The Battle of the Borders

Arnold Kling believes that The Battle of the Borders is a distraction from more meaningful issues:

I believe that illegal immigrants bring relatively little economic benefit and cause relatively little economic harm. I believe that there are substitutes readily available for the work done by illegal immigrants. Legal residents could do some of the work. Other labor could be replaced by capital or by alternative production techniques. By the same token, because there are many substitutes available for unskilled labor, the salvation of American workers does not lie in immigration restrictions.

My prediction is that effective restrictions on illegal immigration would cause a shift in the location of unskilled labor, but not a meaningful long-term change in real wages. In the short run, wages for unskilled labor would rise in the United States. This would cause more manufacturing plants to relocate outside the United States, driving wages back down. Compared with the situation today, the net effect of immigration restrictions would be to shift some Mexican workers out of service work in America and into manufacturing work in Mexico. Within the United States, the reverse would happen: legal residents would lose manufacturing jobs more rapidly, and hang onto low-wage service jobs longer. I do not think that these economic effects are important.

WWE: Illegal Mexican Wrestlers Taking Smackdowns American Wrestlers Don't Want

WWE: Illegal Mexican Wrestlers Taking Smackdowns American Wrestlers Don't Want:

In response to criticism over World Wrestling Entertainment hiring policies, World Wrestling Entertainment Chairman Vince McMahon defended the league's reliance on Mexican wrestlers as "the only way fans can witness the grueling, bone-crunching maneuvers that American wrestlers want nothing to do with."

McMahon made the remarks after the Border Patrol, an unaffiliated Texas-based tag team known for wrestling masked Mexicans and then reporting them to Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, revealed that dozens of illegal Mexican wrestlers join the WWE each year.

The wrestlers, also known as "jobbers," come in search of greater title opportunities and more interesting storylines than those available in their small, unorganized Lucha Libre leagues.

"These masked luchadores are hard-working, energetic, and always willing to learn new skills that Americans consider beneath them—such as being power-bombed from the top turnbuckle or chokeslammed through the announcer's booth," said McMahon on this week's WWE Raw.

"The idea that these Mexicans are somehow stealing jobs from American wrestlers is ridiculous,"McMahon said.

"After all, someone's got to take these folding chairs to the face." McMahon then picked up a folding chair and whacked Rey Mysterio Jr. in the face.

It is not known exactly how many Mexican wrestlers are on the WWE payroll, since many lack Social Security numbers, or even clear and verifiable identities, as McMahon himself admitted Monday. "I know as much about these masked wrestlers as the fans do," McMahon said. "What's certain is, they often seem marvelous and mysterious, saintly, and even rude."

Lioness and Jindo Dog

Another cute At the Zoo photo:

Lioness 'Soonee' and South Korean traditional breed Jindo dog 'Tangchil' play together at a zoo in Chinhae, about 410 km (255 miles) southeast of Seoul March 20, 2006. The 10-year-old Soonee who was raised by zoo keepers and the 5-year-old male dog Tangchil have lived together in the same cage since 2002.

Smart Kids' Brains May Mature Later

Smart Kids' Brains May Mature Later:

The findings are especially strong for cortex development in the front part of the brain and in a strip over the top of the head, areas where complex mental tasks are done, Shaw said.

One analysis found the cortex in kids with the highest IQs — 121 to 149 — didn't reach maximum thickness until age 11. Children who were just slightly less bright reached that point at age 9, and those with average intelligence at around 6. In all cases, the cortex later thinned as the children matured.

Nobody knows what's happening within the cortex to make it get thicker or thinner, Shaw said, so it's impossible to say why those changes would be related to intelligence. Brain development is influenced by intellectual stimulation, so that probably plays a role, he said.

Indian Cattle Drug Is Killing Vultures

An Indian Cattle Drug Is Killing Vultures — by the millions:

Conservationists said Wednesday that they expect Indian authorities soon to ban a cattle drug blamed for killing more than 90 percent of the country's vultures.

Millions of long-billed, slender-billed and oriental white-backed vultures have died in South Asia after eating cattle carcasses tainted with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory and painkiller given to sick cows.

Vultures are vital to the ecosystem:

Vultures play a vital role in disposing of carcasses, keeping down populations of stray dogs and rats that also feed on dead cattle and can spread disease among humans.

Vultures are also crucial to Zoroastrianism:

Zoroastrians consider the earth and fire too sacred to use for either burial or cremation, and traditionally leave their dead atop towers, to be consumed by vultures.

Marines Decline Extra Armor

Marines Decline Extra Armor:

Extra body armor — the lack of which caused a political storm in the United States — has flooded in to Iraq, but many Marines here promptly stuck it in lockers or under bunks. Too heavy and cumbersome, many say.

Marines already carry loads as heavy as 70 pounds when they patrol the dangerous streets in towns and villages in restive Anbar province. The new armor plates, while only about five pounds per set, are not worth carrying for the additional safety they are said to provide, some say.

'We have to climb over walls and go through windows,' said Sgt. Justin Shank of Greencastle, Pa. 'I understand the more armor, the safer you are. But it makes you slower. People don't understand that this is combat and people are going to die.'

