Why the Bible has so many prostitutes.

David Plotz explains why the Bible has so many prostitutes:

What's with all the prostitutes? There's scarcely an unmarried woman in the Bible so far who isn't a prostitute, or treated like one! There's Tamar, who turns a trick with her father-in-law Judah. The Moabite women, who whore themselves to the Israelites. The Midianite harlot who's murdered by Phineas. Jacob's daughter Dinah, whose loose behavior sparks mass slaughter. No wonder they call prostitution the oldest profession — it's the only profession that biblical women seem to have.

I have a rudimentary theory about this. In many tribal cultures, women have been essentially banished from the public sphere in order to control their virtue. We see this in strict Islamic cultures today, where women are punished for speaking to men besides their husbands and relatives. Throughout the Bible, the Israelites have been obsessed with controlling the sexual behavior of their girls and women — this is why there are so many darn laws about female purity, sexual misbehavior, and intermarriage. The Israelite women seem to have played no role in public life. Except for Moses' sister Miriam (and, in passing, Noa and her sisters), there hasn't been a single woman since the Exodus who's had any kind of public responsibility. So, why do we read about prostitutes? Perhaps because prostitutes were the only women involved in the Israelites' public life.

Animal activists free 15,000 farmed fish to their deaths

Animal activists free 15,000 farmed fish to their deaths:

Thousands of dead fish are being washed up along the west coast of Scotland after the raid at Kames Marine Fish Farm, near Oban. The perpetrators are thought to have attacked last week. Detectives believe that the attack could be linked to a spate of other farm attacks throughout the country. The letters ALF (Animal Liberation Front) were spray-painted near by.

The loss is estimated to have cost the fish farm at least £500,000 as boats, cranes and offices were also vandalised. The halibut died from starvation or getting caught in seaweed. They were also being eaten by herring gulls and otters."

Maps of War

The Maps of War site has a wonderful animated map of the Middle East depicting the rise and fall of the various empires that have controlled that contested region over the centuries.

I highly recommend it.

The crucial health stat you've never heard of

Darshak Sanghavi explains that the crucial health stat you've never heard of is something called NNT, or number needed to treat:

Researchers in Scotland reported a 31-percent reduction in the risk of heart attacks among men taking the statin pravastatin, sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb under the brand name Pravachol. Due in part to this study, Pravachol became one of Bristol-Myers' most profitable drugs and now grosses more than $2 billion in sales per year.

A 31 percent reduction in heart attacks, after all, seems impressive. Yet this pervasive way of describing clinical trials in medical journals — focusing on the "relative risk," in this case of heart attack — powerfully exaggerates the benefits of drugs and other invasive therapies. What, after all, does a 31 percent relative reduction in heart attacks mean? In the case of the 1995 study, it meant that taking Pravachol every day for five years reduced the incidence of heart attacks from 7.5 percent to 5.3 percent. This indeed means that there were 31 percent fewer heart attacks in patients taking the drug. But it also means that the "absolute risk" of a heart attack for any given person dropped by only 2.2 percent (from 7.5 percent to 5.3 percent). The benefit of Pravachol can be summarized as a 31 percent relative reduction in heart attacks — or a 2.2 percent absolute reduction.
[...]
In the end, 100 people needed to be treated to avoid two heart attacks during the study period — so, the number of people who must get the treatment for a single person to benefit is 50. This is known as the "number needed to treat."

Instead of a 31-percent relative reduction in heart attacks, we get this:

To a savvy, healthy person with high cholesterol that didn't decrease with diet and exercise, a doctor could say, "A statin might help you, or it might not. Out of every 50 people who take them, one avoids getting a heart attack. On the other hand, that means 49 out of 50 people don't get much benefit."

Poland's Biological Defensive

Poland's Biological Defensive notes that "every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive" — "except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay":

The microorganism is Proteus OX19. In most ways it’s an entirely ordinary little bacterium. Its one remarkable feature is that human antibodies for Proteus OX19 cross-react with the antibodies for Ricksettia — the bacterium responsible for the deadly disease typhus. Blood from a patient infected with Proteus Ox19 will give a false-positive in the most common typhus screening method, the Weil-Felix test.

Enter the Nazis into Poland. Two physicians, Drs. Lazowski and Watulewicz, were living in Poland in 1939 when the Nazis invaded and began deporting the population into concentration camps. When a young man condemned to slave labor in Germany appealed to them for help, the two doctors tried a unique deception. They injected him with Proteus and then sent a blood sample back to Germany for testing. The Weil-Felix test came back positive for typhus, and the young man was spared.

Yale debuts new MBA. curriculum

Yale debuts new MBA curriculum — with newer, better jargon:

The heart of the new first-year curriculum is a series of eight multidisciplinary courses, called Organizational Perspectives, structured around the organizational roles a manager must engage, motivate and lead in order to solve problems — or make progress — within organizations. These roles are both internal — the Innovator, the Operations Engine, the Employee, and Sourcing and Managing Funds (or CFO) — and external — the Investor, the Customer, the Competitor, and State and Society. Each course — titled to reflect these roles — draws on topics and insights from a variety of functional management disciplines to study the managerial challenges each role presents.

"No executive wakes up in the morning and thinks, 'I'm going to do finance today,' so it doesn't make sense for students to sit in a finance class and learn to crunch numbers absent of any context," says Sharon Oster, the Frederick D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, who is one of a number of senior faculty who worked on developing the new curriculum and led the design of the "Competitor" course. "We are teaching them in a way that's relevant in the real world."

Javelin Accident

When I first looked at the thumbnail image, I didn't see the Javelin:

Track and field line judge Lia Mara Lourenco is helped after a javelin hit her in her foot during 'Brazil Trophy,' a national track and field competition, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2006.

