside — possibly members of a pharaoh's court — were discovered by a team of American archaeologists working on the neighboring tomb of Amenmeses, a late 19th Dynasty pharaoh.

'It's a dream come true,' said Edwin Brock, co-director of the project, affiliated with the University of Memphis.

He and his colleagues have not yet entered the single-chamber tomb, believed to be about 3,000 years old and dating to the 18th Dynasty. But they have made a hole about a foot high in the door and peered through to see five wooden sarcophagi and about 20 alabaster jars.

'It was just so amazing to find an intact tomb here after all the work that's been done before. This was totally unexpected,' Brock said.

On Friday, Egypt's antiquities authority allowed journalists a first look into the tomb located across a pathway from Tutankhamun's — the last burial site discovered in the valley on Nov. 4, 1922, by the British archaeologist Howard Carter.

A Profile of the Author of 'Blink' and 'The Tipping Point'

The New York Times has published A Profile of the Author of 'Blink' and 'The Tipping Point', Malcolm Gladwell:

He's long cultivated the persona of the outsider. Gladwell, 42 though he looks younger, was born in England and grew up in rural Canada. His English father taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and his Jamaican mother is a psychotherapist. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and wanted to go into advertising, but said he couldn't find a job and became a journalist instead. After a stint at The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, he joined The Washington Post in 1987. He covered business and science, and spent three years as New York bureau chief before Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, hired him in 1996.

Gladwell, a self-described 'right-winger' as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was 'essentially a socialist country' so 'being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do,' he said. 'You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right.' Now, he plays the flip side: 'I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other,' he said. 'And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical.'

Shark Frenzy Closes Australian Beaches

From Shark Frenzy Closes Australian Beaches:

Several beaches in Queensland state were closed for the second straight day after more than 100 hammerhead, gray nurse and whaler sharks were spotted feeding close to shore, said Sue Neil, spokeswoman for Surf Lifesaving Queensland.

Neil said most swimmers were staying out of the water, but some surfers were putting themselves at risk by coming within yards of the feeding frenzy.
[...]
Last month, a 21-year-old Australian woman was fatally mauled by as many as three sharks in a regular shark-feeding area off North Stradbroke Island in Queensland.

Welcome to the Winter Olympics

No one ever accused Steve Sailer of being politically correct. Welcome to the Winter Olympics:

Yes, I know lots of you couldn't care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules.

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport's judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There's only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock. The more they make it more of a sport like gymnastics and less of an art form, the less feminine it will become and thus the less feminine its champions will be. The danger is not so much that skating will crown as winners more burly women like Tonya Harding, who are strong jumpers, but then so was Charles Barkley. No, the risk is that skating will be overrun by more pre-pubescent girls like Tara 'The Human Drill Bit' Lipinksi, the 15 year old who took the gold in 1998 with her high-RPM jumps.

The physical difference between a little girl and a woman is basically body fat. Women have higher body fat percentages than girls (more body fat is bad in just about any sport not involving massive heat loss like English Channel swimming or Iditarod dogsled mushing). And their weight is distributed farther from their vertical axis (i.e., they have T&A). Recall how skaters spin faster at the ends of their routines when they pull their arms in. It's basic physics. The same applies with T&A. A womanly beauty like Katarina Witt could never attain the RPM necessary to jump like the stick insect-like Lipinski.

Gymnastics has been overrun by pre-pubescents for years (e.g., 14 year old Nadia Comaneci in 1976). That's why they had to set a minimum age of 16 for Olympics 'women's' gymnastics. Unfortunately, that just means girls try to delay puberty with dieting, exercise, and drugs, with God-knows-what long term health effects.

Ultimately, womanly grace is awfully hard to quantify, but we sure know it when we see it. It would be sad to penalize that in the name of making skating judging more objective.

Iranian Nuke Would Be Suicide Bomb

In Iranian Nuke Would Be Suicide Bomb, Nobel Prize-winning economist and game-theorist Thomas Schelling shares his thoughts:

Hope for the future rests on the fact that, despite plenty of opportunities to use the bomb in these past few decades—whether the United States in Korea or Vietnam, or Israel when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez in 1973, or the Soviets in Afghanistan—it wasn’t used.

This reality ought to impress India or Pakistan or anyone else who acquires nuclear weapons. By looking at these foregone opportunities, they will realize for their own case that using the bomb would incur universal opprobrium, if not bring devastation down on their own house.

By calling this record to the attention of the Iranian leadership in particular, I hope it will see that any actual use of nuclear weapons other than holding them in reserve for deterrence would cause it to lose any friend it has and multiply their enemies.

Paleoanthropologist speaks at UO about ‘hobbit’ discovery

Peter Brown, who discovered the fossil "hobbits" in Indonesia, recently spoke at the University of Oregon. From Paleoanthropologist speaks at UO about ‘hobbit’ discovery:

Though the hobbit people were very small — the adult stood as tall as a 3-year-old human child and had a brain the size of a newborn human baby — they had incredible strength, Brown said.

“Chimpanzees have an arm strength four times that of a human; the hobbits were similarly as strong, we think,” Brown said. “You wouldn’t want to arm wrestle one, that’s for sure. It would probably snap your arm off.”

Heinrich Harrer: Out of Austria, into Tibet

Orville Schell tells NPR's Sheilah Kast about Heinrich Harrer's life, in Out of Austria, into Tibet:

Austrian mountaineering legend Heinrich Harrer is dead at 93. He was a pioneering climber, an Olympic skier, a tutor to the Dalai Lama... and a member of Hitler's SS. He was the subject of the film Seven Years in Tibet.

Sylvanus Griswold Morley

Sylvanus Griswold Morley lived the life of a pulp-fiction hero:

Sylvanus Griswold Morley (June 7, 1883–September 2, 1948) was an American archaeologist, epigrapher and Mayanist scholar who made significant contributions towards the study of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in the early 20th century. He is particularly noted for his extensive excavations of the Maya site of Chichen Itza, whose scholarly investigations he commenced. He also published several large compilations and treatises on Maya hieroglyphic writing, and wrote popular accounts on the Maya for a general audience.
[...]
Morley graduated from Harvard in 1908. The next six years he spent travelling through Central America and Mexico, engaged in fieldwork with the School of American Archaeology.

This period coincided with the First World War, and Morley's activities in the region now appear to have been largely a cover for the gathering of intelligence and reporting on the movements of German operatives in the region, which might have been of interest to the U.S. Government. According to recent investigations, Morley was one of several ONI operatives working in the region under the guise of conducting scholarly research. Their mission was to search out evidence for pro-German and anti-American agitation in the Mexico-Central American region, and to look for secret German submarine bases (which turned out to be non-existent). The cover of an archaeologist provided Morley with a ready excuse to be travelling the countryside armed with photographic equipment. Several times Morley needed to convince suspicious soldiers of his bona fides, and was almost unmasked on occasion.