Don’t burn the food

Steven Levitt says, Don’t burn the food:

In a sample of 13 African countries between 1999 and 2004, 52% of women surveyed say they think that wife beating is justified if she neglects the children; around 45% think it’s justified if she goes out without telling the husband or argues with him; 36% if she refuses sex, and 30% if she burns the food.

And this is what the women think.

We live in a strange world.

(Source: Demographic and Health Surveys, publicly available at www.measuredhs.com. Thanks to Emily Oster for forwarding these statistics to me.)

Give Grumpy Gamers What They Want

Lore Sjöberg asks game developers to Give Grumpy Gamers What They Want:

Characters That Don't Look Dead
It used to be that you needed a game with Silent Hill or Resident Evil in the title to freak you the hell out. Nowadays, though, we're deep in the uncanny valley: Thanks to graphics powerful enough to render every pore and eye wrinkle (but not necessarily to animate faces realistically), every in-game bystander and security guard looks like a shambling nightmare creature clinging to life through dark magic and sheer force of will. I swear, if I have one more nightmare in which Tiger Woods and Lara Croft are looking to harvest my organs, I'm going back to the ColecoVision.

Genetically Altered Pork Chops

It's much harder to eat Genetically Altered Pork Chops when they're looking up at you like that:

US scientists said on March 26, 2006 that they had genetically engineered pigs that make beneficial fatty acids and may one day serve as a healthier source of pork chops or bacon.

Mmm...healthy bacon...

Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies

Simon Caulkin says that bosses are in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies:

Heroic leaders are a disaster. Seventy per cent of mergers fail. In most organisations, financial incentives cause more problems than they solve. There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is — the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid). The main result of many consultancy assignments is another consultancy assignment. All 'silver bullet' or 'big ideas' on their own are wrong.

These are not theories, but facts.

He's reviewing Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press), by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.

Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas

In Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas, William C. Taylor, co-founder and founding editor of Fast Company magazine, looks at idea markets:

At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description — called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus — and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.

Mr. Marino, 57, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market, which began in January 2005, has already paid big dividends. One of the earliest stocks (ticker symbol: VIEW) was a proposal to apply three-dimensional visualization technology, akin to video games, to help sailors and domestic-security personnel practice making decisions in emergency situations. Initially, Mr. Marino was unenthusiastic about the idea — "I'm not a joystick jockey" — but support among employees was overwhelming. Today, that product line, called Rite-View, accounts for 30 percent of total sales.

"Would this have happened if it were just up to the guys at the top?" Mr. Marino asked. "Absolutely not. But we could not ignore the fact that so many people were rallying around the idea. This system removes the terrible burden of us always having to be right."

Another virtue of the stock market, Mr. Lavoie added, is that it finds good ideas from unlikely sources. Among Rite-Solutions' core technologies are pattern-recognition algorithms used in military applications, as well as for electronic gambling systems at casinos, a big market for the company. A member of the administrative staff, with no technical expertise, thought that this technology might also be used in educational settings, to create an entertaining way for students to learn history or math.

She started a stock called Win/Play/Learn (symbol: WPL), which attracted a rush of investment from engineers eager to turn her idea into a product. Their enthusiasm led to meetings with Hasbro, up the road in Pawtucket, and Rite-Solutions won a contract to help it build its VuGo multimedia system, introduced last Christmas.

The Container That Changed the World

In The Container That Changed the World, Virginia Postrel explains that the shipping container's story "is a classic tale of trial and error, and of creative destruction":

Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.

"Low transport costs help make it economically sensible for a factory in China to produce Barbie dolls with Japanese hair, Taiwanese plastics and American colorants, and ship them off to eager girls all over the world," writes Marc Levinson in the new book "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" (Princeton University Press).

For consumers, this results in lower prices and more variety. "People now just take it for granted that they have access to an enormous selection of goods from all over the world," Mr. Levinson said in an interview. That selection, he said, "was made possible by this technological change."

When the first container ship set sail 50 years ago, businesses and regulators treated distribution not as a single process but as a series of distinct modes: ships, trucks and trains. Every time the transportation mode changed, somebody had to transfer physically every box or barrel.

"By far the biggest expense in this process was shifting the cargo from land transport to ship at the port of departure and moving it back to truck or train at the other end of the ocean voyage," writes Mr. Levinson, a Wall Street economist and former economic journalist. This "breaking bulk" could easily consume half of the total cost of shipping.

Goods often had to wait in warehouses for the next stage. Those transfers and delays made shipping slow and schedules uncertain. They also created opportunities for damage, mistakes and more than a little theft. (Whiskey was one of the first products shipped by container because it was so subject to pilferage.) Different companies in different industries facing different price regulations for different goods handled each step.

Today, by contrast, "you can call one of the big international ship lines, tell them to pick up your container in Bangkok, which is not a port, and tell them to deliver it in Dallas, which is not a port, and they will make the arrangements to get it to a port and get it on a ship and get it off at another port and get it onto a train or truck and get it where it needs to be," Mr. Levinson said.

On her own site, Postrel adds a key point:

At first, containerization grew through cracks in the rigid regulatory structure of the 1960s. But today's fully integrated systems became possible only after trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated (to very little fanfare) in 1984. Assumptions about transportation regulation have changed so radically that reading about the bad old days seems like science fiction.