The Worst Job in the World

Orson Scott Card describes — somewhat hyperbolically — The Worst Job in the World:

What if you had a really lousy job? You're only employed for seven hours a day, but you have to ride the bus for half an hour each way.

While you're there, they only let you go to the bathroom at certain times. You only have ten minutes to get from one work station to another, and somehow you also have to use the toilet and get your new work materials from a central depository during those breaks, without being late.

If you do anything wrong, you aren't allowed to talk to anybody during lunch.

Even when you go home, it's not over. A job supervisor also lives in your house, and makes you do two or three more hours of the same work you did on the job. The at-home supervisor is even harsher than the one at work and has more power to inflict annoying punishments if you fail to comply.

If you're sick and miss a day or two, then when you get better, you have to do all the work that you missed — both the on-the-job and the at-home tasks.

Not only that, but you can't quit this lousy job. It's the law — the government requires you to stick with it for at least ten years.

What if, on top of all this misery, the work you had to do at home wasn't even real? What if you just went through the motions of all the tasks you did on the job, but you didn't actually accomplish anything? You just spent meaningless hours, repeating the physical movements, while the at-home supervisor says things like, 'That's how you do it?' and 'Are you sure you're doing it right?'

That's a fair description of the lives of far too many of our school-age children.

He decries homework and notes that there is no evidence that homework does any good:

But let's pretend that grades and standardized tests actually measure something meaningful, and better results on those would mean that homework accomplishes something. That's what a researcher named Harris Cooper did, according to Alfie Kohn, in his book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing.

Cooper looked at a number of different studies of homework and sifted and combined the results to see if some kind of definitive answer emerged. It did — but Cooper apparently didn't see it himself.

When Kohn looked at Cooper's published results, the answer was obvious. In Cooper's own words from 1989: "There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students."

That means that there is zero scientific evidence that kids before middle school get any performance boost whatsoever from any amount of homework, no matter how large or small.

And yet when Cooper reached his own conclusions at the end of his published report, he came up with the oft-quoted formula that the ideal amount of homework is ten minutes per grade level per night. That would mean almost an hour a night for fifth graders — even though Cooper's own meta-study found that there was no evidence that any homework for elementary students had any benefit.

Apparently, we have a problem when "science" is done by true believers. Even when Cooper's study found no defense for elementary-school homework, he still found a way to recommend in favor of requiring some anyway.

Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera

Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera looks amazing:

Here's a remarkable video shot from the cockpit of a radio-controlled airplane. The camera's video is transmitted to the flyer on the ground below, who's wearing VR goggles. When he moves his head, the remote camera's pans and tilts correspond exactly to his movements. The result is a extraordinary feeling of actually being in the plane. Shouldn't all R/C airplanes be made this way?

Department of Economic Illiteracy: Special Victim's Unit

In Department of Economic Illiteracy: Special Victim's Unit, Jane Galt calls What If: The Oil Runs Out "possibly the most economically illiterate television programme ever" — despite strong competition from The West Wing:

And what form does that shortage take? It's exactly like 1979 ... long lines, gas stealing, gas stations running out without notice. Terrible rationing.

What doesn't happen? The price doesn't increase much above $3.50 ... which by 2016 will be about $2.70 in today's dollars, so apparently the first effect of this terrible shortage is that the price falls. People are queuing for hours, but apparently not one enterprising station manager thinks to raise the price. And since the price doesn't rise, people spend all their time trying to find stations with gas to sell, rather than looking for ways to cut down their usage.

Is this the result of some strange industry practice? Government action? You wouldn't know it from the script. Apparently, people in 2016 are very, very stupid.

Actually, the problem is that they assumed that a shortage would be just like the 1970s. Except, of course, that the 1970s were like the 1970s because of Nixon's wage and price controls, which meant that the price couldn't rise to adjust for lower supply. Note that after Katrina, shortages lasted a couple of days ... and then prices rose, people cut back on labour day travel, and supply and demand came back into balance.

The other economic crime in the show is that the shortage happens all at once. In fact, of course, the supply problems would take years to develop, and would cause a long appreciation in price, accompanied by spikes and falls as supply shocks developed and were resolved by decreased demand. People would move closer to work, get smaller houses, by smaller cars, and so forth, as gas and oil became increasingly expensive ... not just wake up one morning and find that there was no gas to power their SUV.

Philosophical Question of the Day

As soon as I read Scott Adams' Philosophical Question of the Day, I knew exactly where he was going with it:

If a man goes into the forest and pokes a bear with a sharp stick, and the bear kills the man, whose fault is it?

Don’t read this next part until you have made up your mind whether it is the man’s fault or the bear’s fault.

As he says, don't read ahead until you've answered the question:

Okay, you may continue.

Now substitute an irrational human being for the bear. The guy with the stick knows he’s dealing with an irrational and potentially violent person, and he pokes him with the stick anyway. Just like the bear, the irrational guy kills the guy who poked him.

Whose fault is it now? Is it the fault of the irrational guy or the fault of the unwise guy who poked him?

Okay, now suppose that the irrational guy is a specific kind of irrational guy – a literal believer in his faith. This is not an insult to the religious because even the Pope endorses the view that faith does not spring from rational thought. And let’s say this particular faith says that if ye poketh me with a sharpeth object, woe unto you, for I shall killeth!

And let’s say the irrational person is completely rational in every way that is not related to his religion. He might even be an engineer or a doctor. But his irrational side is well understood by all. Now the guy with the sharp stick pokes him and gets killed.

Whose fault is it?

I think it's instructive to look at what we do with man-eating — or even man-biting — animals: we "put them down" or lock them in cages.

Everyone knows you shouldn't poke a bear — or feed it, for that matter — but when a bear attacks people, people kill the bear.