Morley was to produce extensive analyses (he filed over 10,000 pages of reports) on many issues and observations of the region, including detailed coastline charting and identifying political and social attitudes that could be seen to be "threatening" to U.S. interests. Some of these reports bordered on economic spying, relaying the activities of the local competitors and opponents of large U.S. companies present in the region, such as the United Fruit Company and International Harvester.

As the output of his later work was to prove, Morley was also a genuine scholar and archaeologist with an abiding interest in the region.

Interactive elvish translator

The Interactive elvish translator is actually an interactive Tengwar script transliterator. Either way, it's extremely geeky.

Stop Worrying About the Trade Deficit

Donald Boudreaux says, Stop Worrying About the Trade Deficit:

America's trade deficit — in December reaching a near-record $64.7 billion — is unfortunate, right?

Wrong. Contrary to popular opinion, this so-called 'deficit' is a blessing.

Consider that if Americans export lumber, sheetrock, and architectural blueprints to China so that people build a factory there, we're gleeful. 'Wonderful!' we proclaim. 'Exports are up and our trade deficit is down!'

But if those very same building materials are assembled by Americans into a factory situated and operated in, say, Utah and then bought by Chinese investors, we complain — led today by the likes of Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham — that 'Something's wrong! Our trade deficit is higher!'

Truth is, though, that nothing economically important separates the first scenario from the second. In each case the world's stock of productive capital grows as Americans produce things for sale to foreigners. Those cases appear different from each other only because of the conventions of international commercial accounting, which records investments separately from imports and exports.

The New Iconoclasts

Lee Harris describes The New Iconoclasts:

The word iconoclast, when it is used nowadays, most often refers to a person who 'attacks established beliefs, ideals, customs, or institution,' as Webster's Third puts it — a definition that turns the iconoclast into a cultural rebel or a free thinker, an individual willing to buck the establishment.

By this standard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the controversial caricatures of Mohammed was an iconoclast in our modern sense, and was simply doing what many cartoonists have done before him, using his gifts to poke fun at sacred cows.
[...]
The fanatic is the man who will not allow you to poke fun at his particular sacred cow. He takes his creed so seriously that he refuses to permit anyone else to treat it as a subject for humor or levity.

The topic of fanaticism, however, takes us back to the original meaning of the word iconoclasm, a Greek word that literally means the shattering or destruction of an image, either a visual image, like the icons beloved by Greek Orthodoxy, or the kind of statues that were admired by Roman Catholics. Here the iconoclast is not creating an image designed to provoke irreverence, the way a cartoonist does, but he is intent on eliminating all offensive images completely and totally.

There were two great iconoclastic movements that shook the Byzantine Empire, first in the eighth century, and later in the ninth century, both of which exhibited the same fanatic zeal in destroying the thousands of icons that adorned Byzantine churches and monasteries. Why? Because the Byzantine iconoclasts argued that what were regarded by many as beautiful artistic treasures were in fact acts of sacrilege and blasphemy. They were not to be removed from the churches and monasteries, in order to be carefully preserved in a museum, as a government of zealous atheists might do — no, they were to be destroyed root and branch.

The new iconoclasts are winning:

It has been almost half a millennium since the last outbreak of iconoclastic fanaticism in the West. Yet if you try to discover a republication of the Danish cartoons on the reputable Internet sites, you will discover that they are not being posted. CNN on line noted that they would not be showing the cartoons "out of respect for Islam." Nor does CNN's stance seem to be exceptional. Meanwhile, profuse apologies are being offered to the Muslim world by men who had nothing whatsoever to do with either the creation or the publication of the cartoons, and who are denouncing the cartoons for being…cartoons.

In short, the new iconoclasts are winning — they are realizing that they have the power to make us suppress any image that they find disagreeable to their stern and mirthless fanaticism — even if it is just a funny cartoon in a paper published in a cold corner of Europe, far far from Mecca.

Either Muslims need to begin to get a sense of humor, or we need to became a great deal more serious.

Stuck on Galbraith

Arnold Kling argues that today's Left is Stuck on Galbraith — John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote The New Industrial State, which states:

With the rise of the modern corporation, the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists in the mature industrial enterprise.

Kling says:

If you value entrepreneurship, then it is difficult to be a statist. If you are a statist, then it is difficult to value entrepreneurship.

Did Anyone Actually Read Bush's Budget?

John Merline asks, Did Anyone Actually Read Bush's Budget? As it turns out:

• The Defense budget is going down, not up
• Ditto Homeland Security
• Education spending is through the roof
• Medicare "cuts" aren't cuts at all

As he points out:

Bush's 2007 budget is an extremely modest attempt to rein in what has been one of the most prolific spending sprees in modern American history. Under Bush, overall federal spending has climbed 20%. And that's after adjusting for inflation. (By comparison, spending climbed 12.7% in real terms during the Clinton years.)

Bush's 2007 is about $500 billion above where federal spending would be if he simply maintained the spending trend set by Bill Clinton.

It would be nice to blame the war on terror, or the growth in entitlement programs, for this climb. But spending on things other than Defense and Homeland Security, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and Medicare, actually rose at a faster rate — 23%.

The Flying Luxury Hotel

Igor Pasternak is in the early stages of developing a prototype of The Flying Luxury Hotel:

Even though the Aeroscraft dwarfs the largest commercial airliners, it requires less net space on the ground than any plane because it doesn't need a runway. The airship takes off and lands like a helicopter: straight up and down.

But it's not a blimp:

Unlike its dirigible ancestors, the Aeroscraft is not lighter than air. Its 14 million cubic feet of helium hoist only two thirds of the craft's weight. The rigid and surprisingly aerodynamic body—driven by huge rearward propellers—generates enough additional lift to keep the behemoth and its 400-ton payload aloft while cruising. During takeoff and landing, six turbofan jet engines push the ship up or ease its descent.

A Stroke of Shear Genius

Ryan Robbins calls the new Black & Decker Alligator Lopper A Stroke of Shear Genius and says that "backyard branches don’t stand a chance against this chainsaw-scissor mutant." I ask, how long until this ends up in a horror film?

Robots Go to War

Robots Go to War explains that "we could be at the dawn of a golden age of military UGVs":

According to the 2001 Defense Authorization Act, one third of all operational ground vehicles are supposed to be unmanned by 2015. Therefore, the Department of Defense's ambitious Future Combat Systems (FCS) program calls for the development of three semiautonomous UGVs that can perform certain tasks entirely on their own, and others—firing weapons is the biggie—only while being operated by a soldier. The runt of this FCS litter is the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle. Weighing less than 30 pounds, it will be carried in a backpack and used like a disposable scout. It's designed for high-risk missions in urban environments, such as searching through sewers and dealing with toxic chemicals. Bigger jobs are left to the Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment vehicle, which will travel with infantry units carrying supplies. The third FCS robot, the five-ton Armed Robotic Vehicle, will pack a machine gun, an automatic cannon and beyond-line-of-sight missiles—all remotely operated. In short, a bristling 'bot with a nasty bite.