As Levinson said in our interview, "Nobody even remembers what the Interstate Commerce Commission used to do. But you’ve probably been in the old ICC building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. It had a choice spot in Washington. Important agency, important location, big building. This was a key federal agency. And it spent its time hearing arguments about whether this truck line ought to be able to carry cigarettes in the same trucks as it carried textiles or whether the rates that were being charged to carry pretzels were adequate. People have trouble remembering that today."

Incidentally, this was Postrel's last "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times — but there's good news: she's "writing a column on commerce and culture for The Atlantic," and Tyler Cowen is taking over her Times slot. Excellent.

Your Space Is Waiting: Reserving a Parking Spot

Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, gets mentioned in Your Space Is Waiting: Reserving a Parking Spot:

Taking a cue from Web-based reservation systems used by restaurants, airlines and movie theaters, more companies and cities are offering services that let people reserve parking spaces online or by cellphone.

The services come as traffic is growing worse around the country and are meant to help ease the traffic tie-ups caused by drivers cruising for a parking spot on the street, where charges tend to be lower than garage rates. In downtown areas, based on studies from cities around the world, about 30% of traffic results from drivers searching for curbside parking spots, says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Besides using availability information or reservations to attract drivers to garages or lots, other efforts to reduce such tie-ups include raising the price of curbside parking or charging different rates during various times of the day.

I've blogged on Shoup's work before — and on Dan Klein's review of Shoup's work too.

Liberté, Precarité: Labor Law Ignites Anxiety in France

From Liberté, Precarité: Labor Law Ignites Anxiety in France:

France's most famous period of violent protests in 1968 saw students rioting against what they saw as a rigid and smothering state. Today, it seems, they want the state back. Serge July, director of France's main left-of-center newspaper, Liberation, and a '68 veteran, says his country is gripped by 'anguish about the future.' It is also suffering from, he says, a 'crisis of identity.'

According to a recent poll, France is the only country among 20 surveyed where those who don't have faith in the free market outnumber those who do. Only 36% of those polled in France agreed with the proposition that the free market is the 'best system on which to base the future of the world' — compared with 71% in the U.S., 66% in Britain and 65% in Germany. In nominally communist China, 74% said they favored the free market, according to the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes.

Police put the number of protesters yesterday across France at 1.05 million, more than twice as many as the previous biggest protest on March 16. Trade unions, which organized the rallies, put the figure at three million. A one-day strike to coincide with the protest disrupted hospitals, schools, rail services and air traffic, halted delivery of newspapers, dented production at France's biggest oil refinery and shut down the Eiffel Tower.

Blue Poison Frog

The Blue Poison Frog certainly is a striking animal:

A blue poison frog (Dendrobates azureus) sits on a leaf in the zoo of Zurich, March 22, 2006. The blue colour of this South-American frog serves as a warning to would-be predators, its skin is covered with glands that secrete alkaloid poisons capable of paralyzing and even killing predators. With the destruction of its rainforest habitat the blue poison frog has become one of the most threatened of all poison dart frogs.

Bureaucracy Buster? Glaxo Lets Scientists Choose Its New Drugs

GlaxoSmithKline has made the wild and crazy decision to let its scientists decide which drugs are most promising and thus deserving of funding. From Bureaucracy Buster? Glaxo Lets Scientists Choose Its New Drugs:

Glaxo, the world's second-largest drug company after Pfizer, based on sales, was created from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2000. Chief Executive Jean-Pierre Garnier acknowledges that both companies were stumbling in their core business of developing drugs at the time of the merger. And while the merger created a formidable sales and marketing operation, it threatened to burden research with even more bureaucracy at a time when shareholders were pressing for new drugs to replace those losing patent protection.

Of particular concern was the middle stage of drug development. About 80% of potential drugs fail when scientists try to fine-tune rough chemical compounds and turn them into promising medicines ready for large-scale human tests. It's at this stage that researchers make some of the toughest calls, deciding which products to advance and testing them on animals and small groups of humans for toxicity and early signs of efficacy.

Glaxo used to handle the middle stage like a conveyor belt: Scientists would conduct their specific experiments and then pass the compound on to other scientists for the next step. If any individual step hit a snag, a drug's development could languish.

Mr. Garnier and Tachi Yamada, Glaxo's head of research and development, decided to try a different approach to the problem: giving scientists a vested interest in a single drug's success. To do this, they split middle-stage researchers into seven separate pods of up to 400 people, each concentrating on a specific disease grouping, such as cancer, psychiatry and respiratory and inflammatory diseases.

Today, seven Centers of Excellence for Drug Discovery manage the progression of drugs in the middle of the pipeline. Each group controls its own budget and decides which projects to pursue. Glaxo gives each center funding based on the number of good compounds in its labs, which means the more productive ones get more money. The scientists benefit, too, receiving bonuses if they contribute to the discovery of promising new drugs.

Because it can take up to 10 years to develop a drug, the full impact of Glaxo's experiment is still unknown. But the number of drugs entering intermediate human trials has tripled over the premerger level, Glaxo says. And the company is expanding into new therapeutic areas where it was once weak, including cancer and cardiology.

Famed Ancient Tortoise Dies in India Zoo

Famed Ancient Tortoise Dies in India Zoo:

Addwaita, believed to be the world's oldest surviving tortoise, aged about 250 years, died in the zoo of liver failure, media reports said Friday, March 26, 2006. He was placed for public show at the zoo since its establishment in 1875, believed brought from Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, by the then British rulers of India.

