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.

Economics Saves Lives

Economics Saves Lives — sometimes in overt fashion, like this donor-pairing program by economist Alvin Roth:

Becky Borchert, a Wisconsin nurse, was eager to donate a kidney to her gravely ill friend in New York, but she had type A blood and her friend had type B. Richard Krafton, a school administrator in Massachusetts with advanced kidney disease, had the opposite problem: The friend who wanted to give him a kidney had type B blood, not a match for Krafton's type A.

But last week, Borchert saved her friend's life by giving a kidney to Krafton, a man she did not know, in the first test of a system that brings together strangers to exchange organs for transplant. At the same moment that surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began removing Borchert's kidney for Krafton, another surgical team at New York Presbyterian Hospital started taking a kidney from Krafton's friend, Steve Proulx, to implant in Borchert's friend, who asked to remain anonymous.

Road Penn

In Road Penn, Penn, of Penn and Teller, recounts his unpleasant encounter with airport security. I enjoyed this bit, from his complaint call:

"Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."

Is The MBA Overrated?

BusinessWeek asks, Is The MBA Overrated?:

Zwiener's experience [as executive vice-president at Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.] points to a little-realized fact about the MBA: It only gets you so far. In fact, for those seeking a job at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, it's not even a requirement. BusinessWeek research has found that fewer than one out of three executives who reach those lofty heights do so with the help of an MBA. And if you think a sheepskin from a top school is a necessity, think again. Only half of the executives with MBAs went to the top 10 schools in the 2004 BusinessWeek ranking.

Why Poor Countries Are Poor

Tim Harford (The Undercover Eoncomist) explains Why Poor Countries Are Poor:

Many people have an optimistic view of politicians and civil servants — that they are all serving the people and doing their best to look after the interests of the country. Other people are more cynical, suggesting that many politicians are incompetent and often trade off the public interest against their own chances of re-election. The economist Mancur Olson proposed a working assumption that government’s motivations are darker still, and from it theorized that stable dictatorships should be worse for economic growth than democracies, but better than sheer instability.

Olson supposed that governments are simply bandits, people with the biggest guns who will turn up and take everything. That’s the starting point of his analysis — a starting point you will have no trouble accepting if you spend five minutes looking around you in Cameroon. As Sam said, “There is plenty of money…but they put it in their pockets.”

Imagine a dictator with a tenure of one week — in effect, a bandit with a roving army who sweeps in, takes whatever he wishes, and leaves. Assuming he’s neither malevolent nor kindhearted, but purely self-interested, he has no incentive to leave anything, unless he plans on coming back next year. But imagine that the roaming bandit likes the climate of a certain spot and decides to settle down, building a palace and encouraging his army to avail themselves of the locals. Desperately unfair though it is, the locals are probably better off now that the dictator has decided to stay. A purely self-interested dictator will realize he cannot destroy the economy and starve the people if he plans on sticking around, because then he would exhaust all the resources and have nothing to steal the following year. So a dictator who lays claim to a land is a preferable to one who moves around constantly in search of new victims to plunder.

The Truth

Sports Illustrated's The Truth describes Victor Conte's drug operation, which sold a useless supplement called ZMA to the masses while supplying elite athletes all sorts of potent drugs, in return for their endorsements — of ZMA:

Although Olympic athletes faced the toughest steroid policy in sports, Conte came to realize that beating the testers was not difficult. He worked to provide a broad menu of drugs that were hard to detect. Among those he ultimately offered were growth hormone; erythropoietin, or EPO, the oxygen-boosting drug; the diabetes drug insulin, which also was particularly potent when cocktailed with other substances; norbolethone, a.k.a. the Clear, a powerful anabolic developed by Wyeth Laboratories in the 1960s but never brought to market (possibly because of doubts about its safety); a testosterone-based balm that Conte called the Cream; and the narcolepsy drug modafinil, a powerful stimulant that athletes took directly before competing.

Growth hormone and insulin were completely undetectable. The EPO test couldn't detect all forms of the drug. Testers wouldn't screen for norbolethone, a drug that had never been marketed. And the Cream was a mixture of synthetic testosterone and epitestosterone that concealed what would otherwise be telltale signs of the use of an undetectable steroid.

Conte created a simple "alphabet" shorthand for his drugs — for example, "E" for EPO, "G" for growth hormone, "I" for insulin — to be used on calendars he and the athletes kept. The calendars would list when athletes were scheduled to take which drugs, and they also indicated the dates of competitions so that the drugs' effects would be peaking at the right time. Conte also kept a ledger that detailed the types of drugs athletes were using, as well as the results of blood and urine tests conducted on the athletes. Conte engaged in this "pretesting" to make sure his athletes would pass drug tests.

Conte was very pleased to do business with Bonds's trainer. It meant he could add the greatest baseball player of the modern era to the BALCO stable of athletes. At minimum it was another big name Conte could drop on the Internet chat boards, another celebrity whose name and photo could be exploited to promote his business and himself. "Barry takes ZMA every night without fail," he would write on one board. "Barry is a big fan of ZMA."

Anderson, meanwhile, sold Bonds on Conte by dropping the names of the Olympians and NFL stars already using BALCO. Of course the real BALCO program had little to do with ZMA — instead, it gave Bonds access to state-of-the-art drugs like the Clear, which other elite athletes had begun calling "Rocket Fuel" and "the magic potion." A BALCO connection had additional value because it provided Bonds with a cover story for his radically transformed appearance.

Getting Physical

Getting Physical notes that many of the great physicists were notorious philanderers:

Schrödinger, Curie, Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer…the finest names of pre-Cold War 20th-century physics, some of whom gave us the most concise theories ever posited, form a roster of lamentable philanderers. Albert Einstein was completely “given to flirtation” and had legions of affairs. Caltech professor and bestselling raconteur Richard Feynman was probably the only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars, claim a foolproof manner for bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs. And it wasn’t just the guys: Marie Curie was relentlessly hounded by the press for seducing away her late-husband’s former student from his wife and kids.

Speed Demons

Speed Demons argues that the pace of business is accelerating:

The pace is picking up across such industries as retailing, consumer goods, software, electronics, autos, and medical devices. In many realms, the time it takes to bring a product to market has been cut in half during the past three or four years. At Nissan Motor Co., the development of new cars used to take 21 months. Now, the company is shifting to a 10 1/2-month process. In the cell-phone business, Nokia, Motorola, and others used to take 12 to 18 months to develop basic models. Today: Six to nine months.

A break-in to end all break-ins

Allan M. Jalon describes A break-in to end all break-ins — which, I must admit, I'd never heard of:

Thirty-five years ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up — mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address — in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam

From As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam:

For most of the 1980s and 1990s the Army's understanding of what went wrong in Vietnam was dominated by retired Col. Harry Summers's history On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. That account argued Viet Cong guerrillas were used by the communist regime to distract the U.S. from the real threat — the conventional North Vietnamese Army. The U.S. didn't lose because it fought a guerrilla war badly, Col. Summers asserted, but rather because it was prohibited by the civilian leadership from launching a conventional attack on North Vietnam.

His book, commissioned by the Army and published in 1981, gave Army officers reason to ignore guerrilla warfare for the two decades that followed.

Now military leaders are reading Col. Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, which contrasts the U.S. Army's failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s:

He took the "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" title from a famous aphorism of T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."

KFC Seems to Win Game of Chicken

Like many people — approximately 10 percent of TV viewers — I don't have to watch commercials anymore. I fast-forward through them on my DVR.

KFC's recent ad gimmick got around the DVR problem and turned it to their advantage. From KFC Seems to Win Game of Chicken:

The fast-food chain's spot was designed to circumvent Madison Avenue's latest nemesis: digital video recorders that make it easy for viewers to skip ads. The ad, which ran nationally from Feb. 23 to March 3 on network and cable channels, had something extra for people watching with their TV set hooked up to a DVR. A single frame contained a code word — 'Buffalo' — which viewers could use to claim a coupon for a free 'Buffalo Snacker' KFC chicken sandwich. Only viewers who used their DVR, or an analog video cassette recorder, to slow the ad and watch it frame by frame could see the code.

To ensure viewers would know when to pause their DVRs, KFC announced details of when the ad would run — including in which programs, such as Fox's '24' and CBS's 'Survivor.' That ensured the spot got lots of publicity: 250 mentions in the media, KFC estimates, including from some TV stations that ran the commercial free as part of a news report. It got even more attention after Walt Disney's ABC network refused to air the spot on the grounds that it was subliminal advertising. (ABC ran a version of the spot without the hidden message. KFC will continue to air this version of the spot until April 4.)

Did the idea work? KFC thinks so. Roughly 103,000 people claimed 'Buffalo Snacker' coupons after entering the hidden code on KFC's Web site, the fast-food chain says. Furthermore, the publicity prompted an increase in the number of people visiting KFC's Web site. In the weeks the ad ran, the site drew 2.75 million page views, 40% more than the amount of traffic it usually gets over a similar period of time.

Newest Director Shakes Up GM With Calls for Radical Change

Jermoe "Jerry" York sounds like quite a character. From Newest Director Shakes Up GM With Calls for Radical Change:

A Memphis, Tenn., native and son of an Army colonel, Mr. York graduated from West Point but a gymnastics injury ended a possible military career. He received a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and arrived in Detroit in 1963 to take a job as a GM project engineer. While working toward an M.B.A. at night, he received several carburetor-design patents.

But he wanted more. Mr. York quickly revealed his intention to 'become the chairman and CEO,' according to his first boss, Craig Marks.

A restless workaholic, Mr. York switched into operations and then finance. He moved to Ford Motor Co. and eventually to Chrysler. In 1979, when Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy, he stayed up all night on coffee and cigarettes preparing a financial presentation. (He still smokes a pack a day.) Three minutes into his talk, he fainted. Medics carried him out on a stretcher.

Mr. York left the auto industry in 1993 to become chief financial officer under Louis Gerstner at IBM. There he honed his reputation as a cost-cutter. Mr. York 'let the numbers tell him what was wrong with the strategy,' says Paul Sterne, who worked with him at GM and IBM. 'He would rip people apart who didn't deliver.'

He drove himself hard. During a blizzard, Mr. York arrived early one morning with a snowplow attached to the front of his Dodge pickup truck. He devoured spicy Italian and Mexican food. Meanwhile, he urged IBM executives to treat corporate spending as their 'family checkbook.'

Polar Bears at the Moscow Zoo

The cute polar bears aren't all in the Netherlands. There are also cute Polar Bears at the Moscow Zoo:

A five-month-old polar bear cub(R) plays with his mother while enjoying warm spring weather at the Moscow Zoo.

Polar Bear Cubs

Today's dose of unadulterated cute comes from these triplet Polar Bear Cubs:

Polar bear cubs play on their first day out on public display at the Ouwehands Zoo in Rhenen, the Netherlands March 10, 2006. It is the first time a polar bear in captivity has given birth to triplets, the zoo said. The three-month old triplet cubs were put out on public display for the first time Friday.

Six-Legged Lamb

It's half cute, half creepy. It's a Six-Legged Lamb:

Belgian grower Maurice Peeters holds a six-leg lamb a day after its birth. The lamb cannot walk and has to be specially fed. A veterinary surgeon who examined it was reported as saying he would consider amputating the two superfluous legs if it managed to survive beyond a week.

Nothing Says, 'I Love You, Fido,' Like Food With Gourmet Flair

Nothing Says, 'I Love You, Fido,' Like Food With Gourmet Flair:

Besotted pet owners buy their pooches Gucci coats and canine spa treatments. Now, they can add dog food that wouldn't look out of place on their own dinner tables.

Nestlé SA, the biggest pet-food maker in the U.S., is launching a new line of Purina dishes that include roasted chicken with pasta and carrots, and simmered beef with wild rice and spinach. Rival Del Monte Foods Co. is adding pasta and vegetables to its famous Kibbles 'n Bits. And Procter & Gamble Co. has introduced Savory Sauce, a "canine condiment" to pour over dog food. It comes in three flavors — bacon, chicken and roasted beef.

Why is this happening?