But the three FCS vehicles are just the tip of the military's robotic iceberg. UGVs are uniquely suited to hauling giant loads of cargo in drone convoys. Ladar gives them a leg up on manned vehicles when operating at night and in rough terrain. Others are being designed to function as battlefield ambulances, to patrol supply depots, set up mobile communications links, and who knows, maybe even serve freshly frothed cappuccino with reveille.

Closing Bases Is Good

Closing Military Bases Is Good — even for the local community:

Closing military bases is turning into a financial bonanza for the military, as well as the areas where the bases are located. Many bases have, over the years, found themselves getting surrounded by growing suburbs, or even urban growth. Although it is widely known that the bases closed in the last 18 years have actually helped the local communities (on average), it's still a politically sensitive act. Some local politician will always raise a stink and the local congressman and senator will feel compelled to 'do something' in Washington to save the base. In the last decade, closed bases have usually attracted commercial firms, that move in and provide more, and higher paying, jobs. The former base property now pays local taxes, which reduces the tax load for everyone else in the area.

Survival of the unfittest

Survival of the unfittest opens with this funny-because-it's-true example:

Imagine a program used by 120 million people, of whom about 119m hate it. Sound unlikely? Yet that's the perception one garners in trying to discover whether Lotus Notes, IBM's 'groupware' application, is — as readers of Technology blog suggested — the 'world's worst application'.

LEGO Technic Difference Engine

Andy Carol set out to build a working LEGO Technic Difference Engine which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits. If only Charles Babbage had used LEGO Technic back in the 19th century...

City Bikes Crank Forward

From City Bikes Crank Forward:

A new comfort-oriented bicycle design is known as 'crank forward.' Several small geometric changes combine in a radically different bicycle from the standard diamond-frame comfort bike. As the name implies, the crankset is moved forward from its traditional position directly below the seat. The seat tube is laid back at a more relaxed angle, which lowers the rider's center of gravity and allows a more upright position to relieve pressure on the wrists and hands.
[...]
Electra's Forth further explained, "The upright seating position gives you a much better view, and being able to put your feet down while still seated is like having training wheels without having training wheels."

His Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty

Carl Zimmer's latest article describes Dr. Siddall's subjects as Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty:

'You can't set traps for leeches,' Dr. Siddall said. 'We are always the bait. You can turn over rocks. You can turn over branches. But ultimately the interesting stuff is going to come to you.'

Turning himself into bait is paying off. Dr. Siddall's research has shown that the ancestors of leeches were probably freshwater worms that fed harmlessly on the surface of fish or crustaceans, as the closest living relatives of leeches do. Not only do these worms have the most leechlike DNA of any animal, but they also grow the same sucker on the base of their tail that leeches use for crawling.

The leech evolutionary tree suggests that the earliest land vertebrates may have been the first hosts for leeches. Dr. Siddall has identified several major innovations that early leeches evolved as they became blood feeders. They acquired a proboscis they could push into their hosts to drink blood. Later, some leeches evolved a set of three jaws to rasp the skin.

Leeches also needed chemicals that could keep their host's blood thin so that it would not clot in their bodies.

Leeches have evolved many different molecules for that work that interfere with different stages in clotting, along with other molecules that prevent inflammation. Pharmaceutical companies have isolated some of these molecules and sell them as anticoagulants.

Blood is a good source of energy, but it does not make for a balanced diet. Mosquitoes and other blood feeders have evolved a symbiosis with bacteria that can manufacture the vitamins and amino acids necessary for life.

Leeches appear to have evolved their own partnerships, even producing special chambers in their throats where bacteria can live.

Making a Living in Second Life

Making a Living in Second Life describes how a number of gamer-entrepreneurs are running businesses within virtual worlds:

Jennifer Grinnell, Michigan furniture delivery dispatcher turned fashion designer in cyber space, never imagined that she could make a living in a video game.

Grinnell's shop, Mischief, is in Second Life, a virtual world whose users are responsible for creating all content. Grinnell's digital clothing and "skins" allow users to change the appearance of their avatars — their online representations — beyond their wildest Barbie dress-up dreams.

Within a month, Grinnell was making more in Second Life than in her real-world job as a dispatcher. And after three months she realized she could quit her day job altogether.

Real estate is hot:

One they've perfected their look, Second Life immigrants who want to build virtual homes often purchase or rent land from entrepreneurs like Tony De Louise, from Glen Falls, New York, who gave up the meatspace rat race to become an online landlord. "I've worked two to three jobs most of my life," said De Louise. Now, "instead of coming home at 10:30 at night, I'm home and can help my wife put our new baby to bed."

De Louise and business partner Alice McKeon own d'Alliez Island Rentals, and now lease land on a chain of in-world islands they own. They pay Linden Labs $1,250 for each island, plus a $195 monthly maintenance fee. Renters in turn pay from $15 to $75 for average-size land parcels.

Super Vision Sans Bionics

There's no working prototype yet, but Super Vision Sans Bionics certainly...caught my eye:

At the heart of PixelOptics' technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer — a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision — and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.

Traditional glasses correct lower-order aberrations like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisms. PixelOptics' lenses handle higher-order aberrations that are much more difficult to detect and correct.

Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light.

Software reads the scattered beam and creates a map of the patient's eye, including tiny abnormalities such as bumps, growths and valleys. The pixelated eyeglass lens is then tuned to refract light in a way that corrects for those high-level aberrations.

Music, Wine and Will

Music, Wine and Will shares the amusing findings from a study done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leiceste:

You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like 'It was the right price', or 'I liked the label'. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn't.

That's funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens.

Customers have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy, but they don't know that they have.

Light bulbs: Not such a bright idea

Matt Prescott argues that we should "just ban incandescent bulbs" as Not such a bright idea, but his readers look more deeply into the issue:

Focusing on light bulbs may help people see the light, but it doesn't address the upstream issues that trickle down to all our energy use decisions: the price we pay doesn't reflect the true cost of production and distribution. Tax electricity (which is easier than taxing bulbs) and you'll see usage go down. Use the proceeds to subsidise training or low-power capital expenditure — including for electricity companies — if you want to avoid annoying business.
Ant Evans, London

The sad truth of most environmentalists is that in promoting energy efficient technologies, they rarely present information on the manufacture of those technologies. How much energy is consumed in manufacturing a single CFL, compared to the standard incandescent? I notice that statistic is significantly absent here. Do the energy savings of the bulbs outweigh the energy use to manufacture and ship to end-user? If not you've just off-shored your energy consumption.
Josh Berkow, Buffalo USA

I find the fluorescent bulbs last no longer than incandescent ones, I guess the starter electronics fails. This makes them costly to me and a much greater pollution risk when disposed of. I heard circuit boards take thousands of years to decay in landfill. Regarding waste, the waste is heat, and as my house has heating that kicks in when the thermostat says it's cold, is there really waste, just because the bulb generates the heat rather than the electric heater?
Neil, Liverpool

Million-Dollar Murray

In Million-Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell explains "why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage":

Johns and O’Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. “Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that,” O’Bryan said. “I don’t know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, ‘Congratulations,’ and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so.”
[...]
In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren’t an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. “One morning, I’m listening to one of the talk shows, and they’re just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is,” O’Bryan said. “And I thought, Wow, I’ve never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies.” O’Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald’s fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren’t the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a “One down” call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.