What Nobodies Know

Peggy Noonan explains that elites should listen to What Nobodies Know. The leaders partitioning India didn't:

On Aug. 15, 1947, independence day, in the Punjab, in the city of Amritsar, as local authorities performed the jolly rituals of the transfer of power, a group of local Sikhs went on a rampage in a Muslim neighborhood, killing its male inhabitants. That night, Amritsar's railroad station became a refugee camp for thousands of Hindus who'd fled what was now Pakistan's part of the Punjab. As trains arrived, huge crowds scanned the cars for relatives and friends, for children left behind in the flight. Suddenly a train came in but there seemed no one aboard, which was odd. The stationmaster, Chani Singh, waved the train to a halt. The teeming crowd on the platform froze into "an eerie silence."

From Freedom at Midnight:

Singh stared down the line of eight carriages. All the windows of the compartments were wide open but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. . . . [He] strode to the first carriage, snatched open the door and stepped inside. In one horrible instant he understood why no one was getting off the Ten Down Express in Amritsar that night. It was a trainful of corpses. The floor of the compartment before him was a tangled jumble of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bowels eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.

Her conclusion:

The leaders of the day did not know that terrible violence was coming because of what I think is a classic and structural problem of leadership: It distances. Each of these men was to varying degrees detached from facts on the ground. They were by virtue of their position and accomplishments an elite. They no longer knew what was beating within the hearts of those who lived quite literally on the ground. Nehru, Mountbatten, Jinnah — they well knew that Muslims feared living under the rule of the Hindus, that Hindus feared living under Muslims, that Sikhs feared both. But the leaders did not know the fear that was felt was so deep, so constitutional, so passionate. They did not know it would find its expression in a savagery so wild and widespread.

Classy Economist

Classy Economist looks at "black conservative" economist Thomas Sowell and his views on race:

"The left likes to portray a group as sort of a creature of surrounding society. But that's not true. For example, back during the immigrant era, you had neighborhoods on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan] where Jews and Italians arrived at virtually identical times. Lived in the same neighborhoods. Kids sat side by side in the same schools. But totally different outcomes. Now, if you look back at the history of the Jews and the history of the Italians you can see why that would be. In the early 19th century, Russian officials report that even the poorest Jews find some way to get some books in their home, even though they're living in a society where over 90% of the people are illiterate.

"Conversely, in southern Italy, which is where most Italian-Americans originated, when they put in compulsory school-attendance laws, there were riots. There were schoolhouses burning down. So now you take these two kids and sit them side by side in a school. If you believe that environment means the immediate surroundings, they're in the same environment. But if you believe environment includes this cultural pattern that goes back centuries before they were born, then no, they're not in the same environment. They don't come into that school building with the same mindset. And they don't get the same results."

On classical economics:

Free-market economics, a legacy of the classical school, is thought of as an old conservative doctrine. But Mr. Sowell explains that it was in fact one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge in the history of ideas. Moreover, "the thinking of the classical economist was not only a radical break from landmark intellectual figures like Plato and Machiavelli but also from mainstream thinking to this day." The notion of a self-equilibrating system — the market economy — meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, he says. "And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging."

Fighting Words

In Fighting Words, Victor Davis Hanson lists "the definitive books on the battles of the 20th century":

1. The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne (St. Martin's, 1963)
2. With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge (Presidio, 1981)
3. The Face of Battle by John Keegan (Viking, 1976)
4. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 1998)
5. The Fall of Fortresses by Elmer Bendiner (Putnam, 1980)

Orphaned baby tigers stumble out of Siberian forest

Orphaned baby tigers stumble out of Siberian forest:

Two wild baby tigers, orphaned and famished, scrambled out of a Siberian forest in eastern Russia and into the hands of startled loggers, the Russian ministry of natural resources said.

The two female tigers — one seriously wounded — offered practically no resistance as the loggers took them into captivity about 50 kilometers from the fishing village of Ternei, north of Vladivostok.

Officials called in from the Amur nature reserve for the protection of tigers examined the exhausted cubs, one of which succumbed to its injuries soon thereafter.

"The state of the wounded tiger got worse and it was decided to send both animals to a veterinarian clinic in the village of Razdolny near Vladivostok," explained Vitali Starostine, a special "tiger" inspection officer in the reserve.

"But the trip of nearly 700 kilometers proved too taxing for the little animal, and she died," he said.

"The second tiger is in good health and she withstood the trip well. She is exhausted and will need medical care for about a month," Starostine said.

A search for the mother of the cubs proved fruitless, and officials suspected that she had been fatally wounded or killed.

There remain only 500 tigers in the wilds of the Amur region in Russia's far east. About a dozen of them fall victim to poachers every year, according the World Wildlife Fund.

(Note: The tiger cub pictured is from the Berlin Zoo.)

Ingrates to Their Very Souls

James Taranto calls the rescued Christian Peacemaker Teams Ingrates to Their Very Souls:

There is a whole strange worldview at work here — a theology, if you will. We don't claim to understand it fully, but it seems to equate America as the root of all evil and America's adversaries as Edenic creatures — innocents who know not good or evil and thus bear no culpability for their bad actions.

