Cthulhu License Plate

Any Lovecraft fan should get a smile out of this Cthulhu License Plate, spotted "on a Jeep in March of this year."

The Value of a New York Dollar

Daniel Gross looks at The Value of a New York Dollar — about 76.2 cents — once you account for higher housing costs, tax costs, etc., which are only partially offset by higher wages.

Knock-out blow

In Knock-out blow, Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) explains that a beautiful old neighborhood church was flattened because of attempts to preserve it:

The story is simple. Hackney Council was discussing the possibility of extending a conservation area to include the church. Once that happened, it would be difficult to get permission to demolish the church and build something else. The developers weren’t stupid, and knocked the old building down while they still could.

In the US, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 gives broad powers to federal agencies to restrict development in order to protect species. This can produce the same perverse incentives as Hackney’s conservation area. Economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael studied what happened when the rare red-cockaded woodpecker was discovered in commercially valuable forests in North Carolina. Forest owners who were unwilling landlords to the woodpecker were, of course, not allowed to cut timber. But woodpeckers tend to move about, so there are no prizes for guessing that the forest near the woodpecker, but outside the restricted zone, was cleared immediately.

Michael Margolis, Daniel Osgood and John List found a similar situation in Arizona regarding rare pygmy owls. In 1997, developers discovered that large tracts of land near Tucson were about to be designated “critical habitat”, which would mean restrictions on development. Naturally, the developers didn’t wait.

MIT's pint-sized car engine promises high efficiency, low cost

MIT's pint-sized car engine promises high efficiency, low cost:

For decades, efforts to improve the efficiency of the conventional spark-ignition (SI) gasoline engine have been stymied by a barrier known as the "knock limit": Changes that would have made the engine far more efficient would have caused knock — spontaneous combustion that makes a metallic clanging noise and can damage the engine. Now, using sophisticated computer simulations, the MIT team has found a way to use ethanol to suppress spontaneous combustion and essentially remove the knock limit.

When the engine is working hard and knock is likely, a small amount of ethanol is directly injected into the hot combustion chamber, where it quickly vaporizes, cooling the fuel and air and making spontaneous combustion much less likely. According to a simulation developed by Bromberg, with ethanol injection the engine won't knock even when the pressure inside the cylinder is three times higher than that in a conventional SI engine. Engine tests by collaborators at Ford Motor Company produced results consistent with the model's predictions.

With knock essentially eliminated, the researchers could incorporate into their engine two operating techniques that help make today's diesel engines so efficient, but without causing the high emissions levels of diesels. First, the engine is highly turbocharged. In other words, the incoming air is compressed so that more air and fuel can fit inside the cylinder. The result: An engine of a given size can produce more power.

Second, the engine can be designed with a higher compression ratio (the ratio of the volume of the combustion chamber after compression to the volume before). The burning gases expand more in each cycle, getting more energy out of a given amount of fuel.

The combined changes could increase the power of a given-sized engine by more than a factor of two. But rather than seeking higher vehicle performance — the trend in recent decades — the researchers shrank their engine to half the size. Using well-established computer models, they determined that their small, turbocharged, high-compression-ratio engine will provide the same peak power as the full-scale SI version but will be 20 to 30 percent more fuel efficient.

The temperature is as likely to go down as up

Richard Lindzen, Arthur P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, says the temperature is as likely to go down as up.

How Trey Parker and Matt Stone made South Park a success

How Trey Parker and Matt Stone made South Park a success:

You won't find "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening tearing apart his show at the last minute. That show's writers labor over scripts and then send them off to be animated in South Korea. The entire process, typical of modern animation, takes eight months.

Parker and Stone, however, produce each of their shows in a week. They start Thursday morning with a writers' meeting and finish the following Wednesday, when they send the show to Comedy Central via satellite uplink hours before it airs at 10 P.M.

I guess that explains how they stay so timely.

The Decline and Fall of the Elephant Empire

Charles Siebert wonders if we're looking at An Elephant Crackup:

Just two days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a fishing village nearby. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park, near the village of Katwe. African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They’ve also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

What's going on?

Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

What do you do when adolescent males act up?

When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.

Young males evidently need a coach or drill sergeant to keep them in line.

The Worst Mistake

Jared Diamond says that "Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history":

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it.

New Glowing Mushrooms Found in Brazil

New Glowing Mushrooms Found in Brazil:

Like a black light poster come to life, a group of bioluminescent fungi collected from Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park near São Paulo, Brazil, emanates a soft green glow when the lights go out.

The mushrooms are part of the genus Mycena, a group that includes about 500 species worldwide. Of these only 33 are known to be bioluminescent — capable of producing light through a chemical reaction.

Since 2002 Cassius Stevani, professor of chemistry at the University of São Paulo; Dennis Desjardin, professor of mycology at San Francisco State University in California; and Marina Capelari of Brazil's Institute of Botany have discovered ten more bioluminescent fungi species — four of which are new to science — in Brazil's tropical forests.

If all stories were written like science fiction stories

Mark Rosenfelder notes that if all stories were written like science fiction stories they would go something like this:

Roger and Ann needed to meet Sergey in San Francisco.

“Should we take a train, or a steamship, or a plane?” asked Ann.

“Trains are too slow, and the trip by steamship around South America would take months,” replied Roger. “We’ll take a plane.”

He logged onto the central network using his personal computer, and waited while the system verified his identity. With a few keystrokes he entered an electronic ticketing system, and entered the codes for his point of departure and his destination. In moments the computer displayed a list of possible flights, and he picked the earliest one. Dollars were automatically deducted from his personal account to pay for the transaction.

The planes left from the city airport, which they reached using the city bi-rail. Ann had changed into her travelling outfit, which consisted of a light shirt in polycarbon-derived artifical fabric, which showed off her pert figure, without genetic enhancements, and dark blue pants made of textiles. Her attractive brown hair was uncovered.

[...]

The Rare Carpathian Armadillo

I read Bram Stoker's Dracula years ago — it was much, much better than Frankenstein, by the way — and I've seen any number of vampire movies in my day, but I only recently saw the "original" 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi as the count.

A few observations:

• In the film, it is Renfield (who ends up a bug-eating lunatic) and not Jonathan Harker (the protagonist of the book) who goes to Transylvania.
• Dracula's castle contains rats, fake spiders, and ... armadillos. Seriously. I don't know who the set-dresser was who came up with that one, but they're there.
  
• In the castle, Renfield faints at the sight of a laughably fake bat, and Dracula's wives approach, when Dracula appears and descends — off screen — on Renfield. Rumor has it that the studio didn't want Dracula to attack a man on screen — too gay — but fading to black doesn't seem much better. Anyway, this somehow turns Renfield into his loyal, lunatic manservant.
  

Lighthouse of Alexandria

I didn't realize how long the Lighthouse of Alexandria stood:

The Pharos of Alexandria was a lighthouse built in the 3rd century BC (between 285 and 247 BC) on the island of Pharos in Alexandria, Egypt to serve as that port's landmark, and later, a lighthouse.

With a height variously estimated at between 115 and 135 metres (383-440 ft) it was among the tallest man-made structures on Earth for many centuries, and was identified as one of the Seven Wonders of the World by classical writers.

It ceased operating and was largely destroyed as a result of an earthquake in 1375; some of its remains were found on the floor of Alexandria's Eastern Harbour by divers in 1994. More of the remains have subsequently been revealed by satellite imaging.

The Library of Alexandria did not last nearly as long.

Revolt of the fairly rich

Matt Miller discusses the surprising revolt of the fairly rich:

Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.

The widening chasm between rich and poor may well threaten our democracy. Yet if that banker's lament staggers your brain as it did mine, you're on your way to seeing why America's income gap is arguably less likely to spark a retro fight between proletarians and capitalists than a war between what I call the "lower upper class" and the ultrarich.

Here's my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America's income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won't rise up against ultras because they take it as given that "the rich get richer."

But the hopes and dreams of today's educated class are based on the idea that market capitalism is a meritocracy. The unreachable success of the superrich shreds those dreams.