O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. “We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often,” O’Bryan said. “We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—and that’s at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand.”

The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

“It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan said.

The key point:

Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

A Danish Island Touts Clean Energy, But Reality Sets In

A Danish Island Touts Clean Energy, But Reality Sets In describes some of the ideas suggested for making Samsoe a "green" island:

Using water-filled tanker trucks to capture heat from the diesel-powered ferries that serve the island. The hot water then would be pumped into a municipal heating system.
[...]
Another of Mr. Johnsen's ideas, dubbed the "String of Pearls," met with only partial success. The goal was to build straw and wood-fueled community furnaces that would pump heat into Samsoe's 18 villages through a network of underground pipes. The straw would be grown by local farmers, and the wood chips would come from trees bought from a privately owned forest on the island. The government offered cash incentives to help finance the new heating plants.

In 1998, Mr. Hermansen began holding town meetings to pitch the idea, emphasizing that straw and wood chips would be a cheap, ecofriendly alternative to the heating oil used on the island. He planted an ally in the audiences, local dairy farmer Erik Andersen, to raise his hand when Mr. Hermansen asked for a show of support. "People are afraid to be the first one to try something new. They need a leader," says Mr. Andersen, 60.

We have a word for "an ally in the audience": shill.

Employers Step Up Efforts to Lure Stay-at-Home Mothers Back to Work

From Employers Step Up Efforts to Lure Stay-at-Home Mothers Back to Work:

A need for skilled employees, particularly in accounting, consulting and finance, is leading big employers in these fields to get creative. Although their new programs are open to both women and men, they're drawing more females because skilled women are more likely to leave high-paying jobs in the first place, to raise children and for other reasons. In a study of 13,838 employees, Watson Wyatt, Arlington, Va., found women ages 25 to 40 making over $75,000 a year were nearly 20% more likely to leave their jobs than men. Female turnover was 11.4% a year, compared with 9.6% for men.

But research also shows these women seek to return to the work force fairly quickly, as long as they have a workable and appealing setup. A survey of 2,443 women and 653 men, co-authored by Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Work-Life Policy, found women who take career breaks are only out of the work force for 2.2 years, on average. And only 5% of mothers who return even want to go back to their former employers; instead, they seek flexibility at smaller firms or by starting their own businesses.

Big companies are trying to win these women back by addressing the barriers to re-entry — offering flexible schedules and helping women bring out-of-date skills up to snuff and revive their neglected professional networks. Such efforts are often referred to as 'on-ramping' because they create a path back into the workplace.

United Dragon Ad

I guess I wasn't paying attention when United Airline's Dragon ad played during the Super Bowl, but the Drawn blog pointed it out for me:

The piece is stop-motion animation using cut-out paper characters. The provided link also has a short making-of doc that details the process of creating the animation and all of the people involved. The making of special stars the ad’s director, Jamie Caliri, who also brought us the brilliant closing credit sequence from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Archaeologists Unearth Headless Sphinx

Hadrian didn't just have a big wall in England; he had a pleasant villa in Italy too. And now archeologists are digging it up. From Archaeologists Unearth Headless Sphinx:

Archaeologists who have been digging for more than a year at the villa of Roman Emperor Hadrian in Tivoli have unearthed a monumental staircase, a statue of an athlete and what appears to be a headless sphinx.

Diver survives three days in ocean

Amazing. Diver survives three days in ocean:

A former New Zealand navy diver left adrift at sea for three days survived by eating crayfish and sea slugs after he became separated from friends while diving near an island off the country's coast.

Robert Hewitt, 38, was suffering hypothermia and severe dehydration when he was found in mist and rain by former navy colleagues who joined police divers after an air search was called off, New Zealand Press Association reported.

'This defies survivability, it's bloody awesome,' said police search and rescue Senior Sergeant Bruce Johnson.

Hewitt was found wearing only the bottom of his wetsuit and a yellow catch bag containing the remains of the crayfish and sea slugs that he had eaten during the ordeal, NZPA reported.

Johnson said the diver may have been protected by the thickness of his navy-issue divesuit, and was alert and 'talked non stop' when rescued.

The alarm was raised Sunday when Hewitt, the older brother of a former All Black rugby player, failed to surface from a dive off Mana Island, north of Wellington on the country's North Island.

The American Social Model

Tim Worstall explains The American Social Model and how we aren't working longer hours:

For women, paid working hours have indeed been getting longer. For men, they have been falling (although largely static for the past decade). But unpaid working hours for both men and women have been falling fast, indeed, faster than women's paid have been rising. So total work has declined and leisure increased.
[...]
Precisely because women are earning — and then buying in those services which they used to do unpaid — we're seeing greater specialization of labor (or if you prefer, more trade). And as we know that's the route to greater productivity.

Reform of the Health Care System

Posner comments on Reform of the Health Care System:

The basic reason why so much money is spent on medical care in the United States is that people attach a very high value to their health. The frequent complaint that 15 percent of GDP is 'too much' to spend on health care is superficial. When 80 percent of the average family's budget was spent on food, no one thought that this signified a 'market failure' in the food industry.

Here's where he starts getting sarcastic — or iconoclastic:

The tax burden of government health programs is a matter of concern. There are several measures, though none at present is politically feasible, that would reduce that burden. One would be to eliminate all tax deductions for medical care. Another would be to reduce federal funding of medical R&D. This measure, combined with reducing patent protection for drugs and medical devices, would have the effect of slowing the rate of technological advance in the medical industry. Such slowing would reduce the amount of money that the government spends on Medicare and Medicaid because once an expensive new technology is developed, it is impossible for the government (or insurers for that matter) to refuse to make it available to charity patients.

College and Summer Camp

Arnold Kling compares College and Summer Camp:

The challenge is to reconcile two observations.

1. College graduates earn more than people who do not graduate from college.
2. Introspection suggests that what we learn in college is not very important on the job.

Then perhaps the relationship between earnings and a college education is one of correlation without causation. Perhaps people would prefer to spend age 18-21 on campus, at least if they have sufficient aptitude so that without too much effort they can avoid the unpleasantness of bad grades.