If we have this right, it follows that the CPT Christians see themselves, by virtue of their faith, as being forgiven for being American, or for being from another nation that America has corrupted. This is why they cannot be grateful to, or forgiving of, America: For them that would amount to thanking or forgiving sin itself.

Baby Pygmy Hippo

Even ugly animals have cute babies:

A three-month-old baby pygmy hippopotamus swims by his grazing mother at Henry Doorly Zoo Friday, March 24, 2006, in Omaha, Neb. Zoo visitors will be able to view the baby hippo for the first time on Friday.

V is for Read the Book Instead

I still haven't seen V for Vendetta. Iain Murray says, V is for Read the Book Instead.

Literary Self-Help

Cynthia Crossen finds Literary Self-Help in Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life:

Obviously, I am in a tiny minority of Americans who find more relief from life's travails in Gustav Flaubert, Edith Wharton and George Orwell than Wayne Dyer, Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. But I couldn't have explained my habit of turning to old-fashioned, long-dead novelists for comfort and counsel until I read Mr. de Botton's 1997 encomium to Marcel Proust written in the form of a self-help manual. It turns out that In Search of Lost Time (Or Remembrance of Things Past, as the title is often translated), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, addresses such eternal — if self-centered — lamentations as, "Why do I suffer?" and "How should I express my emotions?" and "Why can't I be happy in love?"

I knew nothing of Proust's personal life before reading How Proust Can Change Your Life. In many ways, the man was a mess. When he wasn't physically ill — and he usually was — Proust was a snobbish insomniac and hypochondriac who couldn't abide fresh air or sunlight. His love for men was mostly unrequited. His relationship with his mother was infantile well into his adulthood. "While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life," Mr. de Botton comments, "the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust's."

Yet with his almost supernatural sensitivity to human relationships (as well as ordinary objects like biscuits called madeleines), Proust explained in poetic detail how and why people behave as they do, and, Mr. de Botton demonstrates, how they might feel and behave better. "Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, In Search of Lost Time is a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life."

Unfortunately for the typically overscheduled citizen of the modern world, Proust needed 3,000 pages to do the job that ordinary self-help writers do in a few hundred. Proust's own brother Robert bemoaned the "sad thing" that "people have to be very ill or have broken a leg" to read In Search of Lost Time." An esteemed Parisian publisher confessed to a friend, "I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep." Proust ended up using his own money to publish the books.

For those of us without lingering illnesses or brittle bones, Mr. de Botton, with humor and cunning, distills Proust's insights into 197 pages without reducing them to so many fortune cookies.

Island Wisdom, Coded in Java

Island Wisdom, Coded in Java explains how Charles Armstrong, fed up with cubicle hell, developed a new communication tool based on what he learned on a tiny island:

So in 1999 he set out to conduct an ethnographic study of how people naturally communicate and organize when shorn of externalities like e-mail and PowerPoint. His quest took him to the tiny island of St. Agnes, the smallest of the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles off the coast of Britain. He lived there for a year, studying how the 80-or-so island villagers interacted and functioned.

Not surprisingly, life on the island contrasted powerfully with the corporate culture of London business. 'Looking at how people schedule tasks and priorities, in most conventional organizations people make a to-do list, then they will do the highest-priority things first,' he says. 'On St. Agnes, somebody wakes up, has breakfast, walks out the door and looks up at the sky.... If it looks like the right kind of wind and tide to catch a kind of fish they like, they might just do that first.'

That same fluidity extended to communications, says Armstrong, with unexpected efficiency. If Friday's boat from St. Mary was canceled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge.
[...]
Called Trampoline, the program will integrate with a company's existing desktop and enterprise server applications, sitting quietly on a company's network and vacuuming in e-mail, files, spreadsheets and anything else it can find.

From there, Trampoline indexes the data by parameters like authorization, originator and destination, and scours it for "semantic triggers" — interesting words that tend to crop up a lot. Then, like a village gossip, it shares information with people who might have use for it within the organization.

Brick by Brick: Lego's New Building Blocks

Brick by Brick: Lego's New Building Blocks describes Lego's new Lego Factory initiative:

Customers create any structure they can imagine using Lego's freely downloadable Digital Designer software. If they then decide to actually build their creation, the software, which keeps track of which pieces are required, sends the order to this corner of the Enfield warehouse. There, employees put all the pieces (which are grouped in standardized bags) into a box, along with instructions, and ship it off.

A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. In A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, he introduces his ideas:

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won't be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We're rich enough to do it.
[..]
There are many ways of turning these economic potentials into a working system. The one I have devised -- I call it simply "the Plan" for want of a catchier label -- makes a $10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated, beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank account. If we implemented the Plan tomorrow, it would cost about $355 billion more than the current system. The projected costs of the Plan cross the projected costs of the current system in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost about half a trillion dollars less per year than conservative projections of the cost of the current system. By 2028, that difference would be a trillion dollars per year.

Let Computers Screen Air Baggage

Security expert Bruce Schneier says Let Computers Screen Air Baggage:

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we're all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn't the 'underwear bomber.')

Airport security is mind-numbing:

Airport screeners have a difficult job, primarily because the human brain isn't naturally adapted to the task. We're wired for visual pattern matching, and are great at picking out something we know to look for — for example, a lion in a sea of tall grass.