The old and the new

In The old and the new, Wretchard looks at the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors:

The Reconquista, viewed from today, more than five hundred years after its conclusion exhibits what is to modern eyes a strange reversal of roles. The Muslims were the cosmopolitans facing essentially backward tribesmen who sought shelter in the rugged terrain of the Iberian Peninsula. The Muslims had the contemporary New York and the Christians possessed the contemporary Afghanistan. Time after time the Caliphate launched punitive expeditions only to watch their efforts reversed as they left. The Christian kingdoms eventually enlisted demography into their arsenal of weapons. They would depopulate certain areas in order to create buffer zones against the Caliphs; and whenever they seized a town or city from the Moors they would immediately populate it with their own peoples to prevent its recovery.

In its last stages the Reconquista became a literal Crusade involving all of European Christendom, a movement which had its own heroic figures, theorists and goals. Again the symmetry is striking. It is the Muslims who are infidels; and the Christians who create their own military-religious orders to defeat them.

Super rats!

The Brits have inadvertently bred super rats:

Twenty-two inches from quivering whisker to fat tail, they can chomp through concrete and leap more than two feet in the air. Sauntering down your street in broad daylight, insolently raising two claws to the binman, they rifle through your rubbish and scoff poison as if it was milk chocolate. There is something of the night and also something of the urban myth about the nearly indestructible super rat coming to a pile of carelessly discarded foodstuffs near you. But Britain's pest controllers are adamant: they are receiving more panicky reports of rodent infestation than ever, and it does seem that our rats are evolving into something not seen before.

Expensive Cameras in Checked Luggage

Security expert Bruce Schneier is impressed with this solution to the problem of having to transport Expensive Cameras in Checked Luggage:

A weapon is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, [or] starter pistol. Yes, starter pistols — those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets — are considered weapons and do not have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare. I'm given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case and gives my key back to me.

That's the procedure. The case is extra-tracked. TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It's a great way to travel with camera gear. I've been doing this since December, 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

Only another 5,500 calories to go ...

Only another 5,500 calories to go ... looks at the results of a recent Swedish study that replicated Spurlock's Supersize Me experiment — without Spurlock's dangerous results:

And this is the most fascinating thing: if Nyström's small group are representative, then it would seem that our bodies are more adaptable than we give them credit for. In other words, metabolism may play a much more important role in the problem of obesity than many people think. Indeed, Nyström claims that for some people, eating 10% more will lead to their metabolism increasing at the same level. The extra energy will be burned off as body heat during sleep. "If that was not the case we would all have to keep track of every last calorie," he says. "And you have to realise that some overeaters consume such grotesque amounts that they would be even heavier — much heavier! — were it not for this safety mechanism."

That's why these kind of studies have to be carried out, he says: "If you only look at the already overweight, you'll only do research on those with least resistance to calories, so to speak."

Learning without learning

The Economist explains learning without learning — via epigenetic imprinting:

There is a growing school of thought that Freud was right, but for the wrong reasons. According to the members of this school, early experience does profoundly mould the brain. However, it is not memory that it moulds — at least, not memory as conventionally understood. What it actually moulds is the way genes work.
[...]
The first inkling of this came when Michael Meaney, one of Dr Szyf's long-term collaborators, noticed that rat pups whose mothers spent a lot of time licking and grooming them grew up to be less fearful and better-adjusted adults than the offspring of neglectful mothers. Crucially, these well-adjusted rats then gave their own babies the same type of care — in effect, transmitting the behaviour from mother to daughter by inducing similar epigenetic changes.

When Dr Szyf looked at the brains of the two sorts of rats, he found differences in their hippocampuses. Among other jobs, the hippocampus is involved in responding to stress. Dr Szyf discovered that better-adjusted rats had, in their hippocampuses, more active versions of the gene that encodes a molecule called glucocorticoid-receptor protein. Glucocorticoid is a hormone produced in response to stress and its job is to make the animal behave appropriately. But too much glucocorticoid is a bad thing, so there is also a way to switch off its production. When glucocorticoid binds to its receptor in the hippocampus, that activates the expression of genes which dampen further synthesis of the hormone. This feedback system is weaker in rats that have had little maternal care. As a result, they are more anxious and fearful, and show a heightened response to stress.

The researchers went on to study what is responsible for the difference in expression of the glucocorticoid-receptor gene. They found that two types of imprinting are involved. One adds molecules called methyl groups to the DNA of the gene. This suppresses gene expression. The other adds acetyl groups, which are slightly larger, to the proteins around which the DNA is coiled. This has the opposite effect, making gene expression easier. Rats that had experienced little maternal care showed high levels of methylation and low levels of acetylation of the glucocorticoid-receptor gene and its neighbouring proteins. The opposite was true for those that had had a more attentive upbringing.

Frank Miller's 300

Frank Miller's 300 is a graphic novel depicting the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae. Now it is being turned into a movie, which, like Sin City before it, is to be highly stylized — "operatic" in the words of one of the designers.

You can view the trailer and production journals at YouTube. Naturally, I was drawn to Video Diary 3: Spartan Training and Video Diary 5: Fight Choreography. The actors have a personal trainer who has them clearly performing a CrossFit workout, and the fight choreographers are from the Inosanto Academy — so don't be surprised if the Spartans fight in a vaguely Asian style.

Outstanding Lecture

A recent Outstanding Lecture has led Arnold Kling to make this recommendation:

My impression is that the number of professors who teach in lecture format is much, much larger than the number of really effective lecturers. I think that the best way to deal with this is to take the typical professor out of the lecture hall and instead substitute videos of the quality of Rosling's lecture.

What was this outstanding lecture? It was Hans Rosling's latest TED Talk on economic development.

You may recognize some of the beautiful animated graphs from Has the world become a better place?, one of his earlier works through his GapMinder organization, which I mentioned a few months ago.