The biggest group of pet owners used to be parents of small children who often didn't have the time or money to coddle their dogs. In the past decade, the biggest group of pet owners has become childless people, ranging from gay couples to baby boomers whose own kids have left home, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Couples have more money to spend and are treating their pets much as they would kids. The percentage of parents owning a pet has declined to 68% in 2001 from 73% in 1996, while the percentage of childless couples who owned a pet rose to 72% from 53%, according to an AMVA survey.

Frog Communicates with Ultrasound

The concave-eared torrent frog communicates with ultrasound to overcome the noise of the waterfalls it inhabits:

The concave-eared torrent frog (Amolops tormotus) joins bats, dolphins and whales and a small number of rodents in the elite club of creatures that are able to communicate by ultrasound.

A team led by Albert Feng of the University of Illinois found that male frogs of this species make high-pitched melodic bird-like calls that sometimes exceeded their recorder's maximum range of 128 kilohertz — more than six times the limit of human hearing.

Russia ... An Honest Broker?

Lee Harris brings his sense of history to current events once again, in Russia ... An Honest Broker?:

In its recent dealing with Iran and Hamas, Russia has succeeded in achieving a major geopolitical objective. And it has done so with relatively little cost. It has managed to convince many in the Muslim world that it is willing to play the role of 'the honest broker' — the role that the wily German Chancellor Otto Bismarck assigned to himself at the Congress of Berlin. For example, representatives of Hamas, on returning from their trip to Moscow, praised the Russian efforts at mediation, and noted that Russia's geographical position made it the ideal party to settle differences between the Islamic world and the West.

Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance

From Max Schulz's Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance:

Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we're running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation's leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s. President Carter famously predicted in 1977 that unless we made drastic cuts in our oil consumption, 'Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price.' And so it goes today, where a slew of books and Web sites make fantastic claims about dwindling supplies of crude.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it.
[...]
In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world's oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world's provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven't been created. It's just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.

The Night I Became An American

Lee Harris describes The Night [He] Became An American:

I became an American when I was forty-nine.

No, I did not become an American after immigrating from another country, passing tests, and taking an oath of loyalty, as millions of other Americans have to become Americans. My people were born here, and as far back as any of them could remember, their people had been born here as well. They were farmers, and like most farmers, they were convinced that they had sprung up from the soil, like corn-stalks. No, I became an American during the course of a conversation that I had on a night train from Innsbruck to fabled Vienna.
[...]
After so much musical and literary seriousness, my traveling companion explained to me the litigious history of the famous Sacher Torte, one of Vienna's miraculous pastry confections. Then, while he was on the subject of food, he looked at me and asked with a laugh: "What do you Americans do when you go to a foreign city? Do you only eat at McDonald's?"

The laugh had a mocking and smugly superior edge to it; and, like the question itself, it disconcerted and befuddled me. Being a good American, I expected him to break out into a grin and say something like the German equivalent of, "Oh, I'm just joshing you." But he didn't. It was embarrassingly obvious that he was quite sincere. After all, where else would we Americans eat in a foreign land except McDonald's? Isn't that all we eat at home?

Suddenly I realized that to my young Austrian companion, it made no difference whether I knew Bruckner's symphonies backwards and forwards; it mattered not in the slightest that I could appreciate the poetry of Grillparzer in the original German. I was an American, and, therefore, I had to be the kind of person who, when in a strange land, would make a bee-line to the closest McDonald's, out of fear of tasting the food of foreigners.

The Perfect Payday

Charles Forelle and James Bandler explain how some executives managed The Perfect Payday:

On a summer day in 2002, shares of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. sank to their lowest level in a year. Oddly, that was good news for Chief Executive Jeffrey Rich.

His annual grant of stock options was dated that day, entitling him to buy stock at that price for years. Had they been dated a week later, when the stock was 27% higher, they'd have been far less rewarding. It was the same through much of Mr. Rich's tenure: In a striking pattern, all six of his stock-option grants from 1995 to 2002 were dated just before a rise in the stock price, often at the bottom of a steep drop.

Just lucky? A Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the odds of this happening by chance are extraordinarily remote -- around one in 300 billion. The odds of winning the multistate Powerball lottery with a $1 ticket are one in 146 million.

Suspecting such patterns aren't due to chance, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining whether some option grants carry favorable grant dates for a different reason: They were backdated. The SEC is understood to be looking at about a dozen companies' option grants with this in mind.

Corn Dog

In Corn Dog, Robert Bryce explains why "The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine":

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.

In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118 percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase America's total energy consumption, not decrease it.

As he points out, "What frustrates critics is that there are sensible ways to reduce our motor-fuel use and bolster renewable energy—they just don't help the corn lobby."

La Ligne Maginot

Donald Pittenger looks back at La Ligne Maginot — as it was seen before the war:

When the drawing was made, details of the Maginot Line were military secrets. Even though the Germans had aerial photos of some of the fortresses under construction and might have had spies in the work crews, the public was told about the Line only in broad-brush form. For example, it was revealed that it was a system of underground fortresses placed near enough to one another that their artillery fire would be mutually-supporting. The fortresses were self-contained, troops living in underground barracks with support facilities such as command-posts, kitchens, mess-halls, dental clinics, operating rooms and recreation facilities. Each fort had its own electrical power generation system for use in case the national power grid (and its buried lines to the fortress) was disrupted. Also underground were artillery magazines and other storage facilities. Gun emplacements were on the surface, but heavily protected by reinforced concrete and steel. Tying it all together were underground electric railroads.

Further Muppet Resistance

Apparently South Park isn't the only show to subversively mock Scientology. From Further Muppet Resistance:

A while back I noted the disquieting resemblance between the Emperor Gorg (of Fraggle Rock) and L. Ron Hubbard (present whereabouts unknown). Now my sources have alerted me to this clip from the short-lived Muppets Tonight. The premise of the clip is a look back at “The Kermit Frog Club,” like the Mickey Mouse Club but with Kermit as the object of devotion and guest Cindy Crawford in the Annette Funicello role. (The MMC is outside the range of my pop culture: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, of interest are the muppet Frogsketeers, whose names are emblazoned on their shirts: along with Cindy, there’s Newt, Stu, and … L. Ron. Now that I look at the screenshot again, Newt’s crop of hair is also somewhat evocative.

Souping up search results

In Souping up search results, John Heilemann says that "The advertising business is ripe for infiltration by the math jocks — and search-engine savant Ellen Siminoff is leading the campaign":

So Siminoff was intrigued when she met Efficient Frontier's founder, Anil Kamath. A Stanford computer science Ph.D. and the founder of eBoodle, a comparison-shopping startup ultimately acquired by BizRate, Kamath was creating a system to help advertisers more effectively place their text ads on Google and Yahoo, both of which conduct online auctions of search keywords that determine where the ads appear. Employing vast computing power and fiendishly intricate algorithms, Kamath's system would indicate which keywords to bid on and the optimal amount to bid--based on countless variables, from past click-through performance to the number of rival bidders, while taking account of constant fluctuations in auction prices.

All this should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with the incursion of computer-driven quantitative methods that transformed high finance in the 1990s. As Siminoff puts it, 'Anil's approach was based on the same sort of math they use on Wall Street.' (Before starting eBoodle, Kamath was a vice president at D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund that specializes in applying quant-jock models to program trading.)

'Google and Yahoo are like exchanges, so the analysis is essentially similar,' Siminoff says. 'You're studying all of the potential scenarios and choosing the ones likely to yield the best ROI in aggregate. Then you just keep iterating and refining the analysis.'

How Not to Embarrass Yourself in an Argument With an Atheist

Andrew Arensburger explains How Not to Embarrass Yourself in an Argument With an Atheist:

Fortunately, for religious arguments, there is a simple technique: take your original argument, substitute some other faith, and see how convincing it sounds to you.

Let's take, for example, the argument that "Millions have found purpose in life through Jesus. Their lives have been enriched beyond measure by the Bible." This is undoubtedly true, but just how convincing is it to someone who isn't already a Christian? To find out, let's turn it around: "Millions have found purpose in life through the prophet Mohammed. Their lives have been enriched beyond measure by the Koran."

Now raise your hand if you've just had a sudden urge to convert to Islam. I said, raise your hand if... anyone? No? Hmmm...

All right, what about "The Bible is thousands of years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!" Once again, let's turn that around: "The Tao Te Ching is 2500 years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!"

Doesn't really want to make you want to rush out and become a Taoist, does it?

An Insider's Guide to Trader Joe's

Andy Bowers offers An Insider's Guide to Trader Joe's — For curious New Yorkers — who are getting their first Trader Joe's:

If a normal supermarket is like a mall — filled with familiar, consistent, and humdrum name brands — Trader Joe's is more like a good bazaar, with its eclectic and erratic selection and frequent surprises, both good and bad. And like any bazaar, it's much easier to navigate with a little experienced help. So, with curious New Yorkers in mind, I asked friends and colleagues in Los Angeles to send me their TJ's tips and warnings.

Z Machine Sets Unexpected Earth Temperature Record

I was vaguely aware of the temperature record set at Sandia Labs recently, but I didn't realize how cool the apparatus looked. From Z Machine Sets Unexpected Earth Temperature Record:

Why is this plasma so hot? Physicists aren't sure. What is known for sure is that the Z Machine running at Sandia National Laboratories created a plasma that was unexpectedly hot. The plasma reached a temperature in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it arguably the hottest human made thing ever in the history of the Earth and, for a brief time, hotter than the interiors of stars. The Z Machine experiment, pictured above, purposely creates high temperatures by focusing 20 million amps of electricity into a small region further confined by a magnetic field. Vertical wires give the Z Machine its name. During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second. Experiments with the Z Machine are helping to explain the physics of Solar flares, design more efficient nuclear fusion plants, test materials under extreme heat, and gather data for the computer modeling of nuclear explosions.

Alan Moore on V for Vendetta

Alan Moore has written a number of excellent, cerebral graphic novels that have been turned into awful, mindless movies:

In Hollywood you're going to have the producers and the backers putting in their ... well, I don't want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but ... having their input, shall we say. You're going to get actors who'll say they don't want to say this line or play this character like that. I mean the police inspector in From Hell, Fred Abberline, was based on real life: He was an unassuming man in middle age who was not a heavy drinker and who, as far as I know, remained faithful to his wife throughout his entire life. Johnny Depp saw fit to play this character as an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers.

On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain [in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen], this was true to the [original] character — he showed a fondness for drugs on several occasions. But Sean Connery didn't want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain's character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor. I don't have these problems in comics.

Naturally, he's not happy with V for Vendetta:

I've read the screenplay, so I know exactly what they're doing with it, and I'm not going to be going to see it. When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

Fly Now, Talk Later

Scott McCartney's "Middle Seat" readers say, Fly Now, Talk Later:

The boys from NPR's popular 'Car Talk' radio program offer a free bumper sticker as a public service to reduce auto accidents among cellphone-distracted drivers: 'Drive Now, Talk Later.'

Judging from the Middle Seat Mailbox this week, we ought to start our own public service campaign with a 'Fly Now, Talk Later' bumper sticker.

That's because the FCC may allow cell phone use on planes:

On May 10, the Federal Communications Commission will auction off two licenses for air-to-ground communications that can be used for onboard cellular service or onboard Wi-Fi connections. The companies say a new technology called "pico cells" — antennas installed on airplanes that are supposed to keep phones from trying to link to antennas on the ground — will eliminate safety concerns for jets since the phones will operate at much lower power, and won't interfere with navigation-signal receivers.

In India, the Path To Growth Hits Roadblock: Slums

In China, if illegal squatters get in the way of progress — by, say, building a home where the airport plans to expand — they disappear.

Democratic India doesn't tackle the problem in quite the same way. From In India, the Path To Growth Hits Roadblock: Slums:

In Mumbai, the city formerly known as Bombay, the paupers have real political clout. Slum-dwellers constitute half of Mumbai's 12 million citizens, and they are faithful voters. That makes them an important bloc for local politicians, most of whom promise to fight efforts to relocate them.

