Back in the Saddle

Jackson Publick is Back in the Saddle — after a trip to Hawaii — and he's sharing the titles of this season's Venture Bros. episodes:

Powerless in the Face of Death
Hate Floats
Assassinanny 911
Escape to the House of Mummies
20 Years to Midnight
Victor. Echo. November.
Love-Bheits
Fallen Arches
Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner?
I Know Why the Caged Bird Kills
¡Viva los Muertos!
Showdown at Cremation Creek

Why Mad Scientists Are Mad

Sharon Begley, the science columnist of the Wall Street Journal, examines the cognitive nature of creativity in Why Mad Scientists Are Mad: What’s Behind the Creative Mind? :

There is little doubt that screening from conscious awareness that which is irrelevant to your immediate needs helps focus concentration. It may also be good for mental health, since paying attention to every little sight, sound, and thought can drive you batty. Indeed, reductions in this filtering mechanism, called latent inhibition, have long been linked with a tendency to psychosis. But Carson wondered whether that “failure” might also spur original thinking. To find out, she and colleagues had 182 Harvard students undergo tests in which they listened to repeated strings of nonsense syllables, heard background noise, and saw yellow lights on a video screen. The students also filled out questionnaires about their creative achievements (which is how Carson identified all those composers, scientists, and the rest), and took standard intelligence tests.

Comparing the measures of the students’ latent inhibition (how many of those noises and lights they noticed) with their IQ scores and creativity, the scientists found that the more creative had significantly lower scores for latent inhibition than the less creative. The truly eminent creative achievers, such as those who had achieved commercial success in the art or music world before the age of twenty-two, were seven times more likely to have low rather than high scores for latent inhibition. Low latent inhibition, it seems, increases the available “mental elements” — thoughts, memories, and the like, or what Carson calls “bits and pieces in the cognitive workspace” — that supply the raw material for originality and novelty.

“Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder,” Carson says. “But if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways.”

Just how closely linked are genius and madness?

In the largest study ever conducted of the connection between creativity and madness, Arnold Ludwig analyzed the biographies of about one thousand eminent men and women. He found that mental illness occurred more frequently in this group than it did in the general population. Specifically, 60 percent of the composers had psychological problems, as did 73 percent of the visual artists, 74 percent of the playwrights, 77 percent of the novelists and short-story writers, and 87 percent of the poets. But only about 20 percent of scientists, politicians, architects, and business people had even mild mental illness. In a similar study at the University of California, Berkeley, creative people were given psychological evaluations. Again, creativity was associated with psychopathology. Writers, for instance, scored higher than the general population on measures of depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, and other mental illnesses. As UC Davis’s Simonton concludes, “The genius-madness link may be more than myth.”
[...]
Another mental illness recently linked to creativity is bipolar disorder. In this illness, people experience alternating episodes of depression and mania, the latter characterized by intense bursts of energy, and, perhaps, creativity. Among the poets and writers suspected of suffering from bipolar disorder are John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, and playwright Eugene O’Neill. Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has found that 38 percent of the artists she studied had been treated for an emotional illness, either simple depression or bipolar disorder. In contrast, 1 percent of the general population suffers from bipolar disorder, and about 10 percent from depression.

Milton Friedman on the Open Mind

As Patri Friedman at Catallarchy notes, "Google Video is starting to accumulate a fair amount of interesting old content," like this interview of Milton Friedman on the Open Mind from 1975.

The opening and closing are remarkably Twilight Zone-esque — watch the video and listen to the music — but the content is a lucid explanation of "conservative" economics. (Friedman refuses to describe himself as conservative, by the way, given the New Deal status quo.) I found a transcript on-line:

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart — I share their — I admire them for the softness of their heart, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.

Another key point:

But I think the important part of the answer is that it is a natural human tendency to take for granted the good things that happen and to regard as the workings of the devil the bad things. And that if a bad thing comes along, you say, my God, we ought to pass a law and do something. That's a very natural human tendency. I think the remarkable thing, the thing that needs to be explained, is not why we've had a movement towards collectivism and towards more government control, because that's been the natural state of mankind for thousands of years. The remarkable thing in my opinion, from an intellectual point of view, is how you ever managed to get a century or a century and a half in which the dominant philosophy was the opposite. That's the exception.

India's economic report card

India's economic report card is not all good:

Given the huge positive press that India has received in recent times, it is sobering to discover that India's per capita income is just a shade higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa, and about one-sixth that of Latin America.

Equally surprising is that 35% of India's population lives on less than $1 a day, which is comparable to Bangladesh's 36% and much worse than Pakistan's 17% and Sri Lanka's 6%.

The common wisdom says that India has the second fastest growth rate in the world:

If we take the national income growth rate over the period 2000-04, with an annual growth rate of 6.2% India was not second but the 17th fastest-growing nation in the world.

If we take a longer period, 1990 to 2004, India moves up to being the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world, behind China, Vietnam and Mozambique.

And if we take an even longer view - from 1980 to now, India does indeed come second, behind China and virtually tying with Vietnam.

So what India has excelled in is sustained growth.

One issue is inequality in India:

Let us consider the ratio of income earned by a country's richest 10% and the poorest 10%. The ratio for India is 7.3. That is, the richest 10% of the population is a little over seven times as rich as the poorest 10%.