In Defense of Empires

Deepak Lal writes In Defense of Empires, which "have undeservedly got a bad name, particularly in America since President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the end of the Age of Empires and ushered in the Age of Nations":

The major argument in favor of empires is that, through their pax, they provide the most basic of public goods — order — in an anarchical international society of states. This is akin to maintaining order in social life. The three basic values of all social life, without which it cannot exist, and which any international order should seek to protect, were cogently summarized by the late Hedley Bull in his magisterial book The Anarchical Society as: first, to secure life against violence which leads to death or bodily harm; second, that promises once made are kept; third that, "the possession of things will remain stable to some degree and will not be subject to challenges that are constant and without limit."

Empires — which for our purposes can be simply defined as "multiethnic conglomerates held together by transnational organizational and cultural ties"[3] — have historically both maintained peace and promoted prosperity for a simple reason. The centers of the ancient civilizations in Eurasia — where sedentary agriculture could be practiced and yielded a surplus to feed the towns ('civitas' — the emblem of civilization) — were bordered in the North and South by areas of nomadic pastoralism: the steppes of the North and the semi-desert of the Arabian peninsula to the South. In these regions the inhabitants had kept up many of the warlike traditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and were prone to prey upon the inhabitants of the sedentary 'plains' and at times attempted to convert them into their chattel like cattle.[4] This meant that the provision of one of the classical public goods — protection of its citizens from invaders — required the extension of territory to some natural barriers which could keep the barbarians at bay. The Roman, Chinese, and various Indian empires were partly created to provide this pax, which was essential to keep their labor intensive and sedentary forms of making a living intact. The pax of various imperium has thus been essential in providing one of the basic public goods required for prosperity.

These empires can further be distinguished as being either multi-cultural or homogenizing. The former included the Abbasids, the various Indian empires, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and the British, where little attempt was made to change 'the habits of the heart' of the constituent groups — or if it was, as in the early British Raj, an ensuing backlash led to a reversal of this policy.

The homogenizing empires, by contrast, sought to create a 'national' identity out of the multifarious groups in their territory. The best example of these is China, where the ethnic mix was unified as Hans through the bureaucratic device of writing their names in Chinese characters in a Chinese form, and suppressing any subsequent discontent through the subtle repression of a bureaucratic authoritarian state.[5] In our own time the American 'melting pot' creating Americans out of a multitude of ethnicities by adherence to a shared civic culture and a common language, has created a similar homogenized imperial state. Similarly, the supposedly ancient "nations" of Britain and France were created through a state-led homogenizing process.[6] India, by contrast is another imperial state whose political unity is a legacy of the British Raj, but whose multiethnic character is underwritten by an ancient hierarchical structure which accommodates these different groups as different castes.

The article is not a short one, and it eventually works its way around to the Middle East, where Lal brings in a bit of personal history:

The amazing thing for me is that, the "right to return" after fifty years is still an issue and is being kept alive by the large number of Palestinians still in refugee camps. Why are they still there after fifty years? On a personal note, my family and I, along with millions of others lost their land and property as a result of the partition of India in 1947. We were refugees. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments provided some help, but most importantly the refugees themselves, after a little while, made new lives for themselves. There are no refugee camps on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border with millions demanding "the right of return."

History is never just, and economists have been right to maintain that "bygones are bygones." This is particularly important in that highly contested territory of Palestine. This came home to me in the late 1970s when a friend was carrying out a dig near the Wailing Wall. He took me down, and showed me layer upon layer of corpses. The ones in each layer had been killed by those above, and then they themselves in a later layer had killed those below them. To decide who has the original rights to the land in this fiercely contested territory, where "might has been right" for millennia, to right historical wrongs on the basis of some principle of restitution would defeat even the wisdom of Solomon. Sensibly, losers in these continual shifts in fortune through history have come to terms with their losses and continued with their lives.

The Overselling of Higher Education

George Leef opens his The Overselling of Higher Education with some harsh words:

Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.

Leef shares this quote from David Labaree's How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:

When students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility, they quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credential they acquire there. Grades, credits, degrees — these become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content... The payoff for a particular credential is the same no matter how it was acquired, so it is rational behavior to try to strike a good bargain, to work at gaining a diploma, like a car, at a substantial discount.

I suspect most young Americans would find this statistic shocking:

Prior to World War II, only about one high school graduate in ten subsequently enrolled in a college or university.

Read the whole article.

Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack

For decades, the egg-heads at RAND have been thinking about the unthinkable. RAND's recent report, Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, examines the results of one such "unthinkable" scenario:

In our scenario, terrorists conceal a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in a shipping container and ship it to the Port of Long Beach. Unloaded onto a pier, it explodes shortly thereafter. This is referred to as a “ground-burst” as opposed to an “airburst” explosion. We used this scenario because analysts consider it feasible, it is highly likely to have a catastrophic effect, and the target is both a key part of the U.S. economic infrastructure and a critical global shipping center.

What would the results be? Roughly 60,000 lives and $1 trillion dollars lost:

Secrets Of The Self-Made

In Forbes' Secrets Of The Self-Made, "fourteen self-made members of the vaunted Forbes 400 shared candid, contrarian and even comedic answers to 20 thoughtful questions — ranging from what they eat for breakfast and how they pray to the importance (or lack thereof) of getting an M.B.A. and what advice they would give aspiring entrepreneurs."

It looks like they all exercise a lot and read a lot — and most respect the idea of getting an MBA, even if they didn't.

The unmourned end of libertarian politics

Michael Lind announces the unmourned end of libertarian politics:

The most epochal event in world politics since the cold war has occurred — and few people have noticed. I am not referring to the conflict in Iraq or Lebanon or the campaign against terrorism.

It is the utter and final defeat of the movement that has shaped the politics of the US and other western democracies for several decades: the libertarian counter-revolution.