"I've seen it in my research," says pollster Doug Schoen, who counsels Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. "If you look at the lower part of the upper class or the upper part of the upper middle class, there's a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional 'success' would leave them with no worries. It's the type of rumbling that could lead to political volatility."

Lower uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers, lawyers. At companies they're mostly executives above the rank of VP but below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even Fortune columnists who earn their living as consultants).

Lower uppers are professionals who by dint of schooling, hard work and luck are living better than 99 percent of the humans who have ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsby-esque splendor they'll never enjoy.

The Leadership Myth

In The Leadership Myth, Arnold Kling notes that "one way in which libertarians differ from conventional liberals and conservatives is that we place less faith in having good political leaders":

The conventional wisdom is that we would be better off if politically powerful leaders were less mediocre. Instead, my view is that we would be better off if mediocre political leaders were less powerful.

He describes "the real value of democracy":

Democracy does not lead to particularly good choices. Most successful institutions in society are not democratic.

An example of an institution that I believe works well is a sports tournament. A good chess tournament or tennis tournament produces a winner who is far better than mediocre.

Another example of an institution that works well is the scientific method. I trust the results of well-designed experiments much more than I trust popular opinion.

Many institutions give concentrated decision-making power to experts. Examples include business decisions made by corporations or tenure decisions made by academic departments. Many government agencies are built to work on this model, but in the absence of the competitive discipline that exists in the private sector, the results are mixed. My personal impression is that some agencies, such as the Federal Reserve, have an abundance of expertise, while other agencies, such as the CIA, appear somewhat deficient.

For me, the value of democracy is that it provides a check on government officials. The fact that leaders can be tossed out by popular vote helps to limit their abuse of power. Democracy gives the people the power to toss out the bums.

We should expect mediocrity from politicians:

We have to expect mediocrity from political leaders. They are selected by a very unreliable process. In general, I try to avoid contact with narcissists who spend their time pleading for money. Those are hardly the intellectual and emotional characteristics that make someone admirable, yet they are the traits of people who go into politics.

Baghdad Vigilantes and the Dark Side of Civil Society

Frederick Turner examines Baghdad Vigilantes and the Dark Side of Civil Society:

The change is radical. Whereas the Wahhabi/Baathist killers are indiscriminate in whom they kill, as long as their victims may include Shiites or at least people who might have voted in the elections, the death squads are quite focused in their aim. There is all the difference in the world between bombing a marketplace and shooting a man you have identified and chosen. Reason — even a vile and brutal reason — can be found in the second, where it was absent in the first. The whole point of bombing a market or a bus station is to assert the monstrous and magisterial superiority of chaos itself, of unreason — only thus can the ultimate terror be evoked, terror of what no reasonable strategy of complicity or evasion can avoid. Only thus can ordinary decent people be forced to accept any kind of order, however evil they find it, as long as it is predictable.

But death squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident. That period was a bit further back in the past for the French, the English, and the Americans. But no nation can be shown to have reached the rule of democratic law without it. The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization. That crime is indeed a crime, and its perpetrators must stand trial for it, whether before God or some human tribunal. But it is possible that true civil self-government can only be established with its aid.

Death squads are distinctly better than suicide bombers. Their members want to survive and have something to lose — they envisage a future in which they can stop killing and get on with family life, while the horrible nightmares gradually fade.

Secrets of greatness

One of the most important secrets of greatness isn't particularly secret — practice makes perfect:

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

Private Schools Now 33% Off!

In Private Schools Now 33% Off!, Andrew Coulson notes the surprising difference in funding between private and public schools:

There’s a common perception in this country that public schools are underfunded, and that if they could only spend as much as private schools do, they’d be in clover. When it is pointed out that the average private school tuition is around half of total public school spending per pupil, defenders of the status quo counter that tuition only covers a fraction of total costs.
[...]
Among the other fascinating findings is that public schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a third less than public schools.

Here's how:

Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona’s independent education sector, but less than half of on-site staff in the public sector. In order to match the independent sector’s emphasis on teachers over non-teaching staff, Arizona public schools would have to hire roughly 25,000 more teachers and dismiss 21,210 non-teaching employees.