Another reason why there are so many slums:

Slums provide the drivers, maids and mechanics that keep Mumbai running. The tough part is housing them all. Rent control and strict building codes make low-cost housing a high-risk, low-return business.

The slums having running water, public toilets, electricity, and Hindu temples:

Peppering slums with temples is also a standard ploy to ensure that Hindu nationalists will rally to fight any threat of demolition.

Ireland's "Crack" Habit

Austin Kelley explains the faux Irish pub revolution in Ireland's "Crack" Habit:

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent — and even in Ireland itself. IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.

IPCo's designers claim to have "developed ways of re-creating Irish pubs which would be successful, culturally and commercially, anywhere in the world." To wit, they offer five basic styles: The "Country Cottage," with its timber beams and stone floors, is supposed to resemble a rural house that gradually became a commercial establishment. The "Gaelic" design features rough-hewn doors and murals based on Irish folklore. You might, instead, choose the "Traditional Pub Shop," which includes a fake store (like an apothecary), or the "Brewery" style, which includes empty casks and other brewery detritus, or "Victorian Dublin," an upscale stained-glass joint. IPCo will assemble your chosen pub in Ireland. Then they'll bring the whole thing to your space and set it up. All you have to do is some basic prep, and voilà! Ireland arrives in Dubai. (IPCo has built several pubs and a mock village there.)

St. Patrick's Day has been tranformed too:

Where there is celebrated excess, there is a market to exploit. In 1995, the Irish government saw potential in international "Irish" revelry. They reinvented the holiday at home to kick-start the tourist season. Now thousands of partiers head to Ireland for the "St. Patrick's Day Season" as Guinness has called this time of year. (It used to be called "March" or, for Irish Catholics, "Lent.") In Dublin, the festival lasts for five days and adds about £60 million to the economy.

Guinness describes the irrepressible spirit of Irishness with the Gaelic word for communal fun, "Craic" (pronounced crack), and recommends "importing Craic from Ireland." It seems that the Irish had exported Craic, only to get it back again. The Irish are reveling in the Irishness business. After all, as IPCo puts it, "Ireland and things Irish are very attractive to consumers." Ireland now has a lot of native consumers. After the parade, they can stop by an authentic pub for a Guinness. It'll be just like Dubai.

Microsoft Confirms it Originated iPod Box Parody Video

Tom Pilla of Microsoft confirms that Microsoft itself originated that iPod box parody video:

"It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding," he said via e-mail.

The Sixty-Million-Year Virus

Viruses regularly invade people's cells, make new copies of themselves, and infect their host. Sometimes they get "stuck" in the host cell's DNA. And sometimes they get stuck in an egg cell, which replicates and survives — and that viral DNA survives for millions of years. From The Sixty-Million-Year Virus:

Scientists can identify viruses lurking in our genome (known as endogenous retroviruses) by their distinctive DNA. A fully-functioning retrovirus sequence contains three genes — one for copying DNA, one for a shell, and one for escaping and invading cells. These genes are flanked by a series of repeating DNA, which allow viruses to be inserted or snipped out of their host's genome. The human genome carries full-fledged retroviruses, as well as viruses in various state of decay. Scientists have identified 98,000 of these viruses, along with about 150,000 fragments of defunct viruses. All told, they make up 8 percent of the human genome. In many cases, the virus genes have disappeared altogether, leaving behind flanking repeats, which have been duplicated to millions of copies that take up about 40 percent of the genome. As a point of comparison, our 'own' genes — in other words, those that encode proteins that make up our bodies and allow our bodies live — make up only about one percent of the genome.

Bruce Crower’s Six-Stroke Engine

Bruce Crower’s Six-Stroke Engine adds a couple strokes to the usual four — intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust:

Bruce Crower has lived, breathed and built hot engines his whole life. Now he’s working on a cool one — one that harnesses normally-wasted heat energy by creating steam inside the combustion chamber, and using it to boost the engine’s power output and also to control its temperature.

If the inside of the cylinder's hot enough, you don't need to ignite gasoline to get a rapidly expanding gas; you can just inject water and get steam. That, of course, cools the cylinder back down again.

Invisible City

The Guardian looks at the Invisible City — the biggest city no one's heard of:

Every year, 8.5 million Chinese peasants move into cities. Most of their destinations are mere specks on western maps, if they appear at all. But their populations put them on a par with some of the world's megalopolises. Britain has five urban centres of more than a million people; China has ninety. A few — Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Nanjing — are well known around the world. The names of many others — Suqian, Suining, Xiantao, Xinghua, Liuan — are unfamiliar even to many Chinese. Nowhere is the staggering urbanisation of the world more evident than in Chongqing. Never heard of it? This is where the pace and scale of urbanisation is probably faster and bigger than anywhere in the world today. This is the Coketown of the early 21st century.

Set in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, this former trading centre and treaty port has long been the economic hub of western China. But after its government was given municipal control of surrounding territory the size of many countries, it has grown and grown, becoming what is now the world's biggest municipality with 31 million residents (more people than Iraq, Peru or Malaysia). The population in its metropolitan areas will double from 10 million to 20 million in the next 13 years.

Startup Names

Paul Graham on Startup Names:

Because so many names have been taken by squatters, a strange new phenomenon has arisen. It's now uncool to have a name that was obviously bought from squatters. It's like running Microsoft software on your servers. It suggests you have more money than brains, and that's not a good thing for a startup brand to suggest.

Hence names like Flickr, Writely, and Del.icio.us. These are the stars of recent startupdom, and yet they're living in decidedly marginal name space. It's a bit like when fashionable people started living in lofts in industrial neighborhoods.

And as happened with lofts, the features that initially repelled people, like rough concrete walls, have now become a badge of coolness. Weird names are now cool, if they're the right kind of weird. Nothing could be less cool, at this point, than calling a startup 'cool.com.'

Amish neighbors take just one day to rebuild home destroyed by twister

It pays to have salt-of-the-earth neighbors. From Amish neighbors take just one day to rebuild home destroyed by twister:

But in less than 15 hours, the Grabers were back in a new home rebuilt on the same spot — a peaceful valley south of Missouri 38 about 10 miles east of Marshfield — by more than 100 men and boys from neighboring Amish homesteads near the Grabers.

'By 2 p.m., we were mopping the floors,' he said.

Debris from the destroyed house was spread for hundreds of yards. Some still hangs in the nearby groves of trees. Fences were torn down. Wash lines snapped. Two other buildings and an outhouse were wiped away.

All were rebuilt in about a morning.

It is a remarkable testimony to the Amish spirit and credo that neighbors help neighbors in times of need.

'I figured there would be help, but I had picking up the mess more in mind,' Graber said.

His brother, Ernest, who lives nearby, said the entourage of workers 'looked like a bunch of ants' when it came to rebuilding the 36-by-64 structure that was a combination living quarters and workshop.

Theaters may ask to jam cell phones

The lastest news out of ShoWest is that theaters may ask to jam cell phones, which is common in some countries but illegal in the US.

For now, theaters have to rely on "funny fake movie trailers urging viewers to shut off phones."

Tamandua

Today's dose of cute comes from this baby Tamandua, or lesser anteater:

A three-month-old Southern Tamandua, also known as an anteater, walks during a press preview at the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo March 13, 2006. The baby Southern Tamandua was born last November, the first time an anteater has been borne and raised at an aquarium or a zoo in the country, an aquarium official said.

Sleep Disorder? Wake Up and Smell the Savanna

Richard Friedman regularly sees patients who think they have a sleep disorder, because they wake up in the middle of the night — even though it doesn't cause them any problem.

In Sleep Disorder? Wake Up and Smell the Savanna, he looks at just what constitutes a normal night's sleep:

It's a question that Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health asked himself in the early 1990's. He conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. He let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted during the experiment.

The first night, the subjects slept an average of 11 hours a night, probably repaying a chronic sleep debt.

By the fourth week, the subjects slept an average of eight hours a night — but not consecutively. Instead, sleep seemed to be concentrated in two blocks. First, subjects tended to lie awake for one to two hours and then fall quickly asleep. Dr. Wehr found that the abrupt onset of sleep was linked to a spike in the hormone melatonin. Melatonin secretion by the brain's pineal gland is switched on by darkness.

After an average of three to five hours of solid sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. Such bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals and also in humans who live in pre-industrial societies lacking artificial light.

Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, has studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations. From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.

She speculates that there may even be an evolutionary advantage to interrupted sleep. 'When we lived in open exposed savanna, being solidly asleep leaves us vulnerable to predators.'

Poverty-Stricken Africans To Receive Desperately Needed Bibles

The Onion's satire can be quite biting: Poverty-Stricken Africans To Receive Desperately Needed Bibles.

Conquest and the Beauty Gene

Art De Vany hypothesizes on the link between Conquest and the Beauty Gene, prompted by some fellow golfers describing a hot Russian "dancer" at a Vegas club:

I said she comes from a place where only the most beautiful women survived the Mongol conquests and mated with the wildest, fiercest males. I described the shape of the head and eyes of these women and likened them to the bust of Lenin, a wild, fierce man who was strikingly handsome as well. A touch of a Mongol brow over a European head, with a high forehead and a slight triangular shape, rounded at the top. I said she also had an hour glass shape because a woman must have wide hips to deliver a baby with such a head. Put these factors together and you have a real beauty. I said maybe there is something to this Russian bride thing and I think we all went away thinking we might see if we can find a web site.
[...]
You also get such women in other parts of the world where conquest and beauty come together; in the regions of France that the German tribes overran often (my part of the world, being German and French, with a French name). In Constantinopol where the Mongols killed everyone but the beautiful women. Images of Afghanistani women (now that they are free to shed their burkas) show this kind of wild beauty; they are Caucasian, not Arab, but come from a hilly terrain where local wars and wife stealing has gone on for eons. In the regions of Europe where the Vikings pillaged I bet you would see the same kind of beauty and fierceness in the people. Men's Journal claims that the most beautiful women on Earth are in Greenland. Not so much a place of conquest as one settled by a people who stole women from many parts of the world. Combine this with a narrowing of the gene pool amongst a small population subject to brutal conditions and you get survival of only the most beautiful women.

On the Vegas Strip, A Fast, Brutal Sport Deals Blow to Boxing

When the Wall Street Journal covers the UFC, the sport has arrived. From On the Vegas Strip, A Fast, Brutal Sport Deals Blow to Boxing:

For decades, Las Vegas was the biggest venue for boxing's prizefights, featuring ring stars like Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis. But with few new marquee names and younger spectators craving harder, faster action, heavyweight boxing's golden era has faded. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is muscling in with corporate sponsors, pay-per-view specials and star-flecked audiences. On Feb. 4, boldface names like Paris Hilton, Cindy Crawford and Charles Barkley showed up for a championship Ultimate Fighting event at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

Dana White, the UFC's 36-year-old president, says the sport fills a void left by boxing's failure to adapt to fans' changing tastes. 'The UFC is the most exciting combat sport in the world because there are so many ways to win and so many ways to lose,' he says. 'Boxing is your father's sport.'
[...]
In Las Vegas and some other cities, the audience for Ultimate Fighting matches can now rival or surpass big boxing matches. For the Super Bowl weekend matchup between Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell — UFC stars capable of earning $1 million or more per year — about 10,300 people packed the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Tickets ranged from $50 to $750, but scalpers commanded well above face value. Most fans were in their seat for the entire card, not just the marquee matchup. An image of spectator Paris Hilton, flashed on the big screen, drew lusty boos from the raucous crowd. The event took in about $3.4 million.

A few weeks later, a big junior middleweight boxing match was held at Mandalay Bay between "Sugar" Shane Mosely and Fernando Vargas, two of the sport's few remaining brand-name fighters. Though the venue seats nearly 11,000, only about 8,500 fans showed up to watch the bout. The fight took in about $3.5 million. A spokesman for Mandalay Bay's owner, MGM Mirage, declined to comment on why the venue did not sell out.

Genes decide if coffee hurts or helps your heart

Is coffee good for you or bad for you? It depends. From Genes decide if coffee hurts or helps your heart:

Coffee can raise or reduce your chances of suffering a heart attack — it all depends on your genes, researchers suggest.