I, for one, welcome our new big-government Republican overlords.

French and German remakes of the BBC's Office

Liesl Schillinger looks at the French and German remakes of the BBC's Office — and the US version as well — and draws some conclusions about our varied national cultures:

Watching all four versions back-to-back is not only a strangely unmooring experience — like seeing the film Groundhog Day over and over — it's a crash course in national identity. And if any conjecture could be made about the cultural differences that these subtly contrasting programs reveal, it might be this one: These days, Germans and Americans are doing much of their living in and around their offices, while the Brits and French continue to live outside of them. Here, in broad strokes, are the chief differences. In the British version, nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible, and everybody is depressed. In the French version, nobody is working but even the idiots look good, and everybody seems possessed of an intriguing private life. In the German version, actual work is visibly being done, most of the staff is coupled up, and the workers never stop eating and drinking—treating the office like a kitchen with desks. Stromberg continually calls his staff "Kinder," or "children," further blurring the line between Kinder, Computer, and Küche.

While Michael Scott also sometimes calls his American office a "family," his staff knows he's the kid brother, not the father, and that if there's to be any Kinder in their lives, they're going to have to get busy with one of their fellow prairie dogs, because really — who else are they likely to meet, given the stretching parameters of the U.S. working day? We may still talk of "working like a dog," but the Russians lately have coined the expression, "to work like an American," reflecting our 24/7 on-call mentality. These days, for Americans, "home office" is not just a place, it's a state of mind. And it's perfectly reflected by our version of this global sitcom — in which work is ostensibly cared about (though skimped on), romantic tension simmers on numerous fronts, and the whole enterprise is gently inflated by a mood of eventual, possible progress in work and love — like a bowl of dough that could have used a little more yeast but is doing its best to rise. Vive la différence.

(Hat tip to Dan Drezner.)

What'll it be?

In What'll it be? Wretchard looks at the "real" moral dilemma of "coercive interrogation":

Hotair has a video of ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross describing what his CIA contacts told him about coercive interrogation. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the technique was able to extract useful information. One of the most pernicious fallacies peddled in the debate over coercive interrogation — or torture — as you would have it, is that duress is absolutely useless is providing any kind of intelligence. According to this point of view, coercive interrogation is just pointless cruelty. And those who advocate it are simply looking for excuses to engage in fruitless sadism.

But the real moral dilemma arises from the fact that coercion can produce intelligence information. If it were useless, as some commentators claim, there would be no dilemma. It is precisely because innocent lives can occasionally be saved by recourse to coercion that this problem is the devil's own. Therefore the correct approach must be to acknowledge the fact that we will have to pay in blood and treasure for not using certain techniques. And if we are prepared to accept that payment then we may willingly forgo these techniques. However, if we are unwilling to pay the price of those risks, we cannot honestly promise the public safety without lying to them. It is the therefore the task of policymakers to inform the public what the tradeoffs are and get them to accept those risks.

Milken on the World Economy

Greg Mankiw cites Milken on the World Economy:

China and India combined to produce nearly half the world's economic output in 1820 compared to just 1.8% for the U.S. Our remarkable growth since 1820 has benefited from democratic institutions, a belief in capitalism, private property rights, an entrepreneurial culture, abundant resources, openness to foreign investment, the best universities, immigration and relatively transparent markets.

(Hat tip to the Belmont Club.)

A Low Impact Woodland Home

An English fellow has built A Low Impact Woodland Home that looks quite a bit like a hobbit hole:

You are looking at pictures of our family home. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen

In The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen, Jonathan of Chicago Boyz describes the tail end of a public-TV documentary he caught:

I have no doubt that our bombing of German and Japanese cities was one of the most terrible things ever done. But what made the documentary tendentious was that it left out the political and military context; there was no more than superficial discussion of what led the USA to adopt such brutal tactics. The remarkable tenacity and cruelty of the Japanese fighters we encountered in our island-hopping campaign weren't discussed, nor was the terrifying prospect of invading the Japanese home islands — a prospect which, until the atomic bombings, appeared certain and would have certainly killed millions. Instead the documentary framed our decision to burn the cities as having been based on Curtis LeMay's desire to find a more-effective alternative to using inaccurate high-explosive bombs against Japanese factories. Of course, when you present the story in such a narrow way it makes it look like we went too far. The documentary might have been redeemed if someone had said: Yes, we did terrible things, but they only became conceivable late in the war after we learned what the enemy was capable of, and the alternatives were all much worse. But no one said that, at least not that I heard.

I don't think this documentary could have been made in the 1960s or 1970s. It would have been widely seen as revisionist. Too many people were still aware, either from direct experience or from having learned about the war from family elders or in school or from the media, of the rationale for destroying the Japanese cities. But nowadays probably a lot of the people doing film production, and certainly a lot of the viewers, are too young and too scantily educated about World War II to recognize an incomplete historical treatment when they see one. This is a great pity in the context of the current war, because people in the democracies need to understand that insufficient seriousness in fighting radical Islam now could in the long run lead to a situation in which we kill millions in order to get the fight over with and protect our people. It could happen. The history of our war with Japan makes clear what we are capable of doing to an enemy who provokes us sufficiently. The Islamists, who are as cruel as the Japanese were, need to understand this too, but probably won't until it's too late.

The ethanol myth

In The ethanol myth, Consumer Reports shares its findings from its test of a flexible-fuel Chevy Tahoe:

When running on E85 there was no significant change in acceleration. Fuel economy, however, dropped across the board. In highway driving, gas mileage decreased from 21 to 15 mpg; in city driving, it dropped from 9 to 7 mpg.

You could expect a similar decrease in gas mileage in any current FFV. That’s because ethanol has a lower energy content than gasoline: 75,670 British thermal units per gallon instead of 115,400, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So you have to burn more fuel to generate the same amount of energy. In addition, FFV engines are designed to run more efficiently on gasoline. E85 fuel economy could approach that of gasoline if manufacturers optimized engines for that fuel.