All South Asian nations have similar ratios.

This is a lot of inequality but not as much as in China which has a ratio of 18.4 or the United States 15.7.

OK, so it's not inequality per se that's the problem:

The problem with South Asia is that, being poor, even this smaller inequality means much greater hardship for the poor and this is what is feeding various kinds of rebellious movements in the region.

Burning Flags

Scott Adams (Dilbert) talks about Burning Flags:

I was delighted to learn that American politicians are trying to make it illegal to burn the American flag. That can only mean that my dedicated public servants have finally solved the problems of crime, drugs, war, poverty, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, and the mystery of why our children are such idiots compared to Norwegians. Evidently those issues are now under control. I was starting to worry that Congress was wasting my tax dollars doing stupid shit.

I heard Senator Frist compare the flag to a national monument. His point was that you wouldn’t want people to deface our one-of-a-kind historical treasures. Therefore we shouldn’t let people burn an American flag that is one of millions churned out every year by Chinese manufacturers. I think that was his best argument. I know it seems dumb when I recount it, but there was something about the robotic way Frist said it that gave me chills.

I consider myself a highly patriotic guy and I understand how people can get worked up over the flag being burned. I love my flag. But symbols are personal things, and everyone is free to interpret them however they see fit. For me, a flag that I’m NOT allowed to burn is a symbol that the government is too intrusive in my life. And it’s an insult to anyone who died to defend freedom. But that’s just me. You might prefer your symbols of freedom to have as many restrictions as possible.

Hollywood Business

I love this line from Alan Deutschman's Hollywood Business:

Hollywood's moguls know they're in big trouble when the single most powerful person in the industry today is Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.

Why is Wal-Mart so important to Hollywood?

The theatrical release has become a loss leader to promote the studios' real moneymaker, the DVD, which in turn often serves as a loss leader for Wal-Mart to draw in shoppers.

Hanging Monastery in China

This Hanging Monastery in China is a fascinating piece of work:

The monastery dates back over 1400 years to the Northern Wei Dynasty. However, most of what you see today are reconstructions made during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties.

The caves behind the pavilions contain religious statues. One cave room has the statues of Buddha, Confucius and Laotsu comfortably sitting side by side. This is noteworthy because simultaneously advocating Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism was rare in ancient China.

The pavilions are constructed almost entirely of wood (except for the decorative multi-hued roof tiles).

Narrow, thin railed skyways connect the pavilions.

The pavilions "hang" partially because long timber poles support them from underneath (see photo). However, the greatest structural support comes from unseen rock ledges upon which parts of the pavilions sit — and from the cantilevered wooden beams deeply imbedded into the cliff.

The Chinese name of the Hanging Monastery is Xuankong.

The monastery is also known as the Hengshan Hanging Monastery. It gets its "Hengshan" descriptive because it is located at the foot of Mount Heng (Hengshan), one of the five holy Taoist mountains of China.

Disney, 1939: No woman animators allowed

In 1939, Disney responded to a female applicant with the unequivocal message: No woman animators allowed:

Dear Miss Brewer:

Your letter of some time ago has been turned over to the Inking and Painting Department for reply.

Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.

To qualify for the only work open to women one must be well grounded in the use of pen and ink and also water color. The work to be done consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the tracings on the reverse side with pain according to directions.

In order to qualify for a position as "Inker" or "Painter" it is necessary that one appear at the studio on a Tuesday morning between 9:30 and 11:30, bringing samples of pen and ink and water color work. We will be glad to talk to you further should you come in.

Yours very truly,

WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS

Message from Dan

In his latest Message from Dan, author Dan Simmons comments on his recent Time Traveler piece and the threat posed by radical Islam:

Why did our fictional Time Traveler return to New Year’s Eve 2005? The paradoxical answer might be that it was the last real time of peace he knew of in the 21st Century.

"Forgetfulness overcomes every successful civilization," writes Lee Harris. That forgetfulness is this: in each era, just when trade and peace and reason and moderation seem most likely to prevail, the opportunity for the zealots to succeed through ruthlessness is at its greatest.

"The result is an unsettling paradox: the more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. There is nothing that can be done to change this fact; it is built into the structure of our world."

The Renewal of the West

Jerry Bowyer disagrees with Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West in his own The Renewal of the West:

If 200 years from now America will be filled with people who know and love the ideas of Jefferson and Madison — but these people are overwhelmingly dark skinned — will this be good or bad?

That's the question I asked Pat Buchanan when I debated with him about the content of his book, The Death of the West. He said it would be a disaster and a tragedy. What do you say?

Your answer is a pretty good indicator of whether you're a we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident conservative or a blood-and-soil conservative.

Bowyer offers up an amusing way to look at misplaced racial pride:

A few years ago, I was studying the life of Charlemagne. His troops had been continually harassed by tribes who would attack, be defeated, surrender, make a treaty and violate the treaty as soon as Charlemagne's troops were out of sight. They did this over and over again. I was reminded of various Palestinian 'pledges' to abandon terrorism. I wondered whether groups like this could ever learn to honor their treaties and live according to the rule of law. Then I realized that the people who were harassing Charlemagne were my ancestors. If you are of Northern European stock, or British or Irish, and you are tempted to racial pride, I highly recommend that you study Romans like Tacitus or Caesar to get some idea how your ancestors looked to the civilized world 2000 years ago.