People with a genetic makeup that causes them to metabolise caffeine more slowly have a 36% greater risk of heart attack if they drink two to three cups of coffee a day than people with the same gene who drink one cup or less a day, according to a new study. And if they drink more than four cups, this risk rises to 64%.

“Our data suggest that the longer caffeine is lingering in the system, the more harm it can do,” says Ahmed El-Sohemy at the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the study.

On the other hand, individuals who metabolised caffeine quickly and consumed two to three cups of coffee a day had a 22% reduction in the risk of heart attack compared with those with the same genetic makeup who consumed just one cup or less each day.
[...]
People who carry two copies of the CYP1A2*1A gene may break down caffeine up to four times faster than those carrying the CYP1A2*1F gene, according to El-Sohemy.

On Call in Hell

On Call in Hell tells one Navy doctor's story of his time in Iraq. In the process, it brings up a stat I don't often hear in the news:

By mid-December, Fallujah was secured. It had been the worst urban fighting involving Americans since Vietnam. At least 53 Marines and Navy SEALs died, as did something like 1,600 insurgents.

That's a 30-to-1 ratio of insurgents to Americans.

The Judo Rank System

As I recently noted, the origins of the various modern martial arts' belt-ranking systems are not shrouded in mystery. They all derive from The Judo Rank System:

In the days before Kano created Judo, there was no kyu/dan ranking system in the martial arts. A more traditional method of recognizing achievement was the presentation of certificates or scrolls, often with the secrets of the school inscribed. Kano started the modern rank system when he awarded shodan to two of his senior students (Shiro Saigo and Tsunejiro Tomita) in 1883. Even then, there was no external differentiation between yudansha (black belt ranks) and mudansha (those who hadn't yet attained black belt ranking). Kano apparently began the custom of having his yudansha wear black obi (belts) in 1886. These obi weren't the belts karateka and judoka wear today — Kano hadn't invented the judogi (Judo uniform) yet, and his students were still practicing in kimono. They were the wide obi still worn with formal kimono. In 1907, Kano introduced the modern judogi and its modern obi, but he still only used white and black belt ranks.
[...]
Other colored belts for students who had not yet achieved black belt originated later, when Judo began being practiced outside of Japan. Mikonosuke Kawaishi is generally regarded as the first to introduce various colored belts in Europe in 1935 when he started to teach Judo in Paris. He felt that western students would show greater progress if they had a visible system of many colored belts recognizing achievement and providing regular incentives. This system included white, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple belts before the traditional brown and black belts.

The Judo practice uniform and belt system eventually spread to many of the other modern martial arts such as aikido and karate which adapted them for their purpose. Karateka in Okinawa didn't use any sort of special uniform at all in the old days. The kyu/dan ranking system, and the modern karategi (modified judogi) were first adopted by Funakoshi in an effort to encourage karate's acceptance by the Japanese. He awarded the first shodan ranks given in karate to Tokuda, Otsuka, Akiba, Shimizu, Hirose, Gima, and Kasuya on April 10, 1924. The adoption of the kyu/dan system and the adoption of a standard uniform based on the judogi were 2 of the 4 conditions which the Dai-Nippon Butokukai required before recognizing karate as a "real" martial art. If you look at photographs of Okinawan karateka training in the early part of this century, you'll see that they were training in their everyday clothes.

Enter the McDojo

I'm not sure when I first heard the term McDojo — a friend thought I'd coined the term circa 1996, and I wasn't sure he was wrong — but I did a little looking, and someone named Dzu Nguyen used it back in 1992, in a Usenet posting, under the subject heading of Badass Karate (-Do?):

One thing i can't stand is the commercialization of teh martial arts. Things have gotten so bad with people inventing their own styles and techniques after only a limited time of study. I used to train at one of these McDojo's and i am thankful for many of the basic punches and kicks that i learned. However the instructor was asking for more money and wanted to sign me up for a 2nd dan program costing about 2 thousand dollars. It seems that many schools are franchised out to anyone with a black belt and the money. In essence many people do 'sell' out. It's a shame really.

I don't know if he coined the term, but it was unusual enough that someone else called it a "great word" for the common phenomenon.

In Fight Against Farm Subsidies, Even Farmers Are Joining Foes

As Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow point out, In Fight Against Farm Subsidies, Even Farmers Are Joining Foes:

There is a long history of mostly failed attempts to pare farm payments. But the current anti-subsidy sentiment, rising over the last year in the U.S., is stirring attention because it is unusually broad. Students for Social Justice at Baylor University in Texas have dumped cotton balls on the ground to protest cotton subsidies. The foundation of late Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt has teamed up with rock star Bono, whose movement wants to overhaul Western agriculture policies to boost African development.

Some facts:

Last year, the government paid a record $23 billion to farmers.
[...]
The government created subsidies during the Great Depression to fight rural poverty. At the time, 25% of the U.S. population lived on farms. Farmers could get federal money for producing commodities including corn, cotton and wheat when market prices fell below certain levels.

Today, farmers represent less than 1% of the population. Yet, thanks to labor-saving technology, their operations have exploded in size. Since subsidies remain tied to production, subsidy checks have ballooned. The government caps annual payments to an individual farmer at $360,000, though loopholes allow higher payments.

Most subsidies go to farmers who are wealthier than the typical U.S. taxpayer. Little of it goes to poor farmers because subsides are tied to production. According to an analysis by Environmental Working Group, 72% of subsidy money goes to 10% of the recipients. The group opposes output-linked subsidies on the grounds that overproduction hurts the environment. Nor do subsidies do much for rural economic development. Most rural people are no longer engaged in farming and two-thirds of those who farm are growing nonsubsidized crops such as fruits and vegetables.

Metal Is So Precious That Scrap Thieves Now Tap Beer Kegs

Metal Is So Precious That Scrap Thieves Now Tap Beer Kegs — and just about any source of scrap metal:

In the past few months, Belgium's main railway station has lost nearly all of its 800 aluminum luggage carts. German railway operator Deutsche Bahn says metal thieves recently dismantled and carted off three miles of idle rail track outside Weimar. In Beijing, a European commodities analyst noted, some 25,000 manhole covers have gone missing since the start of last year. They were replaced with concrete plugs.

How bad is it getting? Last month, groundskeepers at the Royal Johor Country Club in Malaysia discovered that somebody had taken the aluminum cups from 12 holes on the golf links.

It's a growing problem in the U.S., too, where crooks steal aluminum guardrails from highways and plumbing pipe from construction sites. Even military installations aren't immune. Metal scroungers have stolen about $50,000 in booty from the Concord Naval Weapons Station east of Oakland, Calif., Pentagon officials estimate.

The thieves are growing more brazen. In Oregon, two men and a woman dressed in orange workmen's vests arrived at the isolated Elkhorn Creek Bridge in the Willamette National Forest in November 2004. In broad daylight, they put out traffic cones, then dismantled crossbeams and handrails from the short bridge. They hit two more over the next year, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that owns some of the land. The bureau said the thieves trucked 3� tons of steel to a scrap yard outside Salem, the state capital.

With beer kegs, the crime spree began in the United Kingdom, where more than 250,000 wobbled out of circulation last year, according to the British Beer and Pub Association. Last fall, thieves scaled a chain-link fence and made off with 430 kegs in a single night from a storage yard belonging to Empire Distributors Inc. in Charlotte, N.C. The empty kegs had contained Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada and Pyramid brand beers. 'I don't know why they didn't just ram the fence down,' says Hank Bauer, Empire's sales manager. Empire is now locking its kegs in a warehouse to keep them safe.

Soul singer Isaac Hayes quits "South Park"

I didn't realize that Isaac Hayes was one of...them. From Soul singer Isaac Hayes quits "South Park":

Veteran soul singer Isaac Hayes, voice of the libidinous character 'Chef' on the satiric cable TV cartoon 'South Park,' said on Monday he was quitting the show, citing its 'inappropriate ridicule' of religion.

'There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs ... begins,' Hayes said in a statement.

Hayes, 63, a devoted follower of the Church of Scientology, did not mention a 'South Park' episode that aired last fall poking fun at Scientology and some of its celebrity adherents, including actor
Tom Cruise.

The invention of tradition (karate edition)

John Quiggin opens The invention of tradition (karate edition) with a general point about tradition:

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time.

He then goes on to cite Craig Colbeck's Karate and Modernity, which questions karate's mythic past:

And yet, in the 1921 Ryūkyū Kenpō: Karate, the first fully published karate text, little of this appears: karate is not a dō, lacks mythology, and is frank about recent Chinese influences. Reaching further back, to the unpublished writings of Itosu Anko, karate lacks even a name, makes no claims on the spirit, and mentions history not at all. Beyond that, the writing is in Chinese. Strangest of all, and most easily overlooked, is that through the 1920s there was only really one name: karate, the Chinese hand.

What are historians to make of this? Shall we dig through the historical record to discover the origins of these various traits? Plucking belts and uniforms from the history of judō, synchronized movement from the colonial period obsession with military drill, the division of new, jissen styles from their “traditional” parents — deriving their sport-orientation by the subtracting traditionalism of the latter?

I can remember being taught all sorts of mythic lore back at the strip-mall McDojo, including stories about the origin of the black belt. Look, we know the origin of the black belt. Jigoro Kano invented it, and the entire belt-ranking system, when he invented modern judo from traditional jujutsu in the 1880s.

Blinging Up Baby

Blinging Up Baby:

Pink leather Gucci shoes for $230. Louis Vuitton bags priced at $1,240. A $475 Hermes bathrobe. That's not a preview of fall runway fashions but a sample of new products available for babies. Yes, babies.

Couples waiting longer to start families have more discretionary income to spend on their offspring. Combine that with the recent boom in luxury products, and babies are a big opportunity for high-end brands. According to research firm Mintel International, consumers last year spent $445 billion overall on luxury goods, a 30 percent increase since 2000, and not all of it was for Mom and Dad. Sales of high-end products for babies grew an estimated 20 percent last year -- five times faster than the total $24 billion infant and preschool goods industry.

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration:

The lost boys of Prof. Albert Macovski are upon us. Twenty years ago, the ultrasound scanning machine came into widespread use in Asia. The invention of Macovski, a Stanford University researcher, the device quickly gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to determine the sex of their unborn children. The results, by the million, are now coming to maturity in Bangladesh, China, India, and Taiwan. By choosing to give birth to males — and to abort females — millions of Asian parents have propelled the region into an extraordinary experiment in the social effects of gender imbalance.
[...]
Many of the excess boys will be poor and rootless, a lumpenproletariat without the consolations of sexual partners and family. Prostitution, sex tourism, and homosexuality may ease their immediate urges, but Asian societies are witnessing far more dramatic solutions. Women now risk being kidnapped and forced not only into prostitution but wedlock. Chinese police statistics recorded 65,236 arrests for female trafficking in 1990–91 alone. Updated numbers are hard to come by, but it’s apparent that the problem remains severe. In September 2002, a Guangxi farmer was executed for abducting and selling more than 100 women for $120 to $360 each. Mass sexual frustration is thus adding a potent ingredient to an increasingly volatile regional cocktail of problems that include surging economic growth, urbanization, drug abuse, and environmental degradation.

Trapped in cubicles

Today, we're trapped in cubicles, but it wasn't meant to turn out like this:

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called 'monolithic insanity.'

Propst is the father of the cubicle.
[...]
After years of prototyping and studying how people work, and vowing to improve on the open-bullpen office that dominated much of the 20th century, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity (hence the name Action Office). The young designer, who also worked on projects as varied as heart pumps and tree harvesters, theorized that productivity would rise if people could see more of their work spread out in front of them, not just stacked in an in-box.

The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.

But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into little space," says Joe Schwartz, Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."

Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle's runaway success. Around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or "systems furniture," as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.

Why Students Of Prof. El Karoui Are In Demand

Why Students Of Prof. El Karoui Are In Demand:

When Xavier Charvet applies for a job at an investment bank next year, he thinks he'll have an advantage. The 24-year-old French student's resume begins with the phrase: 'DEA d'El Karoui.'