When we took our Tahoe to a state-certified emissions-test facility in Connecticut and had a standard emissions test performed, we found a significant decrease in smog-forming oxides of nitrogen when using E85. Ethanol, however, emits acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen and something that standard emissions-testing equipment is not designed to measure.

Why so much of Delhi is illegal

Soutik Biswas explains why so much of Delhi is illegal:

What do people do when their city's authorities do not keep apace with its rapidly growing population and fail to provide adequate homes and business space?

In the Indian capital, Delhi, people simply encroach public and private land, bribe authorities, build homes, and wait for local politicians to legalise the colonies (housing areas) in exchange for votes in the elections.

Tanning cream may ward off skin cancer

A new tanning cream may ward off skin cancer by providing a "real" sunless tan:

The molecule at the heart of the cream recreates a process that occurs naturally when ultraviolet sunlight strikes skin cells. The cells respond differently depending on a person's skin type. For people who tan well, the sun's ultraviolet rays initially harm DNA in the skin, but this is followed by a robust tanning that curbs the DNA damage.

For lousy tanners, even a light tan can inflict significant DNA damage that can lead to cancers like melanoma by causing pigment-making skin cells known as melanocytes to begin dividing rampantly. The researchers say a darkening in pigmentation can help these people reduce that risk.

"Our strategy turns on pigment but doesn't touch the DNA," said Fisher. "This actually may represent a broader strategy to prevent the damage that UV causes in the skin, shielding the skin in ways that traditional sunscreens cannot."

Selam, the three-year-old from 3.3m years ago

Anthropologists have uneartheed Selam, the three-year-old from 3.3m years ago:

Fossil hunters working in Ethiopia have unearthed the fragile bones of a baby ape-girl who lived 3.3m years ago, the earliest child ancestor discovered so far.

Named Selam, meaning "peace" in the country's languages, the creature belongs to a species called Australopithecus afarensis, the same as Lucy, the famous adult female discovered in 1974 and believed to be a forebear of the human genus, Homo.

The fossilised remains reveal a critical moment in human evolution that saw our earliest relatives shaking off the legacy of ape ancestors to take their first tentative steps along a path that ultimately led to modern humans.

The remarkably complete skeleton's lower half is almost perfectly adapted to walking upright, while the upper body is more primitive, with gorilla-like shoulderblades and curved chimpanzee-like fingers suited to clinging and climbing trees.

The intact skull and nearly full set of teeth show the large, pointy canines that distinguish apes from early humans have disappeared, leaving only substantial chewing teeth.

Pyrats!

I'm a scurvy dog for missing Talk Like a Pirate Day yesterday, but I'll try to make up for it by pointing you to Pyrats, "a super fun animated short from those talented scallywags at Gobelins animation school," according to Drawn!

Soviet Propaganda Posters

These Soviet Propaganda Posters amused me.

U-Va.'s One-Year Wonder

U-Va.'s One-Year Wonder, David Banh, didn't just finish his college degree in one year — he double-majored, in math and physics, while having most of his tuition paid for by a variety of scholarships:

Banh went to U-Va. with the equivalent of 72 college credits [from AP exams]. It takes 120 to graduate, and the school requires that at least half come from U-Va. classes.

The typical course load is 15 credits a semester.

His first semester, he took 23 credits and found he had more time than he did in high school to spend with friends, playing games (video games or board games, he clarified, not drinking games). Or just hanging out.

"I don't feel like I missed out," he said. "Most of college was euphoria."

He had some low points, especially late in April when the workload for his 37 credits seemed crushing, and his grades started to slip. (To some Bs.)

Disney Sells Films Through iTunes Store

Wow. Walt Disney Sells 125,000 Digital Copies of Films Through iTunes Store in Less Than a Week, generating $1 million. But that's just the beginning:

Disney expects revenue of $50 million in the first year from its iTunes partnership, Iger said at an investment conference in New York sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

"Clearly customers are saying to us they want content in multiple ways," Iger said.

So far, Disney is the only studio selling films on iTunes. Disney was also the first studio to agree last year to sell television shows on iTunes. Other studios quickly followed suit.

Catastrophic Black Swans

John Robb discusses the potential for Catastrophic Black Swans — very bad, unpredictable events — at the hands of terrorists:

If we follow this trend line, the path in development is clear. First, over the next decade, the size of the group necessary for global warfare will continue to decrease and decentralize (through a near term shift to systems disruption and open source organizational forms). Second, we will eventually reach a point when the weaponry available to these groups will enable them to initiate a catastrophic black swan (an event that [is] impossible to predict).

RAND's Charles Meade and Roger Molander provide a great example of a catastrophic black swan in their contemplation of the effects of the explosion of a nuclear bomb, smuggled in a shipping container, at the port of Long Beach CA (PDF). Of particular interest are the cascading effects of such an attack — such as port closures across the US, which would result in immediate global economic isolation of an indeterminate duration. Of course, viewed within the context of a catastrophe like this, it is important to consider the first expression of this trend line (global terrorism using conventional weaponry) as a grace period. History has given us an opportunity to get security right before the next wave hits. So far, it doesn't look like we have learned anything at all.

AI Invades Go Territory

AI Invades Go Territory:

Wired News: What makes programming go so much tougher than chess?

Rémi Coulom: In Go, you don't capture pieces, and so it's very difficult to say that black is ahead or white is ahead just by looking at the board. In order to survive, a group of stones needs to surround two "eyes" — empty areas that can't be invaded by the opponent.

On a 19-by-19(-line) board, you'll have plenty of stones whose life or death status is undecided, and this is extremely difficult to analyze statically. This is different from the situation with chess or (checkers), where you can look at the board and say, "I have one more pawn than you."