An Economist's Guide to Happier Parenting

Bryan Caplan offers An Economist's Guide to Happier Parenting:

My main observation about parental unhappiness is this: The last 10% of parenting hours causes half of all the parental unhappiness. First two hours with your kids: a joy. Second two hours: pretty good. Hours 5-8: Tolerable. Hours nine and ten: Pain. Remaining hours: Anguish. There are few better illustrations of the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Once you see this clearly, there are some obvious solutions:

1. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Don't plan three activities every Saturday, and wind up exploding at your kids' behavior in the middle of the third. It's far better for them and you to do one thing together that you can all enjoy, then let them watch t.v. Seriously.
2. If you can afford a nanny, get a nanny. If you can't afford a nanny yet, consider waiting to have kids until you can. If you're the typical person who isn't sure if he or she wants kids, you're well-educated and have good income potential. So if you can't afford a nanny yet, you'll be able to soon enough.
3. Don't let American prejudice against live-in nannies influence you: Live-in nannies mean you can sleep in, stay out, and get a break when you need one. Your best bet is to get a mature woman to bond with your kids when they're infants, and keep her happy. A little respect goes a long way.
4. Read Judith Harris' The Nurture Assumption. Don't worry about 'moulding' your child for life; you couldn't do it if you tried. Realize, instead, that the purpose of discipline is:
   1. To keep your kid in one piece.
   2. To make your life easier - you count too!
   3. To force your kid to sacrifice very short-run gains (playing ten more minutes) for short-run gains (not being cranky later today)

Thus, I am adamant about naps. Partly this is because little kids get cranky without their naps, but refuse to accept the fact. But mostly it's because I'll be cranky if I don't get a nap, and I can't nap if they don't.

If you can't mould your child, what's the point? As Harris observes, that's a lot like asking 'If you can't mould your wife, what's the point?' The point is to enjoy your time together.

The India Model

Gurcharan Das, former CEO of Procter & Gamble India, discusses The India Model and its history:

For half a century before independence, the Indian economy was stagnant. Between 1900 and 1950, economic growth averaged o.8 percent a year — exactly the same rate as population growth, resulting in no increase in per capita income. In the first decades after independence, economic growth picked up, averaging 3.5 percent from 1950 to 1980. But population growth accelerated as well. The net effect on per capita income was an average annual increase of just 1.3 percent.

Indians mournfully called this "the Hindu rate of growth." Of course, it had nothing to do with Hinduism and everything to do with the Fabian socialist policies of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his imperious daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who oversaw India's darkest economic decades. Father and daughter shackled the energies of the Indian people under a mixed economy that combined the worst features of capitalism and socialism. Their model was inward-looking and import-substituting rather than outward-looking and export-promoting, and it denied India a share in the prosperity that a massive expansion in global trade brought in the post-World War II era. (Average per capita growth for the developing world as a whole was almost 3 percent from 1950 to 1980, more than double India's rate.) Nehru set up an inefficient and monopolistic public sector, overregulated private enterprise with the most stringent price and production controls in the world, and discouraged foreign investment — thereby causing India to lose out on the benefits of both foreign technology and foreign competition. His approach also pampered organized labor to the point of significantly lowering productivity and ignored the education of India's children.

But even this system could have delivered more had it been better implemented. It did not have to degenerate into a "license-permit-quota raj," as Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari first put it in the late 1950s. Although Indians blame ideology (and sometimes democracy) for their failings, the truth is that a mundane inability to implement policy — reflecting a bias for thought and against action — may have been even more damaging.

Life of the Party

In Life of the Party, Adam Gopnik looks at the unusual conservative who became prime minister of Great Britain, Benjamin Disraeli:

A salacious imagination is not needed to wonder about the sexual orientation of a man who dresses up in pirate garb, writes novels gasping after gorgeous, ignorant young lords, enjoys a series of passionate friendships with handsome younger men, has his closest female relations with sisters and much older women, and defends, as Disraeli did, the love life of the Turks.

The abolition of slavery

Howard Temperley looks at the unlikely abolition of slavery and shares some little-known facts:

What is surprising is the discovery that a mere 500,000 slaves, 5–6 per cent of the total, went to North America — a figure roughly comparable to the number of West Indians migrating to the United Kingdom over the past fifty years. This contrasts with the 3.5 million who went to Brazil. The difference is largely attributable to the exceptional physical demands of sugar. In Brazil, as in other sugar-producing regions, life expectancy and fertility rates were so low that the only way of maintaining a stable workforce was by shipping in more slaves. When Britain withdrew from the slave trade in 1807, the effect on its colonies’ economy and population was catastrophic. In contrast, the withdrawal of the US from the slave trade, in 1808, had no discernible effect on its slave population, which, being principally employed in tobacco and cotton cultivation, had achieved a rate of natural increase not unlike that of the white population.

The Secret of Your Success

Adrian Wooldridge reviews the history of thought on social mobility in The Secret of Your Success:

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three highly distinct theories of social mobility captivated the imaginations of successive generations of commentators — one based on character; one based on ability, by which psychologists increasingly meant native intelligence; and one based on luck.

Read the whole article for the details.