That stands for the postgraduate degree he is studying for under Nicole El Karoui, a math professor in Paris. She teaches skills required to create and price derivatives, the complex financial instruments based on stocks, bonds or loans. 'When I talk about El Karoui's master's, everyone knows' about the degree, says Mr. Charvet.

As derivatives have become one of the hottest areas for the world's biggest banks, Ms. El Karoui, 61 years old, has become an unlikely player in the business. Her courses at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and a state university, in such rarefied subjects as stochastic calculus, have become an incubator for experts in the field. A resume with her name on it 'is a shortcut because you don't need to train the person on the basics of derivatives,' says Rachid Bouzouba, a former student who is now head of European equity trading at the London office of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Really, how hard could stochastic calculus be?

An Athenian Puzzle

David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, describes himself as "an academic economist who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field."

He's a great source of historical tidbits, paricularly ones involving legal and economic issues, like this Athenian Puzzle:

The ancient Athenians had a very straightforward approach to the problem of funding government expenditures. If you were one of the richest Athenians, every other year you had to pay for something—sponsor Athens' team at the Olympics, pay all (later part) of the cost of the one of the triremes in the Athenian fleet, or the like.

If you were selected for such a task—called a liturgy—there were two ways of getting out of it. One was to show that you had already been assigned a liturgy for this year or had done one in the previous year. The other was to show that there was another Athenian, richer than you, who had not been assigned a liturgy either this year or last — and who should therefore do yours.

That raised an obvious problem. In a society without an IRS, without accounting, without modern banking and financial records, how do you prove that another Athenian is richer than you are?

I will give one hint to the answer: It was obviously invented, not by an accountant, but by an economist. Possibly a mad economist.

The answer is someting called antidosis, but you'll have to read the comments in the original post to find out what that means.

A place like many others

Wretchard argues that anarchic Iraq is a place like many others:

Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.

It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq. Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue "states" will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.

In leading up to that point, he makes an intriguing Napoleonic analogy:

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon's strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon's campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies — and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

What does "OK" stand for?

According to The Straight Dope "the origin of OK was conclusively established 30 years ago":

The etymology of OK was masterfully explained by the distinguished Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964.

The letters, not to keep you guessing, stand for 'oll korrect.' They're the result of a fad for comical abbreviations that flourished in the late 1830s and 1840s.

Read buttressed his arguments with hundreds of citations from newspapers and other documents of the period. As far as I know his work has never been successfully challenged.

The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 and spread to New York and New Orleans in 1839. The Boston newspapers began referring satirically to the local swells as OFM, 'our first men,' and used expressions like NG, 'no go,' GT, 'gone to Texas,' and SP, 'small potatoes.'

Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, 'oll wright,' and there was also KY, 'know yuse,' KG, 'know go,' and NS, 'nuff said.'

Most of these acronyms enjoyed only a brief popularity. But OK was an exception, no doubt because it came in so handy. It first found its way into print in Boston in March of 1839 and soon became widespread among the hipper element.

It didn't really enter the language at large, however, until 1840. That's when Democratic supporters of Martin Van Buren adopted it as the name of their political club, giving OK a double meaning. ('Old Kinderhook' was a native of Kinderhook, New York.)

OK became the warcry of Tammany hooligans in New York while beating up their opponents. It was mentioned in newspaper stories around the country.

Van Buren's opponents tried to turn the phrase against him, saying that it had originated with Van Buren's allegedly illiterate predecessor, Andrew Jackson, a story that has survived to this day. They also devoted considerable energy to coming up with unflattering interpretations, e.g., 'Out of Kash, Out of Kredit, and Out of Klothes.'

Newspaper editors and publicists around the country delighted in coming up with even sillier interpretations-- Oll Killed, Orfully Konfused, Often Kontradicts, etc.--so that by the time the campaign was over the expression had taken firm root nationwide.

As time went on, though, people forgot about the abbreviation fad and Old Kinderhook and began manufacturing their own etymologies.

Rat-Squirrel Not Extinct After All

Rat-Squirrel Not Extinct After All:

The long-whiskered rodent made international headlines last spring when biologists declared they'd discovered a brand new species, nicknamed the Laotian rock rat.

It turns out the little guy isn't new after all, but a rare kind of survivor: a member of a family until now known only from fossils.

Nor is it a rat. This species, called Diatomyidae, looks more like small squirrels or tree shrews, said paleontologist Mary Dawson of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The Cult

In The Cult, Wretchard notes that "deprogramming" techniques have proved successful in Indonesia, Pakistan and the UK on terrorist malefactors caught in Australia.

But treating insurgents like cultists isn't knew, Wretchard contends. After World War II, American commanders helped the Philippine government fight against Communist insurgents, and the Americans played on the insurgents' superstitious beliefs:

One psywar operation played upon the popular dread of an asuang, or vampire.... When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol.... They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next.... When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.

I hope I'm not a bad person for finding that darkly comical. This just creeped me out though:

The army unit captured a Huk courier descending from the mountain stronghold to the village. After questioning, the courier, who was a native of the village, woefully confessed his errors in helping the Huks. His testimony was tape-recorded and made to sound as if his voice emanated from a tomb. The courier was killed. His body was left on the Huk-village line of communications. Soldiers in civilian clothes then dropped rumors in the village to the effect that the Huks had killed the courier. The villagers recovered the body and buried the Huk. That night army patrols infiltrated the cemetery and set up audio-equipment which began broadcasting the dead Huk's confession. By dawn, the entire village of terror-stricken peasantry had evacuated! In a few days, the Huks were forced to descend the mountain in search of food. [owing to the disappearance of the support village] They were quickly captured and/or killed by the army unit.

And here's where the horror of counterinsurgency hits home:

Huks were bayoneted in full view of their supporters. Enemy casualties were piled in trucks, their arms and legs artfully made to overhang the edges of the truck, and the vehicles were ostentatiously driven though rebel strongholds.

As Wretchard points out, "today's readers will find it astounding and not a little disturbing to realize at what price the Cold War victories were won while civilians slept unmindful in their beds."

A Hoist to the Heavens

In A Hoist to the Heavens, Bradley Carl Edwards looks at the economics of a space elevator — "a superstrong, lightweight cable stretching 100 000 kilometers from Earth's surface to a counterweight in space":

It all boils down to dollars and cents, of course. It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram. With space elevators we could eventually make putting people and cargo into space as cheap, kilogram for kilogram, as airlifting them across the Pacific.
[...]
For example, 95 percent of the mass of each mighty Saturn V moon rocket was used up just getting into low-Earth orbit. As science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein reportedly said: "Once you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system." With the huge cost penalty of traveling between Earth and orbit drastically reduced, it would actually be possible to quarry mineral-rich asteroids and return the materials to Earth for less than what it now costs, in some cases, to rip metal ores out of Earth's crust and then refine them.

RiSE: The Amazing Climbing Robot

RiSE: The Amazing Climbing Robot is indeed amazing — and a bit spooky:

RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE's feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.

Each of RiSE's six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.

Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. RiSE is being developed in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

N.C. Probes Flesh-Eating Bacteria Death

N.C. Probes Flesh-Eating Bacteria Death:

North Carolina health officials are investigating the death of a woman who died last week of a flesh-eating bacteria three days after accidentally jamming her hand in a wheelchair while working at a nursing home.
[...]
North Carolina gets about 125 reports of the invasive form of strep annually, and about 10 percent are fatal, she said.
[...]
Sharon Bishop complained on Feb. 24 about a swollen thumb. She had jammed it at work and worried that she had dislocated it. David Bishop took her to Betsy Johnson Regional Hospital, where doctors gave her pain medication and sent her home.

The swelling got worse. By the morning of Feb. 27, her arm was twice as large as normal and looked like it would burst, David Bishop said. Fluid leaked from her elbow and wrist. She complained of terrific pain.

Dunn physician Abraham Oudeh diagnosed necrotizing fasciitis, an infection that destroys tissue.

Doctors at UNC Hospitals that evening tried to stop the spreading infection by amputating her arm at the clavicle and removing all the muscle and tissue around her left breast, torso and thigh in a futile effort to save her life.

Zero to 60 Mph in 3.4 Seconds

Zero to 60 Mph in 3.4 Seconds explains how the new Porsche 911 Turbo and Lotus Europa S get so much power out of "tiny" street-legal engines:

Drawing from engine designs and engineering know-how from the companies' racing car divisions, the Lotus and Porsche engines largely owe their performance boosts to pressure chargers, as they have in years past. While Porsche calls it turbo technology and Lotus says 'super charger,' both systems serve to pump extra air into the engine.

'You have to think in terms of horsepower per liter,' says Jamie Turner, chief engineer of powertrain Research for Lotus Engineering, which also offers engine design consulting services for major, yet undisclosed carmakers. 'You really need to go to a pressure charging system to get (certain) levels of performance (in certain small engine sizes).'

But the aspirated engine designs are just a starting point. Porsche's new 911 Turbo features what it calls variable turbine geometry, which allows the engine's turbine to crank up more rapidly.

The system works by relying on a small turbo charger turbine, which revs up first during initial acceleration and is then replaced by a larger charger to deliver the requisite power for the Porsche's 911 Turbo's 480 horsepower engine.

'Normally, when you push the throttle in with a big turbine, you can count one, two or three (seconds) and then the boost comes, but with this new turbine technology, you push the throttle in and you immediately have the response of the engine power,' Durheimer said.

Why hadn't anyone used this technology earlier?

This technology hasn't been introduced in the automotive market in engines up until now due to the 1,000 degrees Celsius temperatures the turbine blades generate, Durheimer said.

Injured Southern Illinois Cheerleader

A still image just doesn't do it justice. A Southern Illinois Cheerleader, Kristi Yamaoka, "fell about 15 feet onto her head during a routine late in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament championship" on Sunday

But she was OK — and she showed that she was OK by performing a cheer routine, while strapped down on the gurney.

The Stone Age Trinity

Max Borders explains The Stone Age Trinity — and why human instincts don't play out the way we'd like in modern, large societies:

The late philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out that when people compare themselves to one another, they are disposed to feel one of two emotions — guilt or envy. Guilt when someone has a lower station than you; envy when someone has a higher station than you. I would add a third to this mix: indignation. That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong. I refer to this complex of emotional responses to unequal life-stations as the 'Stone Age Trinity.'

Why do we have these egalitarian emotions? Religious folks would say we have egalitarian feelings because a benevolent God wants us to be charitable; or that greed is a sin. Moral philosophers might give us grand theories about guilt, envy and indignation that have to do with the 'moral law' or some other high-falutin' rationale — arguing, perhaps, that these feelings are a psychological complement to more enlightened reflection.

But I (and some others) think it has to do with the wiring of the brain — a neural circuitry configured over millennia in our evolutionary past.

Incidentally, the accompanying graphic is Frank Frazetta's Neanderthal, with Marx placed in the background.

Wild accidents captured in Russia's new Lefortovo Tunnel

When you remove the shackles of communism, and every hard-drinking risk-taking mobster gets a fast car, bad things happen. Here are some wild accidents captured in Russia's new Lefortovo Tunnel:

Security cameras in Russia's recently-completed Lefortovo Tunnel captured some pretty wild high-speed car accidents.

The 3.2 km tunnel appears rather cramped, but that doesn't stop any of these drivers from traveling at ridiculous speeds, nor has it prevented from being generally careless.

Lefortovo tunnel in Moscow is one of the deadliest tunnels in the world.

Watch the video.

Man Says A-L-L-A-H in Name Blocked E-Mail

Man Says A-L-L-A-H in Name Blocked E-Mail:

Ed Callahan said he started trying to establish the e-mail account after his mother, with the same last name, couldn't get one.

As he tried using various words, he determined that e-mail addresses with other religious words seemed OK, but not if they included the spelling of Allah.

I'm surprised Yahoo! didn't notice the problem almost immediately.

Anyway, here's where Callahan starts sounding less-than-reasonable:

"The war on terror is becoming a war on Muslims," Callahan said.

Yahoo explained that it was an attempt to prevent hateful speech:

"A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo's terms of service," the statement said.