Arnold Kling adds his thoughts:

As I pointed out long ago, one of the miracles of public education is that the school system charges more than $10,000 per student, puts 25 students in the classroom, and still pays teachers (far) less than $100,000 per year. The secret for doing this is to pad the school system (and the teacher's union) with non-teaching staff.

Fighting spirit saves retiree from attack

I always enjoy stories like this. Fighting spirit saves retiree from attack:

A 70-year-old British pensioner, trained in martial arts during his military service, dispatched a gang of four would-be muggers in a late-night attack in Germany.

"Looks like he had everything under control," a police spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident last Friday.

The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany, was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.

When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their injured accomplice with them.

The pensioner, whose name was not immediately available, suffered light abrasions.

Seriously, a 70-year-old man hip-tossed his attacker. How cool is that?

Robert Greene Interview

Sonshi.com, which describes itself as "the largest Sun Tzu website," interviews Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power, The 33 Strategies of War):

Sonshi.com: Flavius Vegetius Renatus said, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." Do you think most people are too focused on trying to obtain peace without first learning to how deal with war?

Greene: Yes. That is a major concept in The 33 Strategies. There is too much conflict avoidance in our culture. Some of this comes from a lot of political correctness that has filtered its way through society. Some of it comes from the importance of always appearing to be on the side of peace, cooperation, fairness to one and all. But life involves constant competition and conflict and how you deal with this will determine your fate in life. Being steeped in the art of war does not make you aggressive, at least not under the banner of Sun–tzu. Rather it makes you smarter, more prudent, better able to handle life’s inevitable struggles with intelligence. I want my book to ground the reader in certain basic principles, so when conflict comes, he or she can take the proper stance, like a swordsman.

Besides, I hate the way war is seen as something inherently brutal and ugly. Yes, much of war nowadays brings out the worst part of our nature. But in war, all kinds of noble human traits have been developed, such as discipline, cohesion, pride. All of life involves a kind of warfare, and a lot of Hindu texts spiritualize warfare into a struggle from within, to gain control over your own beastly nature. People with bumperstickers that say "War is not the answer" are such idiots. Tell that to those countries that found themselves invaded by the Nazis. As Heraclitus wrote, "War is the father of everything. Some it makes slaves, others masters."

James Meek joins British troops in Afghanistan

James Meek joins British troops in Afghanistan and shares a few stories:

In the same firefight, another private, 20-year-old Phil Briggs, was saved by his chest plate, a piece of armour slightly larger than a slice of bread. He fell over backwards into another para, shouting out, "I've been shot! I've been shot!" Later, when he opened up his flak jacket, he found the squashed bullet inside. I mentioned this to another group of paras who'd been at Sangin, and they told me about a soldier to whom the opposite had happened. "He was sure the bullet had hit his armour and he was all right. But it had hit him. It was just the adrenaline."

Who Would Fall for the Old Trojan Horse Trick Today?

I'm not familiar with the Australian TV show Chasers, but they did an amusing bit on Who Would Fall for the Old Trojan Horse Trick Today? Watch the video.

Clever Crows

These Clever Crows are apparently very, very clever — but I suspect their cleverness is a product of lots and lots of trial and error. Watch the video.

Aliens Teach University Economics Class

Aliens Teach University Economics Class, or rather, a video game featuring aliens who crash-land on a post-apocalyptic earth is being used to teach ECON 201 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro:

The Sarbonian aliens are named after economics professor Jeff Sarbaum.

"This is a game in which the students are literally immersed in a story. And they take on the role of a character," he explains. "So all of the reading material, all of the content, all of the examinations and homework, if you will, are built inside the engine of the game."

The Sarbonians come from an alien world that knows no scarcity. After they crash-land on Earth, the students have to grapple with economic challenges like how to make and distribute goods, and how to trade with another group of aliens.

Sarbaum says that professors often use simple classroom games to teach economic concepts. But the Sarbonians take that to a new level.

"I believe we are the first ones to fully emerge students in a narrative story and treat the whole course as a game," Sarbaum says.

Creating the course was a two-year effort that involved dozens of people, from drama students to computer programmers.