South Africa's Second Coming: The Nongqawuse Syndrome

In South Africa's Second Coming: The Nongqawuse Syndrome, Achille Mbembe explains that "a dozen years after apartheid ended, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide" — in a manner reminiscent of the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856-57:

By that time, the Xhosa had been involved in nearly a half century of bloody and protracted wars with colonial settlers on the eastern frontier of their homeland. As a result of the deliberate destruction of their means of livelihood, confiscation of their cattle and the implementation of a scorched-earth policy by British colonialists, they had lost a huge portion of their territory and hundreds of thousands of their people had been displaced. As lung-sickness spread across the land in 1854, a number of prophets proclaiming an ability to bring all cattle back to life began to re-emerge.

Then, a 16-year-old girl, Nongqawuse, had a vision on the banks of the Gxarha River. She saw the departed ancestors who told her that if people would but kill all their cattle, the dead would arise from the ashes and all the whites would be swept into the sea. The message was relayed to the Xhosa nation by her uncle, Mhalakaza. Although deeply divided over what to do, the Xhosa began killing their cattle in February 1856. They destroyed all their food and did not sow crops for the future. Stored grain was thrown away. No further work was to be done. Days passed and nights fell. The resurrection of the dead Xhosa warriors never took place.

In his book The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7, historian JB Peires contends that by May 1857, 400,000 cattle had been slaughtered and 40,000 Xhosa had died of starvation. At least another 40,000 had left their homes in search of food. According to Dr John Fitzgerald, founder of the Native Hospital who witnessed the events, one could see thousands of those "emaciated living skeletons passing from house to house" in places such as King Williams Town. Craving for food, they subsisted on nothing "but roots and the bark of the mimosa, the smell of which appeared to issue from every part of their body."

As the whole land was surrounded by the smell of death, Xhosa independence and self-rule had effectively ended.

Hydrogen Atom Scale Model

This Hydrogen Atom Scale Model may not be too practical, but it makes its point:

The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is... yep, fifty million pixels (not a hundred million, because we're only showing the radius of the atom. ie: from the middle to the edge). If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles — making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen.

The Power of the Marginal

I love the opening anecdote to Paul Graham's The Power of the Marginal:

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those guys must have been freezing!"

That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't just tinker. You have to justify.

Graham goes through a list of advantages to being an outsider rather than an insider. One "advantage" to being an outsider is that becoming an insider often involves an "anti-test" — "filtering out the people it should select by making them to do things only the wrong people would do":

For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it's hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric — or Microsoft, actually.
[...]
I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don't realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.

Read the whole essay.

World Cup Game Theory

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) explains "what economics tells us about penalty kicks" in World Cup Game Theory:

In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net — unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.

Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.
[...]
Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias.

The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.

Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful.

It turns out that real players do — intuitively — understand this:

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations — in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.

Stealth Radar System Sees Through Trees, Walls — Undetected

From Stealth Radar System Sees Through Trees, Walls — Undetected:

The radar scatters a very low-intensity signal across a wide range of frequencies, so a TV or radio tuned to any one frequency would interpret the radar signal as a very weak form of static.

"It doesn't interfere because it has a bandwidth that is thousands of times broader than the signals it might otherwise interfere with," Walton said.

Like traditional radar, the "noise" radar detects objects by bouncing a radio signal off them and detecting the rebound. The hardware isn't expensive, either; altogether, the components cost less than $100.

The difference is that the noise radar generates a signal that resembles random noise, and a computer calculates very small differences in the return signal. The calculations happen billions of times every second, and the pattern of the signal changes constantly. A receiver couldn't detect the signal unless it knew exactly what random pattern to look for.

The radar can be tuned to penetrate solid walls — just like the waves that transmit radio and TV signals — so the military could spot enemy soldiers inside a building without the radar signal being detected, Walton said. Traffic police could measure vehicle speed without setting off drivers' radar detectors. Autonomous vehicles could tell whether a bush conceals a more dangerous obstacle, like a tree stump or a gulley.

American Coup D'Etat

In American Coup D'Etat, "military thinkers discuss the unthinkable" — and all agree that it's largely impossible:

LUTTWAK: You would sit in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the first place where you wouldn’t be obeyed would be inside your office. If they did follow orders inside the office, then people in the rest of the Pentagon wouldn’t. If everybody in the Pentagon followed orders, people out in the military bases wouldn’t. If they did, as well, American citizens would still not accept your legitimacy.

RICHARD KOHN: It’s a problem of public opinion. All of the organs of opinion in this country would rise up with one voice: the courts, the media, business leaders, education leaders, the clergy.

Of course, the military doesn't need to commit a coup:

BACEVICH: But this does bring up another crucial reason there could never be a military coup in the United States: the military has learned to play politics. It doesn’t need to have a coup in order to get what it wants most of the time. Especially since World War II, the services have become very skillful at exploiting the media and at manipulating the Congress—particularly on the defense budget, which is estimated now to be equal to that of the entire rest of the world combined.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't imagine a scenario leading to a coup:

LUTTWAK: Such a scenario would probably play out through a multi-stage transformation. After all, take any group of nice people on a trip; if five bad things happen to them in a row, they will end up as cannibals. How many adverse events are needed before a political system, arguably the most firmly rooted constitutional system in the history of the world, becomes uprooted? How many September 11ths, on what scale? How much panic, what kind of leadership? All of us can say that it is foolish to talk of a coup in the United States, but any of us could design a scenario by which a coup becomes possible.