So college, like summer camp, is a consumption good. And you might observe just as high a correlation between earnings and summer camp attendance as between earnings and college attendance. But in neither case is there much causation.

What this might mean:

My problem with the signalling model of education is that it suggests that there is a huge unexploited profit opportunity for employers and employees who can come up with alternative signals. And yet nobody tries to set up a system for identifying and hiring smart high school graduates. I suspect that is because very few talented high school students are willing to miss out on the equivalent of a summer camp experience.

I think that the "summer camp" model explains why colleges have done more in recent years to improve their amenities than to improve education. It may explain grade inflation, since you want to keep the campers happy. It may explain why rural small colleges have fallen out of favor, while universities with top-ranked basketball teams have become more popular.

St. Augustine's Budget

St. Augustine's Budget:

In the old joke about St. Augustine's prayer, the sinner asks the Lord to make him chaste — 'just not yet.' This is more or less the way Republicans have come to think about federal spending during the Bush years: Please make them fiscally responsible — just not this year.

No Beheadings, Please, We’re British.

Theodore Dalrymple says, No Beheadings, Please, We’re British.

The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists.

Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad (only one of which was remotely funny).

In condemning the cartoons, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a man with all the qualities of Neville Chamberlain except his fundamental decency, attempted to curry favor with the Muslim world, or at least to avoid its wrath. Revealing the practical value of such appeasement is the way in which Muslims burned down the Danish consulates and embassies even after the Danes, with equal cowardice, had apologized. But at least the Danes have the excuse of being a very small nation indeed — although their country produces far more, oil excepted, than the whole Arab world put together.

DEVO Remakes DEVO

DEVO Remakes DEVO — and it's way scarier than their EZ-listening album:

As I watched the Disney Channel with my kids this weekend I was horrified by what I saw. Disney Records has released an album of re-recorded DEVO tunes sung by a pack of prepubescent Brittany Spears wannabes. The album is called DEVO 2.0 and, to my greater shock and dismay, the music for the album was recorded by none other than DEVO themselves.

Heavy metal umlaut

The Wikipedia has an number of amusing entries, including this one on the infamous heavy metal umlaut:

A heavy metal umlaut (aka röck döts) is an umlaut over a letter in the name of a heavy metal band. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that invokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to a desire for a "gothic horror" feel [1]. The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor is it intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.

Heavy metal umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the film This Is Spinal Tap (which is spelled with an umlaut over the "n" and a dotless i), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) opined, "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you." In 2002, Spin magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as "the diacritical mark of the beast".

The key factoid:

The first gratuitous use appears to have been by the Blue Öyster Cult in 1970.

Deadly fungus threatens beloved Panamanian frog

From Deadly fungus threatens beloved Panamanian frog:

'I would say that the golden frog was already in critical danger, however, the advance of the fungus outbreak makes matters worse to a point that this species is likely to become extinct,' said Roberto Ibanez, an amphibian expert at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The rare golden frog is a much-loved national emblem that graces Panama's lottery tickets and tourist brochures. Schoolchildren are taught the story of the frogs, which, according to pre-Columbian folklore, turn to gold upon death.

Panamanians believe that people who see the frog alive will be blessed with good luck.

The mysterious mold threatening the frog is spreading quickly in Panama, according to a report published by Southern Illinois University on Monday. It grows over the animals' skin, sealing it up and effectively choking them to death,

'Many frogs use their skin as we use our lungs. If it gets blocked up, they die,' said zoologist Karen Lips at Southern Illinois.

Is “Old Europe” Doomed?

Is “Old Europe” Doomed? Theodore Dalrymple doesn't quite think so:

The European Union serves several purposes, none of which have much to do with the real challenges facing the continent. The Union helps Germans to forget that they are Germans, and gives them another identity rather more pleasing in their own estimation; it allows the French to forget that they are now a medium sized nation, one among many, and gives them the illusion of power and importance; it acts as a giant pension fund for politicians who are no longer willing or able successfully to compete in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, and enables them to hang on to influence and power long after they have been rejected at the polls; and it acts as a potential fortress against the winds of competition that are now blowing from all over the world, and that are deeply unsettling to people who desire security above all else.

Jane Jacobs

Michael Blowhard provides "an EZ, if half-assed and scattershot, intro" to Jane Jacobs:

For those who would like to scratch a little deeper, let me suggest reading James Kunstler's interview with Jacobs, Blake Harris' interview with her, Bill Steigerwald's q&a with her, and Zompist's wiki essay about her economic views. Gert-Jan Hospers has written a good short biography of Jacobs. Here's a quick encounter with Jacobs' most recent thinking.

PDUFA

Alex Tabarrok calls the PDUFA [Prescription Drug User Fee Act] "a shining example of a Pareto optimal policy innovation":

First passed in 1992 the act was essentially a deal between the drug manufacturers and the FDA that said we, the manufacturers, are willing to pay an extra tax for submitting new drug applications to the FDA so long as the tax is earmarked for hiring more FDA staff to accelerate new drug review.

For the non-economists in the audience, here's the definition of Pareto efficiency:

Given a set of alternative allocations and a set of individuals, a movement from one alternative allocation to another that can make at least one individual better off, without making any other individual worse off is called a Pareto improvement or Pareto optimization. An allocation of resources is Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal when no further Pareto improvements can be made.

Facial Armor Rears Its Ugly Head

Facial Armor Rears Its Ugly Head:

No matter how many times soldiers and marines say they're not interested, there's always someone trying to wrap them up in heavier, hotter, more uncomfortable armor.

Reader AS points to the latest culprit: MTek Weapon Systems, which is pushing Stormtrooper-esque 'facial armor' for our troops.

The mask weighs 1.3 pounds, is compatible with ballistic eyewear, and will stop a bullet from a .44 magnum. So far, there seems to be one marine corporal using the thing in Iraq. We'll see if more emerge.

Nothing wins hearts and minds quite like stormtroopers in full armor.

Against brainstorming

Tyler Cowen cites an intriguing article against brainstorming:

Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. The false belief that people are more creative in groups has been dubbed by psychologists the ‘illusion of group of productivity”. But why does this illusion persist?

Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam argue it’s because when we’re in a group, other people are talking, the pressure isn’t always on us and so we’re less aware of all the times that we fail to think of a new idea. By contrast, when we’re working alone and we can’t think of anything, there’s no avoiding the fact that we’re failing...

The researchers said “We suggest that working in a group may lead to a sense of continuous activity. This may provide group members with the idea that they are productive, because they feel that the group as a whole is making progress, even if they themselves are not contributing”.

Other possible reasons for why people think they work better in groups include ‘memory confusion’, the idea that after working in groups people subsequently mistake other people’s ideas for the own, and ‘social comparison’, the idea that in groups people are able to see how difficult everyone else has found it to come up with ideas too.