Story of Honku

Aaron Naparstek opens Story of Honku with a bang:

I started writing Honku after a near-death egg-throwing experience around Christmas, 2001.

What is honku? Haiku about honking:

You from New Jersey
honking in front of my house
in your SUV

Oh, forget Enron
the problem around here is
all the damn honking

Smoking cigarettes
blasting Hot97
futilely honking

Terrorism is
a Lincoln Continental
leaning on the horn

Asymmetric Warfare: A Primer

C. A. "Bert" Fowler opens his primer on Asymmetric Warfare with a look at Frederick W. Lanchester, who devised some simple mathematical rules for examining symmetrical warfare — the "normal" kind of war we're used to, where armies go head-to-head on the battlefield:

Englishman Frederick W. Lanchester (1868-1946) was a major contributor to the foundation of automotive and aeronautical engineering. He also published works on radio, acoustics, warfare, and even relativity. His equations of combat form the basis of the science of operations research. (These equations have been used to formulate business strategy in recent times.) He was the first to describe the aeronautics of lift and drag. His automobile inventions include the gas engine starter, rack-and-pinion steering, disk brakes, four-wheel drive, and fuel injection.

In his historic 1916 paper 'Mathematics in Warfare,' Lanchester presents two simple differential equations relating force attrition to the number of forces or weapons in opposition and to their effectiveness (see sidebar 'Lanchester's Equations'). The equations' solutions show that the effectiveness of a force is directly proportional to the effectiveness of its weapons and to the square of its numbers.

The important take-away is that the effectiveness of a force is proportional to the square of its numbers, because as you lose units, you provide fewer and fewer targets for your enemy to concentrate on:

Note that each side engages only the remaining live targets. If neither side can tell when it has killed a target, as in some artillery duels, both sides must continue to shoot at all the targets, thereby wasting part of their efforts. Lanchester analyzed this problem also and showed that the impact of numbers is a linear not square law.

That's why damage assessment is so important.

Anyway, because numbers are so important, an outnumbered force needs to find a way to side-step the problem. Against the Soviets, the West originally relied on tactical nuclear weapons.

Then it decided to rely on improved surveillance and communication technology. Even if you're outnumbered, you can achieve local numerical superiority, by always being in the right place at the right time. That's how the Brits won the Battle of Britain against the German Luftwaffe. Their secret weapon? Early radar.

Alternatively, rather than simply having particularly good command, control, and communications systems, you can disrupt your enemy's C3 systems. That's what America's early cruise missile and stealth bomber attacks achieved in the 1991 Persion Gulf War.

U.S. trooper weren't 100 times as good as Iraqi troops, but intelligent tactics made them 100 times as effective. Anything that makes your forces that much more effective is what they call a force multiplier.

Naturally, other countries studied the American success, and they've been looking for their own force multipliers and asymmetries to apply against American forces.

Everyone has known for a long time that U.S. forces lose much of their advantage fighting in the jungle or the city. And an insurgency that can blend into the populace always has local superiority — they get to choose the time and place of every engagement.

Another issue is the U.S. dependence on nearby air bases. That hasn't gone unnoticed;

Iran, North Korea, Syria, India, and Pakistan developed longer range, more accurate ballistic missiles that would allow them to put any nearby bases at risk and, thus, attenuate or deny U.S. capabilities.

For example, the Iranian Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), with a 1-ton warhead and a range of 1200 miles, can cover the entire Arabian Peninsula and more. Such a weapon, even with a conventional warhead, could create serious problems for the United States. With a WMD warhead, the situation probably would be untenable. The Shahab-3 is a derivative of the North Korean Nodong missile. Clearly, the deterrent value of IRBMs is greatly increased if they have nuclear warheads—which probably accounts for the priority efforts by Iran and North Korea to develop such missiles.

Fowler closes with T.E. Lawrence's Principles of Insurgency:

1. A successful guerrilla movement must have an unassailable base.
2. The guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy.
3. The enemy must be sufficiently weak in numbers so as to be unable to occupy the disputed territory in depth with a system of interlocking fortified posts.
4. The guerrilla must have at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement.
5. The irregular force must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence, and logistical independence.
6. The irregular must be sufficiently advanced in weaponry to strike at the enemy's logistics and signals vulnerabilities.

As Fowler says, "On reading the rules, one can't help but wish someone in authority had studied them prior to the invasion decision."

New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found

Let the nightmares begin! This thing looks like it came straight out of Aliens. From New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found:

A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet deep at a site 900 miles south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.
[...]
The family was named Kiwaida, from Kiwa, the goddess of crustaceans in Polynesian mythology.

An Energy Pearl Harbor?

Gal Luft contends that the recent attack on a Saudi oil facility was an attempt at An Energy Pearl Harbor:

Osama bin Laden's strategy is based on the conviction that the way to bring down a superpower is to weaken its economy. We 'bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw [from Afghanistan] in defeat,' bin Laden boasted in his October 2004 videotape. 'We are continuing in the same policy to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy.' His logic, feasibility aside, is simple: Bring the United States to a point where it can no longer afford to preserve both its military and economic dominance. Then, as the United States loses standing in the Middle East, the jihadists can gain ground and topple regimes they view as corrupt and illegitimate, while defeating other infidels who inhabit the land of Islam.

Striking oil, which jihadists call 'the provision line and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader's nation,' is relatively easy and effective. Terrorists no longer need to come to the United States to wreak havoc here. They can hit our energy supply near the source, where they enjoy strong support on the ground.

Politically motivated attacks on oil pipelines in Iraq have kept more than 1 million barrels per day off the global oil market. Had this oil been in the market, the price per barrel would have been $10 to $15 lower, according to most energy analysts. For the United States, an importer of more than 11 million barrels a day, the terrorist premium alone costs $40 billion to $60 billion a year.

Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying, research shows

Does this surprise you? Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying, research shows:

In two experiments, one group of students studied a prose passage for about five minutes and then took either one or three immediate free-recall tests, receiving no feedback on the accuracy of answers. Another group received no tests in this phase, but was allowed another five minutes to restudy the passage each time their counterparts were involved in a testing session. Henry L. Roediger III

After phase one, each student was asked to take a final retention test presented at one of three intervals -- five minutes, two days or one week later. When the final test was presented five minutes after the last study or testing session, the study-study-study-study (SSSS) group initially scored better, recalling 81 percent of the passage as opposed to 75 percent for the repeated-test group.

However, tested just two days later, the study-only group had forgotten much of what they had learned, already scoring slightly lower than the repeated-test group. Tested one week later, the study-test-test-test group scored dramatically better, remembering 61 percent of the passage as compared with only 40 percent by the study-only group.

The study-only group had read the passage about 14 times, but still recalled less than the repeated testing group, which had read the passage only 3.4 times in its one-and-only study session.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

City Slinkers

City Slinkers describes the rise of the urban coyote:

Ken Ferebee was one of the first to notice. He's a National Park Service biologist assigned to Rock Creek Park, a 1,755-acre swath of woods, ball fields and picnic areas in the heart of Washington, D.C. Since 2004, he'd observed that deer killed by cars were mysteriously being dragged away, and he’d heard strange yips and yowls. Then, a year ago, he saw a coyote dart across a road just after dawn.

The coyote, that cunning canine of wide-open spaces, has come to the nation's capital. And to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities. In fact, coyotes have spread to every corner of the United States, shifting their behaviors to fit new habitats and spurring researchers to cope with a worrisome new kind of carnivore: the urban coyote.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Blame It on Voltaire

Andrew Higgins says, Blame It on Voltaire, as Muslims demand that the French cancel a production of Voltaire's 1741 Play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet":

"Fanaticism," the play that stirred the ruckus in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, portrays Muhammad as a ruthless tyrant bent on conquest. Its main theme is the use of religion to promote and mask political ambition.

For Voltaire's Muslim critics, the play reveals a centuries-old Western distortion of Islam. For his fans, it represents a manifesto for liberty and reason and should be read not so much as an attack on Islam but as a coded assault on the religious dogmas that have stained European history with bloody conflict.

When Voltaire wrote the play in 1741, Roman Catholic clergymen denounced it as a thinly veiled anti-Christian tract. Their protests forced the cancellation of a staging in Paris after three performances — and hardened Voltaire's distaste for religion. Asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, he quipped: "This is not the time to be making enemies."

Jean Goldzink, a scholar who edited a French edition of "Fanaticism," sees in today's tumult a repeat of the polemics aroused by Voltaire in his lifetime. "It is the same situation as in the 18th Century," Mr. Goldzink says. "Then it was Catholic priests who were angry. Now it is parts of the Muslim community."

Voltaire, the pen-name of François-Marie Arouet, peppered his writing with irreverent barbs that riled the Church. He described God as "a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh," and wrote that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Mr. Goldzink, the scholar, says Voltaire mocked all religions but had some sympathy for Islam, which Voltaire described as "less impure and more reasonable" than Christianity and Judaism.

Banned from Paris by France's Catholic king, Voltaire moved to Geneva. He quickly irked Swiss authorities, who burned one of his books. He then moved to a château a few miles from Saint-Genis-Pouilly and wrote a "Treatise on Tolerance." He later campaigned in vain to reverse a blasphemy conviction against a French noble, who was tortured, beheaded and then incinerated — along with a copy of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary."

Terry Tate: Office Linebacker

If you enjoy the Terry Tate: Office Linebacker ads — they're from Reebok, by the way — then you'll love the extended (3:41) ad.

Do people like happy endings?

Do people like happy endings? Yes:

Forty-one per cent [of respondents] are overwhelmingly in favour of books with a happy ending, as against 2.2% who like it sad. Women were 13% more likely than men to say they want it all to end happily. Almost one fifth of men expressed a preference for books with ambiguous endings.
[...]
Young people were most likely to prefer books with a sad ending - 8.6% of under 16s. Those aged 41-65, however, a group with more personal experience of sadness, dislike sad endings, with only 1.1% preferring books that end this way.

Those numbers come from the World Book Day website survey, so they're not exactly scientific, but they certainly do match common wisdom.

Personal Air Vehicle

MIT student Carl Dietrich has won the 2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for new Personal Air Vehicle design:

Dietrich’s most recent invention is a Personal Air Vehicle concept he calls Transition. It is a flying car that relies on the nation’s thousands of underutilized public-access airports to provide a practical transportation alternative to travelers whose trips range between 100 and 500 miles.

“If you were taking a trip between 100 and 500 miles right now, chances are you’d probably drive unless you were going between two airport hubs,” Dietrich said. “Driving is fine, but it can take you half a day to reach your destination, and you are subject to unpredictable traffic. Commercial airlines are effective for trips over 500 miles, but…they don’t really attack the short-hop market very well. Personal Air Vehicles open up a lot of possibilities in freedom to get around. They offer convenience and flexibility to fit the traveler’s schedule.”

Dietrich’s Transition can be driven on any surface road and requires only a sport pilot’s license to fly. The SUV-sized vehicle can be stored in most home garages and has folding wings that enable it to operate both on the ground and in the air. It can carry two people with their bags up to 500 miles on a single tank of premium unleaded gasoline.

The Transition also offers modern safety features including an electronic center of gravity calculator (important for weight distribution in flying mode), GPS navigation unit, front and rear crumple zones, airbags, and patent-pending deformable aerodynamic bumpers. Since the driver’s visibility is impaired when the wings are folded up, a tiny camera system embedded in the vertical tails provides direct views of blind spots.

He also designed a desktop-sized fusion reactor and a low-cost rocket engine.

Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging

I found this satirical video, Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging, much funnier than I was expecting.

Operations Research and RAF Bombers

What we now call operations research has it origins in World War II, where UK and US scientists applied their analytical skills to wartime problems:

For the survey, Bomber Command inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defenses was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas.
[...]
Blackett's team instead made the surprising and counter-intuitive recommendation that the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage, according to the survey. They reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that successfully came back from Germany. The untouched areas were probably vital areas, which if hit would result in the loss of the aircraft.

Woman Enters Exhibit, Elephant Smacks Her

Do people not understand the difference between cartoon animals and real animals? Woman Enters Exhibit, Elephant Smacks Her:

A 25-year-old woman climbed past barriers and into an elephant's zoo exhibit, then crawled out with minor injuries after the 6,000-pound animal smacked her with its trunk.