Americans trust their military:

DUNLAP: Americans today have an incredible trust in the military. In poll after poll they have much more confidence in the armed forces than they do in other institutions. The most recent poll, just this past spring, had trust in the military at 74 percent, while Congress was at 22 percent and the presidency was at 44 percent. In other words, the armed forces are much more trusted than the civilian institutions that are supposed to control them.

The Holy Grail in a Grain of Rice

Dr. Henry I. Miller descrobes The Holy Grail in a Grain of Rice:

The researchers found that when lactoferrin and lysozyme are added to rice-based oral rehydration solution, the duration of children's illness is cut from more than five days to three and two-thirds. This improvement is thought to be caused by the antimicrobial effect of lysozyme, which has long been known to be one of the primary protective proteins in breast milk. Moreover, over the twelve-month follow-up period, the children who had received the lactoferrin and lysozyme had less than half the recurrence rate of diarrhea (eight percent versus eighteen percent in the controls). This effect is probably caused by lactoferrin, which promotes repair of the cells of the intestinal mucosa damaged by diarrhea.

These developments represent significant progress in managing diarrhea and keeping it from becoming a chronic, recurring health risk.

What makes this approach feasible is Ventria's invention of a method to produce human lactoferrin and lysozyme in genetically modified rice, a process dubbed "biopharming." This is an inexpensive and ingenious way to synthesize the huge quantities of the proteins that will be necessary. (In effect, the rice plants' inputs are carbon dioxide, water and the sun's energy.)

Naturally this "holy grail" is the target of protests.

That's Your Cue

In That's Your Cue, Arnold Kling argues that many bits of religious and political dogma serve as "trust cues" to enable teamwork with strangers — and that's why rational empiricism rarely wins out:

The most trustworthy groups are groups where membership is valuable and excommunication is costly. They are groups that monitor the behavior of their members closely.

The most trustworthy individuals are individuals who regularly show a willingness to sacrifice for the group. Attending religious worship every week, paying a tithe, and participating in ritual fasts are examples of demonstrating religious loyalty. These sorts of sacrifices are indicators that the individual values membership in the group, and they show that the individual would fear excommunication from the group.

The best trust cues are those that can be presented at low cost by members of the group but would be costly to fake for non-members. Thus, odd dialects and unusual phrases can serve as trust cues.

Not Yours To Give

Not Yours To Give was originally published in The Life of Colonel David Crockett, by Edward Sylvester Ellis:

One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

"Mr. Speaker — I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it.

We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I ever heard that the government was in arrears to him.

"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

We will be able to live to 1,000

Aubrey de Grey has long been saying that We will be able to live to 1,000. The news is that BBC News is publishing his piece:

If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.

And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence — you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry.

Geeks and Math Nerds are Taking Over Poker

They used to rule over geek-staples like Magic the Gathering and any number of computer games, but now Geeks and Math Nerds are Taking Over Poker:

David Williams, who came in second behind Greg Raymer in the 2004 World Series of Poker, was a well-known Magic player before he ventured into poker. His appearance at the World Series of Poker wasn’t a fluke; he has final tabled numerous major events since then.

Elky, a well-known and very successful online player, was one of the top Starcraft players in the world before he saw the potential in online poker and switched his game of choice.

Actionjeff, one of the most successful players online (at only 18 years of age, he has already won close to a million dollars online) was at one time the highest ranked Magic player in the US.

Dan Osman

Rock-climber Dan Osman performs a "free solo" — that means he uses no ropes, harness, or other "protection" — of Bear's Reach, in California.

It's just a 5.7 climb, not at all difficult for an experienced climber, but he's doing it for speed.

Nation's Elite AWOL From Military

From Nation's Elite AWOL From Military:

As recently as 1956, 400 members of Princeton's graduating class went on to serve in the military. In 2004, nine graduates did so. Harvard, Yale, Brown and other elite universities don't even allow Reserve Officer Training Courses on their campuses.

In the years after World War II, virtually every member of Congress was a veteran of military service. By 1971, three-quarters of the members had worn the uniform. Today, only a third of the 535 members of the Senate and the House of Representatives have served.

The consequences:

• Not having veterans throughout the decision-making process damages the country's ability to make sound decisions on the use of our military. Without them, the political leadership has less understanding of the true cost of war and who pays that price.
• Any division between the military and the rest of us weakens the country and, the authors argue, increases the risk that the military "will be overused and under-led and that support will run out fast for any project that becomes a political liability."
• Finally, "When those who benefit most from living in a country contribute the least to its defense and those who benefit least are asked to pay the ultimate price, something happens to the soul of that country."

Ethanol Investing: Counterpoint

In Ethanol Investing: Counterpoint, Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer who has worked on alternative fuels, explains two common misconceptions about ethanol:

The first misconception is that ethanol has the potential to make us energy independent, or to displace significant amounts of foreign oil. The second is that Brazil’s energy independence “miracle” can be replicated in the U.S.

On the first point:

According to a 2002 USDA report on corn ethanol, “The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update”, it takes 77,228 BTUs of fossil fuel inputs (natural gas, gasoline, and diesel) to produce 83,961 BTUs of ethanol. This gives a ratio of ethanol output/fossil fuel inputs of only 1.09.