Foregone Pareto improvements?

Tyler Cowen referred to this as a Foregone Pareto Improvement:

In Kenya, four million people are facing hunger due to severe drought. A New Zealand dog food manufacturer offered to donate 6,000 emergency packs of dog food mixture to help feed Kenyan orphans. A Kenyan government spokesman said: 'We appreciate the offer, but we dismiss it as culturally insulting.

The End of Originality

Edward Jay Epstein explains The End of Originality — Or, why Michael Bay's The Island failed at the box office:

In Hollywood, originality is anything but a virtue. Paramount rejected a recent project that had attached stars, an approved script, and a bankable director by telling the producer, 'It's a terrific idea; too bad it has not been made into a movie already or we could have done the remake.' This response, alas, is not untypical. Studios today, as a former executive explained, tend to greenlight four types of movies for wide openings: remakes (such as King Kong), sequels (such as Star Wars: Episode III), television spinoffs (such as Mission: Impossible), or video-game extensions (such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider).

Hollywood, of course, still turns out original movies, but the number is constantly shrinking. Studio executives don't lack imagination, nor do they find particular joy in mindlessly imitating bygone successes, but they must take into account the underlying reality of today's entertainment economy. Unlike in the old days when the studios could rely on a vast habitual herd of moviegoers to fill theaters, audiences must now be created from scratch for each and every film. For the studios, 'audience creation,' for which they spent on average over $30 million a film in America alone in 2005, has become just as important a creative product as the film itself.

The key to a movie's success is the level of awareness that exists for the project well in advance of the advertising blitz that takes place in the week or so preceding the actual release date.

Obakemono Project

The Obakemono Project is an encyclopedia of Japanese monsters:

In Japanese, O is a prefix denoting respect, and bakemono literally means a changed thing — something perverted and altered and moved beyond its natural state — a monster.

Tartakovsky Will Power Dark Crystal

A tiny gelfling has passed along word that Tartakovsky Will Power Dark Crystal:

The Jim Henson Co. has hired Genndy Tartakovsky to direct Power of the Dark Crystal. The fantasy film is a sequel to 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

The story is set hundreds of years after the first film and follows a mysterious girl made of fire who steals a shard of the crystal in hopes of reigniting the dying sun. Annette Duffy and David Odell wrote the script.

The Jim Henson Co.'s Lisa Henson and the Orphanage Animation Studios' Scott Stewart will produce. Brian Froud will design new characters for the film.

Tartakovsky told Variety that for Power the puppets will operate amid a CGI backdrop, rather than expensive sets.

A history of free speech

The Observer provides a history of free speech. This timeline entry stood out to me, because I was just speaking to a Nigerian colleague about the event in question:

2002 Nigerian journalist Isioma Daniel incenses Muslims by writing about the Prophet Mohammed and Miss World, provoking riots which leave more than 200 dead.

Why do we forget our childhood?

Why do we forget our childhood? Maybe we don't:

Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne of the University of Otago noticed that the period of amnesia tends to end at about the time of the onset of language, so they devised an experiment to test whether language ability might be at the root of the problem ('Breaking the Barrier? Children Fail to Translate Their Preverbal Memories Into Language,' Psychological Science, 2002).

They created a memorable event for toddlers of ages ranging from two to three: a magical shrinking machine. The experimenter taught the children how to use the large apparatus — a black box with impressive shiny cranks and handles — to “shrink” a set of toys. The toys were placed in a large hole in the top of the box, and after the appropriate sequence of crank-spinning and button-pushing, a smaller replica of the toy appeared in a separate part of the machine. At the same time, the toddlers were given a verbal ability test. And critically, their parents were asked which words from the magical shrinking machine demonstration their children could actually say.

Six months to a year later, the toddlers were revisited and asked about the experience. Most kids, regardless of their age, could say very little about the shrinking machine. However, when they were shown photos of the toys from the experiment along with decoys (for example, four teddy bears, only one of which was used in the game), they accurately identified the toys from the game most of the time. The identical language tests were given to the children at this point, and by this time the children knew nearly all of the words used in the original experiment. Yet none of the children interviewed used any of the words that they did not know at the time of the original demonstration to describe their memory of the event. Though they clearly could remember the experience, and even showed the experimenters how the machine worked, they didn’t use the proper words for the parts of the machine (”handle,” “knob”) if they hadn’t known them at the time of the original event. The memory existed, but the words were not associated with the memory.

Simcock and Hayne argue that these memories simply are not ever encoded in language, and for that reason, never become part of an adult’s autobiographical memory.

Swiss Fight Against Tax Cheats Aids Singapore's Banking Quest

Swiss Fight Against Tax Cheats Aids Singapore's Banking Quest:

For decades, the ultrarich looking for discreet banking services gravitated to Switzerland, where account secrecy was sacrosanct. But when Swiss authorities acceded to pressure from the European Union to discourage tax evasion, the door opened for a new challenger to woo the world's wealthy: Singapore.
[...]
In Singapore's asset-management business, which includes private-banking, total funds under management rose to more than $356 billion at the end of 2004, from $94 billion at the end of 1998, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the nation's financial regulator. Roman Scott, a director of Boston Consulting Group in Singapore, estimates private-banking assets account for about $125 billion of the total.

Zoroastrians Turn To Internet Dating To Rescue Religion

The headline tells most of the story, Zoroastrians Turn To Internet Dating To Rescue Religion, but here's a quick history of the Parsis:

The Zoroastrian faith centers on a supreme God who presides over seven creations: the sky, waters, earth, plants, cattle, man and fire. Among these creations, fire — a source of light and life's energy — occupies a central role in the religion. It burns inside Zoroastrian temples as a focal point of worship. Man's spiritual aim is to preserve these creations. (Thus in death, the Zoroastrian's body is placed in a 'Tower of Silence,' or stone amphitheater, and devoured by flesh-eating birds. The ritual seeks to avoid sullying sacred fire with cremation or the earth with burial).

How Zoroastrians dispose of their dead is outlined in religious texts and even mentioned about 2,500 years ago by the Greek historian Herodotus, according to the Zoroastrian scholar Mr. Mistree. Zoroastrians believe exposure to the sun and birds of prey — vultures mostly — cleanse the corpse in a naturally harmonious way, says the Oxford-educated Mr. Mistree, noting that several Indian cities with sizable Parsi populations continue the practice. In Mumbai, the 'Tower of Silence' has been equipped with solar panels to speed up desiccation and compensate for the city's vanishing vultures.