But we're much less adept at detecting random exceptions in uniform data. Faced with an endless stream of identical objects, the brain quickly concludes that everything is identical and there's no point in paying attention. By the time the exception comes around, the brain simply doesn't notice it. This psychological phenomenon isn't just a problem in airport screening: It's been identified in inspections of all kinds, and is why casinos move their dealers around so often. The tasks are simply mind-numbing.

It's Like Lending to a Friend, Except You'll Get Interest

It's Like Lending to a Friend, Except You'll Get Interest:

Prosper.com, a start-up company based in San Francisco, started operations last week, offering a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.
[...]
On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo — and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.

Chief among those criteria is the borrower's rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.

Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.

To help lenders minimize risk, Prosper permits them to finance just part of a given loan, so a typical lender may offer, say, $100 at 6.5 percent interest toward a loan to someone with excellent credit.

Once the bidding is complete, and if enough lenders bid enough money to finance the loan at a single rate acceptable to the borrower, Prosper transfers the money to the borrower's account and establishes a monthly repayment system that withdraws money from the borrower's checking account. (Should a borrower default, Prosper hires a collection company on the lender's behalf and alerts credit bureaus.)

Anti-Gambling Crusade a Bad Bet

Radley Balko argues that Virginia's Anti-Gambling Crusade is a Bad Bet:

Last month, police in Fairfax, Va., conducted a SWAT raid on Sal Culosi Jr., an optometrist suspected of running a sports gambling pool with some friends. As the SWAT team surrounded him, one officer's gun discharged, struck Culosi in the chest and killed him. In the fiscal year before the raid that killed Culosi, Virginia spent about $20 million marketing and promoting its state lottery.

Picking the Perfect NCAA Bracket

Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guys, explains the astronomical odds of Picking the Perfect NCAA Bracket:

Filling out a perfect bracket means predicting the outcome of 63 games. If each game were a true toss-up, that would mean your chance of perfection is a mere one in two to the 63rd power, or one in nine million trillion (yes, million trillion — there are no tidy terms for numbers this large). Put another way, you are about 60 billion times more likely to win the multistate Powerball lottery.
[...]
Of course, you can do better than just flipping a coin for each game. Some teams are better than others. I spoke with a half-dozen statisticians and mathematicians to get their best guesses about how well an informed picker could theoretically do. The most generous estimate for the chance of a perfect bracket: about one in 150 million.

Wily Coyote Captured in Central Park

It sounds like this urban coyote won't be waking up in the city that never sleeps. Wily Coyote Captured in Central Park:

A wily coyote paid a visit to the big city, leading dozens of police officers on foot and in a helicopter on a loping chase through Central Park before being captured Wednesday.

'For a coyote to get to midtown, he has to be a very adventurous coyote,' said city Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. Officials said the animal may have wandered into the city from suburban Westchester County, or perhaps crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey via a bridge, a railroad trestle or a passing truck.

Officials said the tawny-colored animal, nicknamed Hal by park workers, was about a year old and weighed around 35 pounds. Hal proved quite adept at avoiding capture, jumping into the water, leaping over an 8-foot fence, ducking under a bridge and scampering through the grounds of a skating rink.

Hal was caught near Belvedere Castle, close to 79th Street and Central Park West, after being shot with a tranquilizer gun at close range by a police officer.

Brock Samson by Bill Sienkiewicz

If you're a hipster-geek fan of Jackson Publick's Venture Bros., you should be happy to hear that "the DVD project is all in the can and everything."

If you're an übergeek and know who Bill Sienkiewicz is, then you'll be especially happy to hear that he "turned in a supercool painting, as expected, for the inside packaging."

China From Red to Green

China From Red to Green quotes Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto on China's water supply:

For most Americans, it is unimaginable that the great Mississippi River would one day dry up and not reach the ocean. Yet between 1974 and 2000, China's Yellow River....ran dry 18 times. In 1998, the Yellow River failed to reach the ocean mouth for more than 250 days. With 1.3 billion people to feed, such water shortages are not just a major agricultural problem but a serious threat to China's economic and political stability.

No Coke a sign of Zimbabwe's tough times

I'm not the least bit surprised that Zimbabwe is going through hard times, but I am surprised by this quasi-metric. No Coke a sign of Zimbabwe's tough times:

It was the first Coke drought across the country for at least four decades, shop owners said. Throughout the seven-year guerrilla war that ended white rule and led to independence in 1980, Coca-Cola was available in rural stores in the heart of war zones.

Traditionally, it has been the country's best-selling soft drink, and its absence underscored the nation's worst economic crisis since independence.

Why was England first to industrialise?

Why was England first to industrialise?:

Why was England first? And why Europe? We present a probabilistic model that builds on big-push models by Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny (1989), combined with hierarchical preferences. Exogenous demographic factors (in particular the English low-pressure variant of the European marriage pattern) and redistributive institutions – such as the Old Poor Law – combined to make an Industrial Revolution more likely. Industrialization was the result of having a critical mass of consumers that is “rich enough” to afford (potentially) mass-produced goods.

Our model is calibrated to match the main characteristics of the English economy in 1780 and the observed transition until 1850. This allows us to address explicitly one of the key features of the British Industrial Revolution unearthed by economic historians over the last three decades – the slowness of productivity and output change. In our calibration, we find that the probability of Britain industrializing before France and Belgium is above 90 percent. Contrary to recent claims in the literature, 18th century China had only a minimal chance to industrialize at all.