On the second point:

The question then arises: “Just how much did widespread use of ethanol in Brazil contribute toward their energy independence?” The answer is: “Not much”. In 2005, Brazil produced 4.8 billion gallons of ethanol, or 114 million barrels. However, a barrel of ethanol contains approximately 3.5 million BTUs, and a barrel of oil contains approximately 6 million BTUs. Therefore, 114 million barrels of ethanol only displaced 67 million barrels of oil, around 10% of Brazil’s oil consumption. In other words, Brazil’s energy independence miracle was 10% ethanol and 90% domestic crude oil production. Brazil did not farm their way to energy independence.

Mark Sisson on Steroids in Sports

Art De Vany reprints a letter from Mark Sisson on Steroids in Sports, explaining why the notion of a fair playing field is a farce:

Hard training raises EPO and hematocrit, but drug companies also make artificial EPO which does the same thing without training (intended medical use is for recovery from chemotherapy which destroys RBCs). Artificial EPO is banned. Now here’s the irony: research confirms that if you train at sea level and sleep at 14,000 feet, your body makes red blood cells at an impressive rate and amount. Several companies have developed expensive “altitude chambers” for home use where you can now train at sea level and then retire to your room for the night, simulating an altitude of 14,000 feet or higher. The end result is that you have, within the letter of the law, manipulated your own EPO to artificially raise hematocrit, yet using artificial EPO to do the same thing is punishable by a 2-year suspension. Talk to an endurance athlete from a developing nation with $2 to his name about THAT level playing field.

The Confederados

The Confederados were southerners who moved even further south after the War of Northern Aggression:

Immediately following the American Civil War, some Confederate southerners were unwilling to live under the rule of the triumphant Union. Reconstruction had gone badly for many of these former Confederates as their pre-war lifestyle was gone and replaced with economic impoverishment. Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil seized upon this opportunity by offering an alternative. He sent recruiters into Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas in search of experienced cotton farmers for his country. Many southerners saw this as their only option for happiness; to build a community with southern values in the jungle of Brazil. They would become known as the Confederados.

Dom Pedro offered the disgruntled Southerners a package of tax breaks and grants if they would immigrate to Brazil. General Robert E. Lee asked Southerners not to accept, but about 10,000 Confederates did take the Emperor up on his offer. Eventually about sixty percent of the Confederados trickled back into the United States, but of those who stayed permanently, most became part of a Confederate-values colony northwest of Sao Paulo that was named Americana.

Incidentally, slavery was legal in Brazil until 1888.

Darwin's tortoise dead at 176

I regret to say that Darwin's tortoise is dead at 176:

Charles Darwin's tortoise, Harriet, has died at the Australia Zoo near Brisbane. Darwin brought Harriet (then called Harry: Darwin was quite a naturalist, but an undistinguished tortoise-sexer as these things go) from the Galapagos Islands in 1835.

Coffee Cup Stamp Mugs

These Coffee Cup Stamp Mugs turn a negative into a positive:

Those irritating ringmarks that mugs and cups leave ... well, you can turn them into a nice floral pattern now with a set of Stamp Cups. The pattern on the base of the cup match up so you can join as many marks as you want.

Acid Redux

In Acid Redux, Louis Menand discusses the life and times of Timothy Leary:

Leary was born in 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is also the home town of Dr. Seuss, of whose most famous creation Leary was in many respects the human analogue — a grinning, charismatic, completely irresponsible Lord of Misrule.

Teaching Basic Economics to Fifth Graders

Arthur E. Foulkes describes his experience Teaching Basic Economics to Fifth Graders:

Lesson 1: Trade

The first week's "word for the day" was trade.

To illustrate trade, I gave each student a very small, inexpensive gift I had purchased at a Dollar General nearby. I distributed the gifts randomly, then told the students they could trade their gifts (if they wanted to) with their immediate neighbors. Some did. Then I opened the class up to unrestricted trade and said they could trade with anyone in the whole classroom. Many more now traded. When they were finished I asked how many of them had traded because they believed by trading they would be better off. All said they had.

Once they settled down again, we talked about the concept of trade in general. I was impressed with how well they already understood this concept; they seemed to clearly understand that exchange involves giving up something you value less for something you value more and finding someone else with opposite valuations. For good measure, I ended the day by snatching away the gifts of two students and forcing a trade where none had been performed. One student was happy with the exchange, the other unhappy. This allowed us to discuss the idea of a "fair" trade — which I defined as a trade where both parties voluntarily take part. Again, I was impressed with how easily they seemed to grasp this idea as I replaced the items I had snatched away for my "forced" trade.

Scientist's Study Of Brain Genes Sparks a Backlash

From Scientist's Study Of Brain Genes Sparks a Backlash:

Dr. Lahn's group zeroed in on the role of two genes, called ASPM and microcephalin, that are known to have a role in brain size. Humans with defective copies of either gene are born with brains only about one-third the normal size.

Studying DNA from several species, the Chicago team found that, over millions of years, the genes had undergone more rapid change in monkeys, apes and humans than in other animals. Their next step was to determine if evolution had continued in modern humans. Dr. Lahn's graduate students began decoding DNA from 1,184 people belonging to 59 groups from around the world, including Bedouins, Pima Indians and French-speaking Basques.