Parsis arrived in what is now western India in the 10th century after Islam drove them from Persia. Rather than trying to win converts in their new home, Parsis formed self-contained communities that effectively barred newcomers to the faith. Children of mixed marriages were admitted only if the father was a Parsi. Because Zoroastrianism doesn't seek converts, a small band of the faithful were able to live peacefully among Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

During the British rule of India, Parsis showed a knack for commerce. Today, they are well represented among the rich and famous. The Tata family, India's best known industrialist clan, is Parsi. Others include the conductor Zubin Mehta and Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of the rock band Queen.

Fashion Redesigner

Terry Agins calls Paul Charron a Fashion Redesigner:

As a former naval officer with a Harvard M.B.A. and experience as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, Paul R. Charron didn't fit the mold of the typical apparel-company executive when he took over as chairman and chief executive officer of Liz Claiborne Inc. in 1995.

That seems to have been an asset for Mr. Charron. With his background at P&G, he applied market research, brand management and formal management training — common at most big consumer-products companies — at Claiborne to great effect. In the process, the company has expanded from sales of $2.1 billion in 1995 to $3.6 billion last year, and its methods have helped to change the way the fashion industry operates.

Shouldn't this have happened decades ago?

How Pygmy Ota Benga Ended Up in the Bronx Zoo

Cynthia Crossen tells the sad story of How Pygmy Ota Benga Ended Up in the Bronx Zoo As Darwinism Dawned:

For a few yards of cloth and some salt, Samuel Verner, an American missionary and explorer, bought a young man named Ota Benga in the Belgian Congo in 1903. Ota Benga was a Pygmy who had been enslaved by another tribe. Mr. Verner was working under a contract to the St. Louis World's Fair. He was supposed to bring several Pygmies to America for a living display of the stages of evolution, and then return them to Africa.

Three years later, with the World's Fair over and Mr. Verner in financial straits, Ota Benga was placed in a new home: the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo.

R/C F-14

This R/C F-14 is quite impressive:

Built out of kevlar and carbon fiber, this miniature figher jet can reach speeds upwards of 280 M.P.H. The models use small jet turbines, functionally identical to those used in actual full-sized jets to achieve remarkable speeds and flying precision.

Watch the video.

Tastes Great, More Filling

Tastes Great, More Filling is a bit smug about the effects of the recent capital gains tax cut:

Well, what do you know. The latest statistics on capital gains tax collections were recently released by the Congressional Budget Office, and receipts are not down but way up. By 45% to be exact. As part of President Bush's 2003 investment tax cut package, the capital gains tax rate was reduced to 15% from 20%. Opponents predicted, as ever, that this would reduce tax revenue.

Not even close. Here's what actually happened. This 25% reduction in the tax penalty on stock and other asset sales triggered a doubling of capital gains realizations, to $539 billion in 2005 from $269 billion in 2002. One influence was the increase in stock values over that time, thanks in part to the higher after-tax return on capital induced by the tax cuts.

But another cause for the windfall was almost certainly the "unlocking" effect from investors selling their existing asset holdings in order to realize some of their profits and pay taxes at the lower rate. They could then turn around and buy new assets, hoping for higher rates of return. This "unlocking" promotes the efficiency of capital markets by redirecting investment into new and higher value-added companies.

Turkish movie depicts Americans as savages

This isn't exactly reassuring. From Turkish movie depicts Americans as savages:

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine-gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison — where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

'Valley of the Wolves Iraq' — set to open in Turkey on Friday — feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward their longtime NATO allies: Americans.

The movie, which reportedly cost about $10 million (euro 8.3 million), is a work of fiction and does not purport to level allegations against American troops. It is part of a genre of popular culture in Turkey that demonizes the United States.

I must admit that I wasn't expecting this:

The movie's American stars are Billy Zane, who plays a self-professed "peacekeeper sent by God," and Gary Busey as the Jewish-American doctor.

Pregnancy test may lie behind deadly frog fungus

As you may know, frogs are dying all over the earth, and the cause — or at least one cause — seems to be a fungus.

Where did this fungus come from? I couldn't make this up — Pregnancy test may lie behind deadly frog fungus:

"We think we have traced the origin of the spread of the amphibian chytrid fungus to the 'frog' pregnancy test for women, which was widely used from the 1930s to the 1960s," said Che Weldon, a zoologist at North-West University who has been researching the phenomenon.

That test involved taking the urine of a woman and injecting it into an African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant the hormones in her urine would stimulate ovulation in the frog and it would spawn within a matter of hours.

The species was exported to labs around the world in huge quantities from South Africa from the 1930s -- the decade in which Weldon has traced the first recorded case of the fungus by examining preserved frogs in museum collections.

Some of the exported frogs were released or escaped into the wild where it is believed they spread the fungus, which can move quickly through a water system and can jump from one frog species to another.

The first case of the fungus recorded outside South Africa was in 1961 in Quebec, Canada.

Adding weight to the case for an African origin is the fact that the fungus is widespread in southern Africa but frogs in the region appear to have developed a resistance to it.

Hundreds of seal pups drown in Canada storm surge

Hundreds of seal pups drown in Canada storm surge:

Around 1,500 seal pups were swept out to sea and drowned by a tidal surge off Canada's east coast this week after a lack of ice cover meant their mothers were forced to give birth on a small island, environment officials said on Friday.

Forer Effect

I didn't know the formal name for the "horoscope effect" — the Forer Effect:

In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave a personality test to his students, and then gave them a personality analysis, supposedly based on the test's results. He invited each of them to rate the analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) as it applied to themselves: the average was 4.26. He then revealed that each student had been given the same analysis:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Forer had assembled this text from horoscopes.

That's Good Enough for Me

It's not often that the Wall Street Journal invokes either death metal music or muppets, but Jim Fusilli's That's Good Enough for Me brings the two together:

While the extreme branch of heavy-metal music known as death metal is defined in part by often-vile lyrics about violence, catastrophic destruction, nihilism, anarchy and paranoia, its singing style is associated with a beloved goggle-eyed, fuzzy blue puppet.

Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the 'Sesame Street' puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other.

Controversial VW Ad

This Controversial VW Ad isn't real, but it is darkly — very darkly — amusing.

Questions for Daniel C. Dennett

Deborah Solomon poses some Questions for Daniel C. Dennett. Here are some of his answers:

• We have a built-in, very potent hair-trigger tendency to find agency in things that are not agents, like snow falling off the roof.
• When a person dies, we can't just turn that off. We go on thinking about that person as if that person were still alive. Our inability to turn off our people-seer and our people-hearer naturally turns into our hallucinations of ghosts, our sense that they are still with us.
• I certainly don't believe in the soul as an enduring entity. Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.
• Churches have given us great treasures. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

Why education is productive

Tyler Cowen explains why education is productive through "a parable of men and beasts":

We know the paradox. Education improves earnings but most formal schooling appears to be a waste of time. Many economists claim that education is mostly a means of signaling quality.

I view education as a self-commitment to being a more productive kind of person. Education is about self-acculturation.