The Girls Next Door

In The Girls Next Door, Joan Acocella looks at The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds — and, by extension, at Hugh Hefner:

Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a “life style” magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men’s magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn’t its kingdom be indoors? “We like our apartment,” he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

Hef has a peculiar set of vices — beyond the obvious:

Hefner is addicted to games: pinball machines, electronic games, board games. He likes to do forty-hour Monopoly marathons, fuelled by Pepsi (of which, it has been said, he used to consume three dozen bottles a day) and Dexedrine.

At "the end of the sixties, one-fourth of all American college men were buying his magazine every month," so things have dropped off quite a bit — but not as much as they could have:

As for the magazine, the surprise is not that it has lost fifty per cent of its readers but that, outdated as it is, it has lost only that many, and that the faithful are not all in nursing homes. (According to a 2005 market study, the readers’ median age is thirty-three.) A good comparison, made recently in Time, is with Mad, which was launched a year before Playboy and was as much a product of the fifties as Hefner’s publication. Mad is still in print, but with one-tenth the circulation it had in the early seventies. Next to that, Hefner’s half a loaf looks pretty good.

Nokia aims to kill iPods, camcorders

Business 2.0's "Browser" column claims that Nokia aims to kill iPods, camcorders:

Last year, Nokia became the world's largest camera maker when it shipped 100 million cameraphones. Top Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki took credit for driving Konica-Minolta out of the camera market, noting that the company first predicted the demise of the camera business in 2000. Now the company is setting its sights on the music player and camcorder markets, by adding those functions into its phones. One development that may help cell phone makers like Nokia push music players on to cell phones: NEC has developed a new chip that allows cell phones to play music for up to 50 hours. That would be a big improvement over the iPod, which claims a battery life of up to 20 hours.

New way to bet on real estate

There's a new way to bet on real estate:

On Tuesday, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Tradition Financial Services, together with Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss and Standard & Poor's, announced the launch of S&P CME Housing Futures and Options.

These derivatives will enable investors to take a position on the direction of home prices either for the nation as a whole or for 10 major cities to start, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Mortgage bankers will be able to hedge against falling markets, but even ordinary consumers may get into the act:

• By direct investment: Investors could buy futures in housing prices and profit if home prices continue to increase (if the investor goes long) or if they fall (if the investor goes short).
• By locking in home equity: Home owners intending to sell within a year or two can go short in home price futures. If the price of their house drops, that can recapture the loss on the investment.

Me-Ouch: Cat Survives 80-Foot Fall

This hokey "news" story, Me-Ouch: Cat Survives 80-Foot Fall, describes a fairly common phenomenon:

Piper the cat may have used up a life or two but was unharmed after falling nearly 80 feet from a tree.

She had been in the tree for eight days when a rescuer started up to save her Monday. But a scared Piper crept away until the limb underneath her snapped.

She fell 80 feet, twisting and turning in the air before slamming onto the ground. It looked like a catastrophe, but Piper wasn't even dazed, scampering off before her owner Rodney Colvin could catch her.

Piper was found a few minutes later under a vehicle. Her owner said she had no broken bones and was only a little dehydrated.

Cats routinely survive long falls, because they have a nonfatal terminal velocity:

The truth is, after a few floors it doesn't really matter [how far the cat falls], as long as the oxygen holds out. Cats have a nonfatal terminal velocity (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but most small animals have this advantage). Once they orient themselves, they spread out like a parachute. There are cats on record that have fallen 20 stories or more without ill effects. As long as the cat doesn't land on something pointy, it's likely to walk away.

I remember hearing about this 1987 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association study:

Two vets examined 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise windows and were brought to the Animal Medical Center, a New York veterinary hospital, for treatment. On average the cats fell 5.5 stories, yet 90 percent survived. (Many did suffer serious injuries.) [...] When the vets analyzed the data they found that, as one would expect, the number of broken bones and other injuries increased with the number of stories the cat had fallen — up to seven stories. Above seven stories, however, the number of injuries per cat sharply declined. In other words, the farther the cat fell, the better its chances of escaping serious injury.

The authors explained this seemingly miraculous result by saying that after falling five stories or so the cats reached a terminal velocity — that is, maximum downward speed — of 60 miles per hour. Thereafter, they hypothesized, the cats relaxed and spread themselves out like flying squirrels, minimizing injuries.

Of course, there's an obvious — and literal — survivorship bias here. Cats that fell 20 stories and did not land just right were no longer recognizably cats and did not get brought in for veterinary care.

Debra LaFave

It looks like we have yet another story leaving guys wondering, Where was she when I was in school?:

Debra LaFave, a Florida teacher, seen here leaving a Tampa court in 2005, who admitted having sex several times with her 14-year-old student was freed after prosecutors dropped sexual abuse charges to avoid calling the boy to the witness stand.

The Decline of France

Witness The Decline of France:

The right to assemble is a pillar of free society. But in France it's the only pillar its citizens seem to take seriously. So much so that any public debate of import gets conducted in the streets rather than through the ballot box or institutions of a purportedly mature democracy.