The data showed that evolution had continued in recent millennia. A statistical analysis of DNA patterns suggested that new mutations in each of the two brain-related genes had spread quickly through some human populations. Evidently, these mutations were advantageous among those populations -- just as the genetic variant promoting milk digestion was advantageous to early Europeans. Dr. Lahn and his team further observed that the new mutations are found most frequently outside of Africa.

What the data didn't say was how the mutations were advantageous. Perhaps the genes play a role outside of the brain or affect a brain function that has nothing to do with intelligence.

While acknowledging that the evidence doesn't permit a firm conclusion, Dr. Lahn favors the idea that the advantage conferred by the mutations was a bigger and smarter brain. He found ways to suggest that in his papers. One mutation, which according to his estimates arose some 40,000 years ago, coincided with the first art found in caves, the paper observed. The other mutation, present mostly in people from the Middle East and Europe, and estimated to be 5,800 years old, coincided with the "development of cities and written language."

That suggested brain evolution might have occurred in tandem with important cultural changes. Yet because neither variant is common in sub-Saharan Africa, there was another potential implication: Some groups had been left out.

As the article notes, "Dr. Lahn stands by his work but says that because of the controversy he is moving into other projects."

Why are corporate reports hard to read?

Tyler Cowen asks, Why are corporate reports hard to read? and cites the amusingly titled Optimisation of cliché synergies:

Apparently there's a simple reason why annual reports are hard to read: managers, in many cases, are trying to hide something.

The study, Annual Report Readability, Earnings and Stock Returns, found that the annual reports of underperforming companies are harder to read than those of companies that are performing well.

Feng Li, an assistant professor of accounting at the university, measured annual report "readability" using a sample of more than 55,000 company reporting years. He examined syllables per word and words per sentence in reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Zoomorphic Calligraphy

Zoomorphic Calligraphy developed in Turkey, India, and Iran after the taboos outlawing iconography had loosened.

`Beef' cut from India's history textbooks

`Beef' cut from India's history textbooks:

References to the beef-eating past of ancient Hindus have been deleted from Indian school textbooks following a three-year campaign by Hindu hardliners.

For almost a century, history books for primary and middle schools told how in ancient India, beef was considered a great delicacy among Hindus — especially among the highest caste — and how veal was offered to Hindu deities during special rituals.

"Our past" chapters in the texts also detailed how cows used to be slaughtered by the Brahmins, or upper caste Hindus, during festivals and while welcoming guests to the home.

The passages that offended the Hindus, who now shun beef, have been deleted from new versions of the books delivered to schoolchildren last week.

The march of technology

The march of technology describes the technology of the modern infantry soldier:

A survey of American soldiers — the first conducted in 40 years — found that an infantryman typically carries around 120 pounds, or 55kg, on his back. “If I were to put 120 pounds of kit on you with a weapons system, and then tell you, ‘Okay, now I am going to shoot at you, and you're going to shoot these targets,' you would understand how truly difficult it is not only to accomplish your mission, but to just stay alive,” says Jean-Louis “Dutch” DeGay of the American army's Future Force Warrior (FFW) programme, a $250m effort to devise military technologies for deployment starting in 2010.

The soldier of the future will be wearing three layers:

Closest to the skin will be a layer of clothing, embedded with sensors that can detect whether the wearer is injured, dehydrated, exhausted or even asleep. In the event of injury, vital signs can be measured to assess the soldier's medical condition, and this information, plus the soldier's exact location, can be transmitted to a medical team, so that it knows what to expect and can act quickly when it arrives.

The second layer consists of “electro-textiles” that provide power and data connections to these sensors, and to the various other devices being carried by the soldier. Radio antennae can also be incorporated into this layer. Finally, the third and topmost layer consists of a new kind of armour. Existing armour stops bullets, says Mr DeGay, but it is heavy, and its snug fit means that the impact of a bullet can still cause broken bones or internal injuries. The new armour, which will be battle-tested this summer, is based upon flexible Kevlar plates positioned a few centimetres above the skin. This means the plates are better able to absorb and distribute the impact of an incoming round — and also makes the uniform cooler to wear.

Why hurricanes cause more damage

Gregg Easterbrook explains Why hurricanes are causing more damage than they used to:

The insurance industry is "feeling the unmistakable economic impact of global warming," Al Gore declares in his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Publications as diverse as USA Today and Mother Jones have similarly argued recently that rising weather-related insurance losses are evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Last year, hurricanes Katrina and Rita contributed to a record $50 billion in weather-related losses in the United States. Ceres, a public-interest organization that urges business to engage in environmental protection, recently estimated that weather-related insurance losses rose from an average of about $5 billion per year 20 years ago to an average of about $15 billion annually in the last decade. (All money figures in this article are stated in current dollars.) Like the former vice president and a lot of other people, Ceres attributes increased insurance losses to artificially triggered climate change.

But maybe there's another reason losses keep rising — namely, that property keeps becoming worth more. With each passing year, hurricanes that strike the United States are striking a nation of ever-more-affluent people who build ever-more properties in coastal areas. No wonder the destruction keeps getting worse. Every year there's more to destroy!