Home Economics

In Home Economics, Jon Gertner looks at Edward Glaesar's research on real-estate prices:

Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. He has previously noted (with a collaborator, Matthew Kahn) that 95 percent of the United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was, like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to construct higher buildings with more housing units.

So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations — which were enacted by locales in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the orderly growth of suburbs — had become so various and complex in the second half of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in nature and effect. Regulations in Glaeser's new hometown of Weston, for instance, made extremely large lot sizes mandatory in some neighborhoods and placed high environmental hurdles (some reasonable, others not, in Glaeser's view) in front of developers. Other towns passed ordinances governing sidewalks, street widths, the shape of lots, septic lines and so on — all with the result, in Glaeser's analysis, of curtailing the supply of housing. The same phenomenon, he says, has inflated prices in metro areas all along the East and West Coasts.

Who wants these regulations?

"I'm not in any sense trying to suggest that we want a developer's paradise where you can build anything, anywhere," he says. "But I sure as heck think the current situation happened by happenstance, happened by changing the legal norms, which in no sense is guaranteed to yield a socially desirable outcome." Homeowners, he points out, have a strong incentive to stop new development, both because it can be an inconvenience and also because, like any monopolist, stopping supply drives up the price of their own homes. "Lack of affordable housing isn't a problem to homeowners," Glaeser says; that's exactly what they want. "The thing you want most is to make sure that your home is not affordable if you own it. And for that reason, there's absolutely no reason to think that little suburban communities with no businesses that are run essentially by their homeowners will make the right decisions for the state as a whole, for the business in the area, for the country as a whole."

Annual Seal Hunt

Paul McCartney and his (newish) wife Heather Mills-McCartney are protesting the Annual Seal Hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Canada's Atlantic Coast.

The Great Escape

The Great Escape describes a live-action game making its way from Spain to the US:

Next stop: Times Square. Will Négone's planned 30,000-square-foot game center at 49th and Broadway appeal to US gamers? Today's videogame graphics and story lines are so sophisticated that aspects of La Fuga seem a bit canned and low-budget by comparison. La Fuga may be shooting for Halo's apocalyptic look, but the emphasis on discovery and puzzle-solving makes the experience flow more like Myst. The overwrought video clips smack of a bad telenovella. On top of that, the game's most compelling aspect — its physicality — could be too much for gamers used to moving only their thumbs.

But climbing ropes, tunneling through a roomful of plastic spheres, and squeezing through air ducts (just like in Aliens) can be pretty damn exciting — even without the rocket launchers, railguns, and frag grenades you get in the typical RPG. Maybe Négone's games will appeal to parents trying to get their Gen Y progeny out of the living room for a bit of exercise.

Even though I've never seen anything like it, the game somehow seems familiar. Then, on the flight home, it hits me: Eight years ago I went on a hardcore Doom jag for a few months and started having dreams that took place inside the game. That's what playing La Fuga feels like. It's a fully realized dream sequence. One thing I'm painfully aware of during my 13-hour plane ride: Falling down in a real-world game definitely leaves a real-world bruise.

Sweet Heart

Boing Boing points to this Sweet heart, an anatomically correct candy heart:

Artist Nathan Sawaya makes awesome Lego sculptures, but he also produces some super-sweet candy art. Case in point, this human heart fashioned from Necco Conversation Hearts, and "star bursts" made from Starbursts.

Leopard Cubs

Today's dose of cute comes from two recently born Leopard Cubs being fed milk from a bottle by a member of staff at the Assam State Zoo in Guwahati — which is in northeast India, by the way.

Stephen Colbert on Dungeons and Dragons Online

Stephen Colbert on Dungeons & Dragons Online:

Earlier this week marked the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons: Storm Reach, a new on-line version of the popular swords and sorcery game. I myself played a lot of the D and D way back when. Actually I once met Len Lakofka at Gen Con Ten.

Anybody?

I'll never forget when I lost Faraneeth, my level 21 Lawful Good Paladin. Heh. I know, that's redundant. He was on a campaign searching for Tenser, wizard of the Circle of Light, en route from the Sheldomar Valley to the Thilronian Peninsula. He got cornered by a displacer beast and a mind flayer and he failed to save against psionic attack. See, he'd already lost a lot of hit points battling a beholder, and the cleric in the party couldn't regenerate enough hit points with his heal light wounds spell. All in all, a sad day in Badabaskor.

But I gave up D&D in 1984. My parents were concerned I was being possessed by demons. So one summer they sent me to an exorcism day camp. Eight weeks of sailing, casting out the devils within me, and making lanyards did the trick. Oh, and I got a girlfriend.

Anyway, it is the end of an era. And as the cyber-elves and the e-wizards log onto the digital dungeon, I sadly place on my shelf these now obsolete polyhedral dice. The good news is with D&D now on the Internet, the social outcasts of today's junior high schools are relieved of the agony of any human contact.

Enjoy your magnificent isolation.

Don't forget to bathe.

Addendum: Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor was an early third-party D&D supplement.

Len Lakofka wrote the L series of adventures:

L1 Secret of Bone Hill
L2 Assassin's Knot
L3 Deep Dwarven Delve

Also, you may have heard of his character Leomund, who lent his name to several well known spells.

And now the video has been posted online at YouTube and on the Colbert Report site.

High Achievers: What Price Are They Paying?

In High Achievers: What Price Are They Paying?, a Harvard alum interviewer describes the kids he interviews, and how they're "running on empty":

He listed cross-country as a sport he took up in his junior year. No athletic endeavors had preceded his high-school running. I asked John* (all names have been changed) what had drawn him to distance running and why he came to pursue it his junior year. He replied matter-of-factly, 'My guidance counselor told me it would look good on my transcript if I had a sport. He said that colleges looked for well-rounded kids and that I needed something like a sport to look better for colleges. Time was running out and my junior year was the last year I could get a sport in before I sent in my applications. I joined cross-country because everyone makes it who tries out.' 'Do you like running? Does it give you pleasure?' I hoped. 'No,' was his hollow reply.

Peter had scored two 800s on his SATs and was recognized as a National Merit Scholar. As we spoke of his favorite high-school classes, I asked whether he had ever challenged any of his English teachers' opinions in class. Looking down at the floor, he spoke softly. 'Sure, I used to disagree lots of times. I mean, there's no absolute right answer when it comes to knowing whether an author was using her own life or not as the basis for the main character, right? But every time I'd disagree with this teacher or our textbook's opinion I'd end up getting marked down for it. So I learned it's better to tell teachers what they want to hear so you'll get a better grade.' Sadly, there was no anger or disappointment in his voice.

Sarah, class valedictorian and winner of numerous, prestigious math and science awards, spoke with a dull and disembodied affect about her academic triumphs and her future, 'Math and science have always been easy for me. I don't like them nearly as much as literature but they're what I do best. I guess I'll major in them in college, get a graduate degree in them and then get an engineering job and get married. That's what my parents (survivors of Cambodia's killing fields) expect. They want me to get an engineering job and to get married as soon as I get my graduate degree. I hope that I can save up enough money so that I can retire early, like in my 50s, and travel.' Sarah was 17, a broken sparrow, dying to be middle-aged.

All or Nothing

All or Nothing is a study of how fourth-grade high-achievers solve — or don't solve — math problems like this one:

Find the number
It is smaller than 100.
If you divide it by 7, there is no remainder.
If you divide it by 3, the remainder is 2.
If you divide it by 5, the remainder is 1.

Interestingly, many of them refuse to write down any intermediate work, and many of them won't persevere long enough to check that a number does in fact meet all three criteria.

Out of the Blue

JP Trenque won the BBC News Photographer of the Year 2005 competition for his underwater photography.

The Art of Raising Angel Capital

Guy Kawasaki explains that Raising Angel Capital "is not harder or easier than raising institutional venture capital — it's simply different." His advice:

1. Make sure they are “accredited” investors. “Accredited” is legalese for “rich enough to never get back a penny.”
   
2. Make sure they're sophisticated investors. Sophisticated angel investors have knowledge and expertise in your industry — they will have “been there and done that.”
3. Don't underestimate them. You can have an “early stage” company but not a “dumb ass” company, and angels care as much about liquidity as venture capitalists — maybe even more since they're investing their personal, after-tax money.
4. Understand their motivation. They've “made it,” so now they want to “pay back” society by helping the next generation of entrepreneurs. Thus, they are often willing to invest in less proven, more risky deals to provide entrepreneurs with the ability to get to the next stage. I know many nice venture capitalists, but I cannot tell you that any of them are motivated by the desire to pay back society. :-)
5. Enable them to live vicariously. That is, angels want to relive the thrills of entrepreneurship while avoiding the firing line.
   
6. Make your story comprehensible to a spouse. If you've got a “client-server open source OPML carrier class enterprise software” product, you must make it comprehensible to the angel's husband when he asks, “What are we going to invest $100,000 into?”
7. Sign up people that they've heard of. Even if the other investors are not buddies, investing side by side with well-known angels is quite attractive. If you get one of these guys or gals, you're likely to attract a whole flock of angels too.
8. Be nice. If you're seeking angel capital, you're probably not proven, so you can't get away with actling like a schmuck.

Jungle Patrol

Victor Hurley's Jungle Patrol is full of evocative stories from the American occupation of the Philippines a century ago:

Another tale concerned an early army experience in the Mohammedan country to the south. There the army had been building a road through the jungle, and a young Sergeant had taken his duties too seriously as a foreman of the road gang. One day he indicated a shovel to a proud Datu of the Mohammedans who was standing there, erect and aloof. The Mohammedan chief ignored the suggestion that he soil his hands with manual labor. The Sergeant lashed out with his boot.

A flicker appeared in that impassive Mohammedan's face. His hand tightened on his kris, and for an instant fire lighted the fierce eyes. An ancient American packer, junglewise and illiterate sauntered by to witness the scene. His great beard was stained with ill-directed tobacco juice and he was an object for laughter to the spick-and-span regulars. But he offered a note of excellent advice to the too earnest Sergeant. 'Kill 'em after you kick 'em,' he advised casually, 'or they'll git you, Son, sure as Ol' Billy Hell.'

The Sergeant grinned as the old-timer spat against the wind and sauntered on. The next morning, the Sergeant was still grinning as he lay beside the road. His head had been carelessly kicked away from his torso.

Gramscian Damage

I'm not sure what to make of Gramscian Damage:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithetic. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.

Here's where it gets a little too...conspiracy theory:

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence.

The Dark Side of China’s Rise

Minxin Pei examines The Dark Side of China’s Rise:

The record of China’s growth over the past two decades has proved pessimists wrong and optimists not optimistic enough. But before we all start learning Chinese and marveling at the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party, we might want to pause for a moment. Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.

Behind the glowing headlines are fundamental frailties rooted in the Chinese neo-Leninist state.

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece

Theodore Dalrymple declares A Clockwork Orange — the book — A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece:

A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them. To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius.

Dungeon Masters in Cyberspace

Dungeon Masters in Cyberspace interviews Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, on the new software version of the game, Dungeons & Dragons Online:

'The analogy I make is that pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games.'

Russia and The End of History

Lee Harris turns on the sarcasm in Russia and The End of History:

There was a point in time when geopolitical cynics might have worried that Russia was trying to achieve what used to be called 'a sphere of influence' in Iran. These cynics might even have worried that Russia might be deliberately courting and coddling Iran so that Russia could exploit to its own selfish advantage the current division between the West and that oil-rich and militant Muslim nation. Fortunately for us, however, our leadership no longer tolerates such cynics in their midst. Foreign policy in both the United States and in Europe has been purged of all such illiberal skepticism about the sinister motives of others. We all want the same things, don't we? Therefore, Vladimir Putin must be just as anxious to visualize global peace as any American soccer mom. As we all know, Russia is our friend, and not our enemy. Besides, we are at the End of History. Why would Mr. Putin want to start up history all over again — for example, by insisting that Russia should play a major role on the world's stage, as it once did, and not so long ago?