In less enlightened societies, as opposed to the birthplace of the Enlightenment, that's usually called mob rule. But the violent street demonstrations roiling France's cities today, and the unhappy career prospects of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are the latest symptoms of an ailing democracy.

Polar Bear Cub on the Prowl

I must admit, baby predators can be pretty damn cute. This five-month-old polar bear cub is hunting a bird in his cage in the Moscow Zoo.

How A Man Makes Over 2 Million Dollars A Year... Chasing The Geese Away

How A Man Makes Over 2 Million Dollars A Year... Chasing The Geese Away:

David started Geese Police in 1986, as the solution to driving away unwanted geese from town parks, corporate properties, golf courses, or even front lawns. Using trained border collies, they drive away the geese without harming them. Today, Geese Police has considerably grown and expanded, earning just under $2 million in 2000. David has also begun to franchise his business to a highly selected group of individuals.

When Pilots Pass the BRBON, They Must Be in Kentucky

When Pilots Pass the BRBON, They Must Be in Kentucky:

Pilots primarily navigate by using special radios that tune in to signals emitted by transmitters, or beacons, on the ground. They then fly from one beacon to the next. To pinpoint their position, they determine the compass reading, or 'radial,' from two different beacons. Fixes are points in the sky at the intersection of two radials from two beacons. They act as landmarks — much like the intersection of two city streets — only airborne. HEHAW, for example, is the point when the Nashville navigation beacon is at a radial of 156 degrees on the compass and the Bowling Green beacon is at 247 degrees. There's only one spot where those two radials intersect.

In the mid-1990s, the military released satellite-based navigation for commercial use, enabling the FAA to create additional fixes anywhere in the sky. Now, the FAA can mark a spot with simple longitude and latitude coordinates, and then give it a name. Airplanes can identify it with Global Positioning Satellite computers, which receive signals directly from space.

Satellite navigation lets the FAA create better routes, such as more-precise approaches at small airports or safer passages through mountainous areas. As a result, scores of new fixes have been dreamed up in the past 10 years.

The 'Tweety Bird' approach in Portsmouth, N.H. — one of the first satellite-based airport approaches in the U.S. — is credited with unleashing the burst of creativity at the FAA.

The Tweety Bird approach?

The route takes you from ITAWT to ITAWA to PUDYE to TTATT. If a pilot can't land, he is told to hold by way of IDEED. ("I thought I saw a pussy cat....I did!")

Nashville has PICKN, GRNIN and HEHAW. Vegas has HOLDM. Newark has HOWYA and DOOIN. Louisiana has RYTHM, Kentucky has BRBON and Massachusetts has BOSOX. Kansas City, Mo., has SPICY, BARBQ and RIBBS.

The FAA switched from meaningless five-letter combinations to pronounceable, mnemonic codes in 1976.

For the Danish, A Job Loss Can Be Learning Experience

For the Danish, A Job Loss Can Be Learning Experience:

The government allows liberal hiring and firing as in the U.S. And it has imposed limits on the duration of its high unemployment benefits. But it also invests more than any other country, as a percentage of its gross domestic product, in retraining the jobless — a combination it calls 'flexicurity.' Its unusual mix of the free market and big government has helped Denmark cut its unemployment rate in half, from about 10% in the early 1990s to U.S.-style levels of under 5% now. The economy has been relatively robust, growing 3.4% last year. Meanwhile, France and Germany are at or above the Danish jobless rate of a decade ago.

Dutch Immigrants Must Watch Racy Film

According to Fox News — and not The Onion — Dutch Immigrants Must Watch Racy Film:

The camera focuses on two gay men kissing in a park. Later, a topless woman emerges from the sea and walks onto a crowded beach. For would-be immigrants to the Netherlands, this film is a test of their readiness to participate in the liberal Dutch culture.

Saved by 'sand' poured into the wounds

Many Marines have been saved by 'sand' poured into the wounds:

Every US marine and navy soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan carries QuikClot. Its maker, Z-Medica of Wallingford, Connecticut, claims it has saved 150 lives so far. The porous mineral powder is poured into the wound, where pores quickly absorb water, which concentrates the blood's clotting factors and so speeds up clotting. In lab tests, blood treated with QuikClot clots in less than 2 minutes, compared with the 10 minutes or so for untreated blood. In studies on pigs with severed arteries, the survival rate was 100 per cent; with a standard gauze dressing, more than half the animals died.

The safety problem in the way of QuikClot's wider use arises because of the large amount of heat the material releases when it absorbs water, sometimes enough to cause second-degree burns. In the face of a life-threatening injury, this may be a price worth paying. 'The general feeling around the department is that if I get shot, I don't care if it burns,' Johnson says. Despite this, the navy and marines advise soldiers to apply QuikClot only after all other methods have failed, and it is not standard issue for the US army's troops.

Instead, they carry HemCon, a special bandage of ground-up shrimp shells. The shells contain chitosan, a substance which binds strongly to tissue and seals wounds in much the same way as a tyre patch seals a tyre. HemCon has its own problems: because it comes in a bandage, it is difficult to apply to deep or oddly shaped wounds. The bandage is also too stiff to be used to treat gunshot wounds effectively, as it cannot be packed into a hole to create enough pressure to control the bleeding. As a result, many army units buy QuikClot regardless of the policy at the top, says Z-Medica CEO Ray Huey.