WN: What are "Monte Carlo” methods and how do they apply to Go?

Coulom: Monte Carlo methods are named after a quarter of Monaco that's famous for its casinos. In the case of Go, the basic idea goes like this: To evaluate a potential move, you simulate thousands of random games. And if black tends to win more often than white, then you know that move is favorable to black.

WN: With 250 moves in a typical game, that must take a lot of computational power.

Coulom: The version of Crazy Stone in the Torino Olympiad ran on a four-CPU machine — two dual-core AMD Opterons at 2.2 GHz — and did about 50,000 random games per second. Unlike traditional algorithms, the Monte Carlo approach is extremely easy to parallelize, so it can take advantage of the multi-core architecture of the new generation of processors.

WN: Crazy Stone was not the first program to use Monte Carlo methods, but it was successful enough that it started a trend among Go programmers. What was your innovation?

Coulom: Because you can't sample every possible random game, the Monte Carlo algorithm can easily fail to find the best moves. For instance, if most of the random games resulting from a certain move are losses, but one is a guaranteed win, the basic algorithm would take the average of those games and still evaluate it as a bad position.

Crazy Stone is clever enough to avoid this problem. When it notices that one sequence of moves looks better than the others, it tends to play it more often in the random games.

Actor Mickey Hargitay dies at age 80

Actor Mickey Hargitay dies at age 80:

Born Miklos Hargitay in 1926, he emigrated from his native Hungary to the United States after World War II. He became interested in bodybuilding in the 1950s and was named Mr. Universe, Mr. America and Mr. Olympia in 1955.

"My dad's a bit of a superhero," Mariska Hargitay told the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" last year.

He parlayed his perfect physique into a performing career when Mae West tapped him to be one of the musclemen in her stage show.

It was there that Hargitay met Mansfield, whom he married in 1957. That same year, he made his big-screen debut in "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." He went on to star opposite his wife in three films: "The Loves of Hercules," "Promises! Promises!" and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?"

The couple had three children together, including Mariska, before divorcing in 1964. Mansfield died in a car crash in 1967.

The World's Most Toxic Value System

Steven Dutch argues that the primitive "honor" ethic — which he calls thar, the Arabic term for "blood vengeance" — is The World's Most Toxic Value System. The elements of the thar mentality:

• Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult
• Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing
• Obsessive male dominance
• Paranoia over female sexual infidelity
• Primacy of family rights over individual rights

Some examples of its toxicity:

• When Western firms first started doing business in Saudi Arabia, they encountered a cultural roadblock. Men would eagerly learn how to do technical tasks, but at first refused to clean things — parts, tools, work areas — because cleaning things was "womens' work."
• After my civil affairs unit had been in Kuwait a month in 1991, we began to sense that something was wrong: the recovery was far too slow. Kuwait was not that badly damaged in the Gulf War, apart from the burning oil wells. It was certainly not as badly damaged as an American city would have been by an earthquake or hurricane. The prevailing attitude everywhere was "where can we hire people to clean up? This attitude, that local people are managers and the actual hands-on work is done by hired help, is pervasive in the Persian Gulf and is very similar to the attitude of ancient Rome. In ancient Rome the attitude was that if citizens needed technical help, they could always buy an educated slave.
• In many societies, the low-status jobs are first taken by foreigners who either don't share their neighbors' disdain for the jobs, or who are more interested in profit than status. However, when the low-status jobs turn out to be critical, often the locals find that they have been bypassed on the ladder to success. Worse yet, the rungs above them are occupied. In many African nations, shopkeeping and clerical jobs were left to Asian immigrants because they were considered too lowly for the warrior and herding classes. As time went by and it became obvious that trade and government were the routes to prosperity, that there really weren't all that many jobs for traditional warriors and that killing lions with a spear was not a skill in high demand, the immigrants who took the former low-status jobs found themselves targets of resentment. In Idi Amin's Uganda in the late 1960's, Asian shopkeepers were simply expelled, but at least they were spared the agony of living in the society that Amin proceeded to create.
• Immigrant families from thar-dominated societies to the United States often strongly resisted public education because it was seen as a threat to the authority of the family.
• It's very common to read accounts of entrepreneurs in Third World countries who could easily achieve even greater success but deliberately refrain because if they did, they would be inundated by extended family members. Could there be a more effective mechanism for keeping a society poor?
• For sheer, bottom-of-the-barrel depravity, it's hard to top this. A recent newspaper account of the plight of AIDS orphans in Africa described how they would often be left utterly destitute because their parents' relatives would swoop in and take all their property. No doubt these are the same relatives who would expect the orphans to support them if they became successful.

The Shire of Bend, Oregon

The Shire of Bend, Oregon is an unusual housing development:

The Shire is a development that borrows its basic design concept, styling and features from an era where the sense of community, the beauty of the land and the interaction of the residents with the land had high value. The Shire brings the spirit of a great age to daily living. The Shire has many flavors of eighteenth century English architecture and landscaping chosen because the style of the period was enchanting, evoking good feelings of a simpler lifestyle than the present. The Shire is a place where just the beauty and charm of the grounds and the structures make you relax, smile and be happier. We set out to create a lifestyle rather than a subdivision.

Links to free episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

Someone calling himself Dragobert has compiled a list of links to free episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on Google Video:

The show aims to debunk an array of metaphysical, supernatural, and popular misconceptions and to apply critical thinking and scientific skepticism to these issues.

Enjoy!

U.C. Irvine Scientists To Start Ant Civil War

Military aircraft rely on radio-based IFF systems to distinguish friends from foes. Ants use a chemical-based system, and now U.C. Irvine scientists are trying to start an ant civil war by playing with those scents:

Hoping to trigger an ant civil war, U.C. Irvine scientists are experimenting with a colorless potion that makes bosom-buddy arthropods try to decapitate one another, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

It could help rein in one of the planet's most troublesome pests — the Argentine ant.