Many popular computer games like Civilization and SimCity contain challenges that are economic in nature. But Sarbaum says it's hard to use these games to teach economics, because they don't explicitly explain economic theories to the players.

"What we need to do is explain to them exactly what it is they are experiencing," Sarbaum says. "You know, 'This is what you are experiencing, and this is how an economist would describe the situation.'"

The Anglosphere Constitutional Tradition and War

I just finished reading James C. Bennett's The Anglosphere Challenge, and I particularly enjoyed this passage on The Anglosphere Constitutional Tradition and War:

Anglo-American tradition had always held that the executive, whether Crown or White House, could not engage the country in war without presenting to the populace, as represented by the legislature, the reasons for the war and obtaining approval. These checks and balances came in several forms. One was the raising of funds earmarked for the conflict, in the form of appropriations and special levies approved by the legislature, and subscriptions and loans volunteered by the financial community and general public. A second was the response of the people to a call for military volunteers, in the form of voluntary enlistment and a willingness of the militias to respond to a call for mobilization. The third was the traditional sentiment in both England and America against maintaining a large standing army, or even a military establishment, in time of peace.

That last point is more interesting than I first realized.

Historically, there was no national army, and the Crown had to call on nobles and burghers to provide men and equipment to wage war — that's what Parliament was in large part for — but Cromwell's professional New Model Army changed all that. It also validated fears of a standing army by intervening in politics:

Much of the political effort of the Restoration was devoted to preventing the concentration of power that the New Model Army represented. Britain, the United States, and the British colonies followed the subsequent military model through 1914.

This model was based, fundamentally, on the militia system. The “general militia” was defined as the armed populace of the country, organized on a county-by-county basis. Those who trained regularly and were preorganized into units having a dedicated function in wartime were known as “select militia.” In time of war, this militia was to form the core of the army, along with the royal bodyguard regiments and any additional new regiments raised specifically for that war. Permanent peacetime military forces were viewed with such suspicion, constitutionally, that even select militia training was opposed by most Whigs throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

There were several important exceptions. It was recognized that specialized bodies of military experts could not be trained up quickly in emergencies, but would have to be maintained in time of peace. Artillerymen were the most obvious example; fortification engineers were another. To maintain this expertise, specialized bodies such as the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers were established and maintained.

Note the terminology. Contemporaries, ignorant of the constitutional purpose behind the Anglo-American military structure, idly wonder why the British Air Force and Navy are termed “Royal” while the Army is merely the “British Army.”

This terminology is not a piece of historical trivia: it reflects and illustrates a specific constitutional point. “Royal” forces are permanent forces of the state, maintained even in peacetime.
[...]
Therefore, while the British Army is not a “Royal” force, those parts of it that historically had to be maintained in peacetime are. Examples include the artillery or engineers: Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, and so on. The Royal patronage of various individual regiments comes originally from their origin as the personal bodyguard of the king — the Coldstream Guards, Horse Guards, and the like. Another force of troops maintained in peacetime was the category of “guards and garrisons” — troops manning forts at home and overseas. This category constituted most of the nonspecialist peacetime standing forces maintained by the British military from the Restoration until the post-1918 era.

Since it was recognized that maintenance of the freedom of international commerce and other necessary functions of government might require small-scale exercise of military force, one standing land force was earmarked for that purpose — the Royal Marines, maintained as an adjunct of the Royal Navy. The navy was ever landing small parties of marines to deal with pirates or piratical small tyrants, especially in areas such as North Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia (all of which, for that matter, remain troublesome nests of piracy to this day). An examination of the use of the Royal Marines, and subsequently the U.S. Marines, demonstrates how the structure of the armed forces under the Anglo-American civil constitution historically served to create an effective barrier to the abuse of the war-making power. Small-scale interventions have been, and will probably continue to be, an inevitable adjunct of the functions of a large country with worldwide trade and maritime activities. The need to deal with organized ideological-religious terrorist groups, larger than gangs but smaller than states, makes it all the more likely that small-scale armed expeditions will be an ongoing feature of contemporary affairs.