Russia's Global Roulette

Ariel Cohen describes Russia's Global Roulette:

Is Russia deliberately destabilizing the Middle East while benefiting from resulting higher energy prices? Sometimes it sure looks that way.

Why does anyone think science is a good job?

Why does anyone think science is a good job?:

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

Retail Without the Risk

Cheryl and Gary Casper have turned eBay sales into Retail Without the Risk:

That's because the Caspers now sell goods they don't even own. They look for vendors that have too much inventory (ideally, hard-to-find merchandise) and then sell the stuff on eBay. The sweet part: The vendors hold the inventory until after the sale. The Caspers only touch the stuff when it's time to mail it out. The couple's product assortment might sound dull — they specialize in floor mats for Ford (Research) automobiles — but their inventoryless business model is amazingly efficient and virtually risk-free.

The Caspers have teamed up with a Houston-based auto surplus company that supplies them with a product list. Some days they put as many as 50 mats up for auction, at $16 to $125 a pop. Once or twice a week, they drive to the warehouse to buy the mats they've sold. The profit margins are as much as 75 percent, even after paying the dealer. 'If I only wanted to make a few hundred dollars a day, I'd be done by noon,' says Cheryl, a former Merrill Lynch sales associate. Some days, she says, she and her husband make $700 in pure profit.
[...]
Peddling electronics on eBay, they found, is a sucker's game because of the vast number of sellers crowding that market. They used eBay itself as a research tool, punching in offbeat product ideas to gauge sales potential and competition. (Star Wars light sabers and gumball machines were two quickly discarded notions.) They even attended Chamber of Commerce meetings to find people with products to sell. "That's how your mind has to work," Cheryl says.

Eventually Gary called a friend in the auto surplus business. At first the Caspers considered hawking the man's excess spark plugs and brakes, but the technical knowledge needed to sell such items was beyond them. Then the Caspers learned that their pal had auto mats — lots of them, stacked three stories high in a warehouse the size of two football fields. Auto mats are easy to understand and market.

Is 'New Urbanism' Worth Added Costs?

A new study asks Is 'New Urbanism' Worth Added Costs?, and its authors seem shocked — shocked! — that people want to free-ride off of others:

Gerrit Knaap, a co-author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Urban Economics, says home buyers pay a premium for elements like connected street networks, smaller blocks, better pedestrian access to shops and proximity to light rail. But while they're willing to pay a premium to be near these elements, they don't actually want to live in the thick of them.

'The American public seems conflicted and self-centered' when it comes to where they want to live, says Mr. Knaap, who also is the executive director for the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. For instance, people like to able to walk to the store, but they don't want the store in their immediate neighborhood. They like having a street grid that is easy to navigate, but prefer to live on a cul de sac, a feature that disrupts traffic flow.

Homes in intimate and highly planned neighborhoods fetch 15.5% more than comparable homes in traditional subdivisions, according to the study.

In Quest to Build A Financial Center, Hurdles for Dubai

When the emir of the United Arab Emirates wanted to build a world-class port, he built it. When he wanted to turn Dubai into a Middle Eastern Las Vegas, he went all out, with the world's tallest skyscraper, the world's largest aquarium, an indoor ski slope, and a property development build on land shaped into a map of the world.

Now he wants Dubai to become a financial center, rivaling New York, London, and Tokyo. From In Quest to Build A Financial Center, Hurdles for Dubai:

In the latest phase of its development, Dubai sought to lure global financial firms to its soil. And if they wanted international legal and regulatory standards, Dubai was determined it would provide them — at least inside one section of downtown. After some wrangling with the U.A.E.'s central authorities, Dubai won permission to exempt its financial center from nearly all of the federation's commercial laws.

The U.A.E.'s central bank, under international pressure to improve its oversight, set some limits. It retained jurisdiction over investigations of possible terrorism financing and money laundering. But it let Dubai set up an entirely separate, Western-based commercial system for its financial district that would do business in dollars, and in English.

This included independent regulators and judges imported from the West. Dubai scored its first coup in 2002 when it lured Ian Hay Davison, a former chief executive of Lloyds of London, and Phillip Thorpe, a former senior British financial regulator, to set up and oversee the regulatory side of the proposed financial center.

Vannevar Bush

In 1940, Vannevar Bush — Vannevar is pronounced like receiver — managed to get a meeting with the President, in which he presented a single sheet of paper proposing what became the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), an organization meant to increase cooperation between civilian scientists and the military.

As the war came to a close, he wrote a famous article, As We May Think, proposing the Memex, or memory extender, a machine that would do what the modern Web does — using the technology of the time:

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.

Online loans help world's poor

Online loans help world's poor:

Kiva's story starts a little more than two years ago, when Jessica Flannery went to East Africa. She was working for a group that gives $100 grants to needy projects.

'Every single day, I would meet an entrepreneur, and hear about how $100 had changed not just his or her life, but also the lives of their families, friends and other community members,' said Ms Flannery.

'Take a goat herder in Uganda. If you give him $25, that's two smaller goats. That's a great start. With $100, you can imagine more goats, perhaps a small shelter, stock up on goat feed. So, that little bit of money can really help set someone up.'
[...]
The result is the Kiva website. Kiva is a Swahili word for unity or agreement. The site went live last year.

Kiva users are not donors, they are lenders. Matt Flannery calls it a kind of "peer-to-peer microfinance." Using the internet, Kiva lenders can loan out as little as 5 dollars to a project.

The challenge:

The challenge that these microcharity enterprises have is identifying great projects, vetting them, ensuring that they are on the level, and ensuring that they are using the money wisely.

A Real Rocket Bike

Rocket designer Tim Pickens has lived the dream of many a 12-year-old boy; he has built A Real Rocket Bike:

Pickens, president of rocket-design firm Orion Propulsion, created his first rocket bike with fellow speed enthusiast Glenn May by bolting a 35-pound-thrust rocket engine to Pickens's bike—enough power for a gentle push down the road. That project didn't kill anyone, so Pickens got himself another bike and stepped it up, attaching a 200-pound-thrust engine capable of blasting him from 0 to 60 miles an hour in five seconds—fast enough to beat a Porsche in a drag race. In fact, the rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design.

In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens's larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. His next project is to build a company car: a pickup truck with a removable 2,000-pound-thrust rocket strapped into the bed.

Stop Training Iraqi Troops?

Stop Training Iraqi Troops? Stephen Biddle argues that "Iraqization" won't work the way "Vietnamization" was meant to:

In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq's Sunnis perceive the 'national' army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids… to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hostile occupation. And the more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get.

The creation of powerful Shiite-Kurdish security forces will also reduce the chances of reaching the only serious long-term solution to the country's communal conflict: a compromise based on a constitutional deal with ironclad power-sharing arrangements protecting all parties. A national army that effectively excluded Sunnis would make any such constitutional deal irrelevant, because the Shiite-Kurdish alliance would hold the real power regardless of what the constitution said.

Energy independence is a disaster in the making

Justin Fox says that energy independence is a disaster in the making:

But I'm a big believer that words count, and the words 'energy independence' are potentially disastrous ones.

To put it most starkly: We could have energy independence tomorrow if Congress simply slapped a huge tariff on energy imports (would $250 per barrel of oil do it?). Meanwhile, skyrocketing fuel prices would shift the economy into reverse, throw tens of millions of Americans out of work, and what oil and natural gas we have left under our territory would be rapidly depleted.

Yes, homegrown energy alternatives like wind, solar and ethanol would get a big boost. But the biggest boom would probably be in mining and burning coal — the dirtiest and least efficient of the hydrocarbons, but one the United States possesses in abundance. Meanwhile, the other energy-importing countries of the world would go their merry way, paying vastly lower prices for oil and natural gas and gaining a huge competitive advantage as a result.

Nobody's seriously proposing such drastic action, of course. But the scenario above ought to make clear that energy independence isn't really what we want. What we want is the most possible economic bang for our energy buck, plus freedom from the feeling that a handful of oil exporting countries hold our national interest in their hands.

Thinking like a Genius

Some advice on Thinking like a Genius:

1. Look at problems in many different ways, and find new perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has publicized!)
2. Visualize!
3. Produce! A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.
4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.
5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.
6. Think in opposites.
7. Think metaphorically.
8. Prepare yourself for chance.

Which University of North Carolina?

Richard Feynman was always good for a story. From Which University of North Carolina?:

One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who looks at gravity.

I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the dispatcher, 'I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina.'

'Which do you mean,' he said, 'the State University of North Carolina at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?'

Needless to say, I hadn't the slightest idea. 'Where are they?' I asked, figuring that one must be near the other.

'One's north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same distance.'

I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.

That gave me an idea. 'Listen,' I said to the dispatcher. 'The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other, like 'G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.''

His face lit up. 'Ah, yes,' he said. 'You mean Chapel Hill!' He called the next taxi waiting in line. 'Take this man to the university at Chapel Hill.'

'Thank you,' I said, and I went to the conference.

Marijuana might cause new cell growth in the brain

Marijuana might cause new cell growth in the brain:

A synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

In mammals, new nerve cells are constantly being produced in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning, memory, anxiety and depression. Other recreational drugs, such as alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress this new growth. Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues decided to see what effects a synthetic cannabinoid called HU210 had on rats' brains.

They found that giving rats high doses of HU210 twice a day for 10 days increased the rate of nerve cell formation, or neurogenesis, in the hippocampus by about 40%.

To clarify, THC (D9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the active ingredient in marijuana, did not yield neurogenesis in mice; only its close relative, HU210 did.

Fruits, Veggies Not as Vitamin Rich as in Past, Says New Data

Fruits, Veggies Not as Vitamin Rich as in Past, Says New Data:

Fruits and veggies aren't what they used to be, new data suggests.

Of the 13 major nutrients found in fruits and vegetables, six have declined substantially, according to a study by Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Davis concludes that recently grown crops have shown decreases of up to 38 percent in protein, calcium, vitamin C, phosphorus, iron and riboflavin when compared with produce from past decades.

What accounts for this negative trend? Like any other competitive industry, farmers' attempts to drive up profits have led them to use new techniques to increase production, Davis said. The faster-grown fruits don't have as much time to develop the nutrients.

'Farmers get paid by the weight of a crop, not by amount of nutrients,' Davis said. He called this the 'dilution effect': As fruits and vegetables grown in the United States become larger and more plentiful, they provide fewer vitamins and minerals.

Our Columnist Creates Web 'Original Content' But Is in for a Surprise

In Our Columnist Creates Web 'Original Content' But Is in for a Surprise, Lee Gomes describes his experience penning "original content" for a web site that didn't want truly original content; it wanted popular existing articles on hot topics rewritten just enough to register as original content on search engines:

My beef, actually, is with the search engines and the economics of the modern Web. Google, for example, says its mission is 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' The way that's written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth, capturing all its information but interfering with nothing.

In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world's 'information.' Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. Nothing very useful about that.

For This Industry, Rising Foreclosures Are Good for Business

"Mortgage field services" is the highfalutin term for going into foreclosed properties and preparing them to be resold by the lender. For This Industry, Rising Foreclosures Are Good for Business:

Mr. McFalls owned and operated a gas station before he got into this business in 1999. He had heard about field services from a friend and saw more opportunity there — for someone with a strong stomach. For one thing, people sometimes leave pets behind. 'We found a beautiful Great Dane, starved to death,' Mr. McFalls says. Dirty needles and clogged toilets are other occupational hazards. In some homes, says Robert Preston, who runs a field-services business in Grand Rapids, Mich., his crews have found decomposed bodies. About a decade ago, while Mr. Preston was helping with an eviction in Indiana, a man being forced from his home shot himself to death, Mr. Preston says.

'After a time, you just become desensitized,' says D. Scott Smith, who ran a field-services business in Baltimore for about eight years before changing careers. He now invests in real estate.

Mr. McFalls says he feels sorry for some of the people whose belongings his crews cart away. But he thinks many people get into trouble simply because they have made bad choices, buying expensive cars and other luxuries instead of paying off their mortgages. 'The majority of them are just living far beyond their means and putting themselves in that position,' he says.