Throughout the state, the species has formed a massive super-colony that stretches from San Diego to Sonoma, wreaking havoc on wildlife, citrus crops and countless kitchens, according to The Times.

The glue that unites the ants is their scent, a hydrocarbon-laced secretion that coats their exoskeletons and enables the insects to identify one another as friends.

But biologist Neil Tsutsui and chemist Kenneth Shea recently created a synthetic version of the Californian ant scent, then tweaked the ingredients slightly and transferred the concoction onto ants serving as guinea pigs, The Times reported.

Like cheap cologne, the new scent offended nearly every other ant in the room. One whiff and they began tearing their suddenly strange-smelling comrades to shreds, according to The Times.

'Our preliminary results strongly suggest that by manipulating chemicals on the exoskeleton, we can disrupt the cooperative behavior of these ants and, in essence, trigger civil unrest within these huge colonies,' Shea said in remarks reported by The Times.

Addendum: If you're not already familiar with UCI, there's an amusing bit of trivia that makes this story even more amusing: UCI's mascot is the anteater. (That's what happens when the student body votes on the mascot in the middle of the 1960s.)

Proxy Terrorism From Iran

Natan Sharansky, former deputy prime minister of Israel and current member of parliament for the opposition Likud Party, discusses Proxy Terrorism From Iran, starting with an anecdote form Russian President Vladimir Putin:

"Imagine a sunny and beautiful day in a suburb of Manhattan," he said. "An elderly man is tending to the roses in his small garden with his nephew visiting from Europe. Life seems perfectly normal. The following day, the nephew, carrying a suitcase, takes a train to Manhattan. Inside the suitcase is a nuclear bomb."

The threat, Putin explained to me a year before 9/11, was not from this or that country but from their terrorist proxies — aided and supported quietly by a sovereign state that doesn't want to get its hands dirty — who will perpetrate their attacks without a return address. This scenario became real when Al Qaeda plotted its 9/11 attacks from within Afghanistan and received support from the Taliban government. Then it happened again this summer, when Iran was allowed to wage a proxy war through Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But this time, the international community's weak response dealt the global war on terror a severe blow.
[...]
It is clear that Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran. It is public knowledge that Hezbollah receives more than $100 million a year from the Iranian regime, as well as sophisticated weapons and training.

Yet Iran has paid no price for its proxy's actions. No military strikes on Iranian targets, no sanctions, no threat whatsoever to Iranian interests. On the contrary, in the wake of the war, there have been renewed calls in the democratic world to "engage" Iran.

Symptomatic of the moral myopia in the West is a farce worthy of Orwell: Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, under whom students were tortured after a 1999 crackdown at Tehran University and whose rule was marked by the continued stifling of dissent, spoke Sunday at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on "Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence."

The Iranian regime's intentions are clear. It calls for "wiping Israel off the map" and tells its followers to "imagine a world without America." It seeks to dominate the Middle East. By failing to hold Iran accountable for its brazen support of Hezbollah, the free world has undermined a central pillar in the war on terror and given the Iranian regime a huge weapon for achieving its ambitions. Now the mullahs know they can attack a democratic country with impunity.

He concludes, The road to a suitcase bomb in Tel Aviv, Paris or New York just got a whole lot shorter.

Literary Wealth

In Literary Wealth, Ward Just shares his five favorite novels about the pursuit of money:

1. The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873).
2. The Financier by Theodore Dreiser (Harper, 1912).
3. Something Happened by Joseph Heller (Knopf, 1974).
4. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (Harcourt, Brace, 1922).
5. American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

The Dutch are the world's tallest people

Another article notes that the Dutch are the world's tallest people:

Most of us are taller than our parents, who probably are taller than their parents. But in the Netherlands, the generational progression has reached new heights.

In the last 150 years, the Dutch have become the tallest people on Earth — and experts say they're still getting bigger. It is a tale of a nation's health and wealth.

Prosperity propelled the collective growth spurt that began in the mid-1800s and was only interrupted during the harsh years of the Nazi occupation in the 1940s — when average heights actually declined.

With their protein-rich diet and a national health service that pampers infants, the Dutch are standing taller than ever. The average Dutchman stands just over 6 feet, while women average nearly 5-foot-7.
[...]
The Dutch were not noted for their height until recently. It was only in the 1950s that they passed the Americans, who stood tallest for most of the last 200 years, said John Komlos, a leading expert on the subject who is professor of economic history at the University of Munich in Germany. He said the United States has now fallen behind Denmark.

Many Dutch are much taller than average. So many, in fact, that four years ago the government adjusted building codes to raise the standards for door frames and ceilings. Doors must now be 7-feet, 6 1/2-inches high.
[...]
In 1848, one man out of four was rejected by the Dutch military because he was shorter than 5-foot-2. Today, fewer than one in 1,000 is that short.

George Maat, an anthropologist at Leiden University Medical Center, cites a study done in 1861 correlating the height of conscripts to the availability and price of rye, then the main food crop. One year after a poor crop, the number of men rejected as too short shot up.

Height appears to come naturally with the territory. Two thousand years ago, the men of the Low Countries stood about 5-foot-9 — tall for the age — and were enlisted as guards for the Roman emperor, Maat said.

Average heights declined over the next 1,800 years as food supply failed to keep pace with population growth and people moved into disease-ridden cities, said Maat. He spoke from his office, cluttered with leg bones and skulls, overlooking a grassy quadrangle that is the burial site of thousands killed by plague in 1635.

Even during the 17th century, when Amsterdam was the world's richest city, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few merchants and average height did not increase.

It took until World War I for the Dutch to regain the 4 inches they lost over two millennia.