Large buildup of strain in the San Andreas fault makes quake imminent

From Large buildup of strain in the San Andreas fault makes quake imminent:

Fialko gathered eight years' worth of radar data from European Space Agency satellites that measure in detail how the ground moves. He also added 20 years' worth of data from global-positioning measurements on the ground.

Taken together, he says, the measurements suggest that the two plates either side of the southern San Andreas are slipping past each other at around 25 millimetres per year. Without a recent earthquake to alleviate that strain, Fialko says, the fault line itself, which has remained essentially static for centuries, has built up between 5.5 and 7 metres of 'slip deficit'.

If released all at once, that could result in a magnitude-8.0 earthquake, he says, roughly the size of the devastating 1906 quake in San Francisco. Such a powerful event might threaten even those buildings constructed to earthquake specifications.

Why the New Camaro Will Fail

Eric Peters says that the new Camaro will fail because we live in an unmanly era:

But the thing that will drive a stake through the new Camaro's hood, deep into its small-block heart, is the polarizing, hyper-macho cod piece styling. If the production car ends up looking like the show car that's been in every buff magazine and all over the news, it will be the belly flop heard 'round the world.

The enduring genius of Ford's Mustang is that it transcends testosterone — and the muscle car era. Fitted with a hi-po engine and stripes, it's a car that guys absolutely love. But it doesn't alienate women — and women are half the market, don't forget (and most guys have a woman in their lives who they'd prefer not to annoy with their choice of car). The previous generation (1994-2002) Camaro was an "in your face" kind of car — and so is this new one. You either love it — or you hate it. And the question is, can GM afford such a confrontational machine with inherently limited appeal — one that's already hobbled by being late to the game, fighting for a relatively small subset of prospective buyers and which will likely arrive just in time for the next ugly uptick in gas prices?

The smart money (or mine, at least) says don't bet the farm on it.

It's 2007 — not 1967.

Lady and the Lamp

John Lasseter, of Pixar fame, went to the famous Cal Arts school, where he animated Lady and the Lamp:

Oddly, this was released on home video in the early 90's. A company called Expanded Entertainment (a subsidiary of Animation Magazine), released a number of videos of indie animated shorts from some of their film festival compilations. This film was included on "Animation Celebration Vol. 2".

Polar Bear Cub in Water

Today's dose of cute comes from this Polar Bear Cub swimming with his toy hippo:

The weak and hungry orphaned cub was delivered in May from a scientific polar station on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean to the zoo, where it is recovering.

Islamocapitalism

In Islamocapitalism, Turkish Muslim writer Mustafa Akyol asserts that Islam and capitalism are compatible:

The conceptual openness of Islam towards business was one of the important reasons for the splendor of medieval Muslim civilization. The Islamic world was at the heart of global trade routes and Muslim traders took advantage of this quite successfully. They even laid the foundations of some aspects of modern banking: Instead of carrying heavy and easily-stolen gold, medieval Muslim traders used paper checks. This innovation in credit transfer would be emulated and transferred to Europe by the Crusaders, particularly the Knights Templar.

So central was trade to Muslim civilization that its very decline may be attributed to changes in the pattern of global trade. When Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in November 1497 — thanks in part to the astrolabe, invented by Muslims — he opened a new chapter in world history, one in which global trade would shift from the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the oceans. Consequently the Arabic Middle East, which had been scorched by the Mongols two centuries before and could have never recovered anyway, entered deadly stagnation. The Ottoman Empire would excel for a few more centuries, but decline was inevitable. The loss of trade also meant the end of cosmopolitanism; this was followed by the rise of religious bigotry. While the early commentators of the Koran cherished trade and wealth as God's bounties, late Medieval Islamic literature began to emphasize extreme asceticism.

Norway begins building 'doomsday vault'

The screenplay practically writes itself. Norway begins building 'doomsday vault':

Norway will begin construction today of a "doomsday vault", a vast top-security seed bank in a mountain near the North Pole to ensure food supplies in the event of environmental catastrophe or nuclear war.

Built with Fort Knox-type security, the $US3 million ($A4.1 million) depository will preserve around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops at sub-zero temperatures.

"This facility will provide a practical means to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters," Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said in a statement.
[...]
The vault will be built deep in permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 1,000km from the North Pole.
[...]
A metre of reinforced concrete will fortify the chamber walls. Arctic permafrost will act as a natural coolant to protect the samples which will be stored in watertight foil packages should a power failure disable refrigeration systems.

The thick walls, airlocks and doors mean that even if global warming accelerates badly, it would take many decades for hotter air to reach the seeds.

So the seeds can survive for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years.

Despite the top-level security arrangements the seed bank will not be under constant guard, except for the numerous polar bears which roam the area.

Extroverted like me

For its 10th anniversary, Slate is republishing some old favorites, like Seth Stevenson's Extroverted like me, the story of his experiment with Paxil to overcome his shyness:

Day 35: Drinking a lot, several nights a week. Liquor + Paxil = Wow!

Pre-Paxil, I was a social drinker. Now I'm walking a mile in someone else's brain chemistry. I can see why some of you like to drink so much, maybe even need to drink so much. It's fun for me now, in a way it just wasn't before. On liquor and Paxil, strangers mean novelty, not fear. Group conversations are a chance to play raconteur, not a chance to smile weakly and shut up.

And it's so much better than sobriety. Sober for me these days means extreme detachment. Movies, once a favorite hobby, do noth