Men are born beasts. But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

Steve Sailer's comment:

Obtaining an MBA degree signifies that you have made a 20-month sacrifice to join the officer class of the corporate world.

The Wisdom of Parasites

Wow. From The Wisdom of Parasites:

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it — in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex — like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon — which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Incidentally, "Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid."

Nuts with Nukes

Lee Harris explains the power of Nuts with Nukes:

There is an important law about power that is too often overlooked by rational and peace-loving people. Any form of power, from the most primitive to the most mind-boggling, is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable. A gun being waved back and forth by a maniac is far more disturbing to us than the gun in the holster of the policeman, though both weapons are equally capable of shooting us dead. And what is true of guns is far more true in the case of nukes.

That is why nuclear weapons in an Iran dominated by a figure like its current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make us more nervous than nuclear weapons in the hands of the Swiss.
[...]
In a world where everyone else is prepared to do anything to prevent a war, the man who makes other people believe he is willing to go to war automatically gains the advantage of being the party that must be appeased if war is to be avoided. In such a world, it is the erratic and the irrational whose power is amplified at the expense of the reasonable and the predictable.
[...]
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a populist demagogue of quite exceptional talent who has instinctively grasped the law of power that so many in the West have forgotten: Just as it is the squeaking wheel that gets the oil, it is the shrieking madman who gets his way.

Addicted to What?

In Addicted to What?, James K. Glassman says that "America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love," and explains that oil is a global commodity:

The truth is that the United States will never become energy independent. Even if we were, disruptions in the Middle East (or Venezuela or Nigeria) would still boost the price of oil — which is a global price since energy is a global commodity.

Also, it may surprise Americans to learn that, according to the most recent import statistics from the Department of Energy, the biggest petroleum exporter to the United States is Canada (at 70 million barrels in November 2005 vs. 41 million for Saudi Arabia, in a distant third place). Second is Mexico. Persian Gulf (including Saudi) oil amounted to about one-sixth of our imports and one-tenth of our total petroleum use last November.

Green Card Blues

Ilya Shapiro sings the Green Card Blues:

For example — despite having lived in the United States for over a decade (my entire adult life), worked for a senator, federal judge, and presidential campaign, and sworn four oaths to uphold the Constitution — I am no closer to permanent resident status (a 'green card'), let alone citizenship, than before I came.

At the opposite end of the immigration debate — centering on unskilled workers flooding across the Mexican border — America makes it difficult, if not impossible, for skillful, talented people to become Americans. It is perhaps self-serving of me to point this out, but I think this country would be better off if it were possible to get a green card by some method other than through family ties or a difficult-to-obtain employer sponsorship (on which more later). As it stands now, even those worthy skilled professionals who secure a quota-restricted temporary worker visa (H1-B) have to leave upon that visa's expiration, with no mechanism for applying for permanent residence — unlike in every other immigrant-accepting country in the world.

What Makes You an Expert?

Nick Shulz interviews Philip Tetlock, the Mitchell Professor of Leadership at the University of California, Berkley, and the author of Expert Political Judgment, How Good Is It? How Can We Know, in What Makes You an Expert?:

And one of the first things we discover is that there is a tendency for experts to claim to know more than they do about the future. So if you look at all those predictions that are assigned 90 percent confidence, you'll find out that events assigned 90 percent confidence don't happen 90 percent of the time. Depending on the sub-group of experts we're talking about, it can happen somewhere between 80 and 60 percent of the time.

Violent Rhetoric or Flush Toilets?

From Austin Bay's Violent Rhetoric or Flush Toilets?:

Afghanistan buckled and broke after the Soviet invasion and a decade of chaotic war. Taliban religious zealots offered an end to conflict and corruption. Of course, in short order, the entire Taliban government became a creature of violence, intimidation, graft and theft — in other words, heinously autocratic and corrupt.

That's the track even the zealots follow: Once they are the government wielding power, and if that power is unchecked, unchallenged and unpoliced, corruption inevitably follows. The revolutionary promises of sectarian or egalitarian utopia, recovered tribal glory or national resurrection then become propaganda tropes masking 'the gang in control.'

Democracy may not be a perfect defense against the Mafia — obviously, it is not. American mobsters exist. They intimidate judges in New Jersey, own aldermen in Chicago, and slide cash to congressmen via K Street. Democracies, however, tend to marginalize gangsters, in the same way they tend to marginalize political extremists. With checks and balances like the rule of law, the free press and electoral politics, Al Capones and Jack Abramoffs end up in jail. Even a president can lose his law license for 'misleading' a federal judge.

Democracy is no perfect defense against religious and ethnic terrorists, either. Hamas won an election, soundly drubbing secular Fatah.

Democracy is flawed — the other choices, however, are fatal.

Holding the Line on Defense Spending

According to Sam Walker, the Seahawks are Holding the Line on Defense Spending:

Based on an examination of league salary data that aren't released publicly, the Seahawks defense cost the team 30% less than the average for the National Football League. In fact, Seattle spent less than all but three of the league's 32 teams.

Both the Seahawks and Steeler spent money on linemen:

The Steelers and Seahawks both spent lavishly on offensive linemen: Their $30 million investment here was about 12% above the NFL average for that position (both teams finished in the top five in rushing and together allowed fewer than two sacks per game). The teams each spent about 10% more than the NFL average on tight ends, too, another strength on both rosters. On defense, both trailed the league by 26% to 42% on cornerbacks and safeties and, perhaps as a result, posted average or subpar numbers in interceptions and passing yards allowed.

The teams that ended up in the big game both picked up some undervalued players:

Like most NFL teams, the Steelers and Seahawks allocated about 40% of their payrolls to just 10 star players. But they also drew strength from the underpaid: According to an advanced "dividend" formula created by Protrade, an online fantasy-sports company, Pittsburgh's Willie Parker produced almost four times as much value as a typical NFL running back, while Seattle wide receiver Joe Jurevicius produced double the normal productivity. Each player took up less than 1% of his team's overall budget.

Two-Month-Old Net Giraffe

It's hard not to smile at a photo of Lenga, a Two-Month-Old Net Giraffe, or Giraffa camelopardalis reticulata:

Lenga, looks towards photographers at the zoo in Frankfurt, central Germany, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2006. Lengai is the youngest of Frankfurt's net giraffes that originally come from northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia.

(Is its name Lenga or Lengai?)

Will Inflation Spring Back to Life in 2006?

In Will Inflation Spring Back to Life in 2006?, David Wessel presents a "You know you're old when..." scenario:

When my daughter was taking a high-school history class a few years ago, she asked me: 'Dad, what's inflation?'

Kenya rapped for luxury vehicles

The reports that two leading Kenyan lobbying groups have criticized the government for its "extravagant" spending:

Kenya's government has spent more than $12m on new cars since 2002 — enough to send 25,000 children to school for eight years, their report said.