Traditionally, intervention using the navy and marines could be done on the initiative of the executive without the explicit sanction of Parliament. When the problem became too large and army troops had to be raised (since there were so few permanent troops, to send any overseas almost always implied raising them), the Crown was required to go to Parliament for an authorization for troops and funds. In the course of this process, the goals and objectives of the conflict could be thoroughly debated, and the costs and benefits to the country weighed. The subsequent call for volunteers and appeal for subscriptions and loans gave the country an additional opportunity to demonstrate its enthusiasm or lack thereof for the conflict in question. The bias against standing armies was so great that the term “British Army” was not used in official language, like acts of Parliament during peacetime, until 1745. (Appropriations for existing forces were earmarked for “guards and garrisons.”)

America followed this tradition, and for many years the US had a Department of the Navy and a Department of War:

Why was the army’s department the department of “War” while the navy’s was titled the “Navy”? Was not the navy also involved in war? The point, now lost, was that the navy was intended to function in peace as well as war, while the army was expected to exist (except for its few necessarily permanent functions) only in time of war.

The very small standing army compromised a few specialists who needed specialized training:

The old fort of West Point was turned into an engineering school (the first and, for decades, the only such in the country) to provide the specialists needed to maintain these functions. Unlike European military academies, which concentrate on teaching the methods and history of war, West Point was created as, and until recently remained, an engineering school. In fact, for much of its first century, West Point functioned more as a polytechnic school on the model of the French Grandes Écoles — a Republic-wide resource for technical talent. West Point graduates often found themselves loaned out to private railroad or other civil engineering projects, and in fact, many did not pursue a military career at all after graduation.

How to succeed or fail on a frontier

Nick Szabo explains how to succeed or fail on a frontier:

In the early 15th century, two nations at opposite ends of the world — one vast and the other tiny, one an ancient and advanced civilization and the other recently emerged from a barbaric Dark Ages, one fielding large fleets with large ships, the other fielding small fleets with small ships — both set out on the sea. Told that one of these nations was destined to travel around Africa and conquer the main sea trade routes of the world by the early part of the 16th century, any rational observer would conclude that this prophecy must refer to the vast and ancient civilization with its giant fleets. That observer would have been wrong. But why?

The vast nation, the Chinese Empire, sent abroad vast naval flotillas — the Zheng He fleets. The main purpose of these fleets was not to develop trade, nor to protect trade, nor even to conquer. Instead, the main purpose was simply to display the glory of the Chinese Empire, which as everyone already knew was indeed the most glorious and powerful empire on the planet. A quite secondary purpose was to collect tribute, which came nowhere near the levels needed to fund the fleets.

These state fleets operated completely independently of the vibrant private Chinese merchant fleets that traded not only off China with Japan and Korea and the Philippines, but in Indonesia, Indochina, India, and as far as the east coast of Africa. Zheng He did not help to either protect, expand, or otherwise enable this trade. Instead Zheng He, a eunuch and master bureaucrat of the Emperor, sailed his vast fleet as far as Africa accomplishing little more than showing off the glory of the Emperor and collecting exotic animals for his amusement.

All it took was a political change for the bureaucracy to realize that these expeditions were far too expensive and ultimately pointless. But, as often occurs with politics, the Emperor overreacted and banned not only Zheng He's "treasure fleets," but also the productive trade of the Chinese merchants. The last "treasure fleet" returned in 1433 and China soon withdrew on itself.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a tiny nation of fishing villages and small-time crusaders set out on a different path. Assisted by navigators and investors from other parts of Europe, the Portuguese embarked on a pay-as-you go path of conquest and trade. They focused on conquering strategic points that allowed them to control, tax, protect, and enable trade. They enforced the property rights of their allied merchants and otherwise enabled the commercial institutions by which that trade could flourish.

What does this have to do with us?

When it comes to the "final frontier" of space, it seems to be so far the West that has stepped into China's old shoes. What did Apollo return but glory and a handful of rocks? We proved that our socialists, if funded by taxing capitalists, could beat their socialists funded by socialists. Did such proof of bureaucratic glory really require 1% of our GDP over several years?

Apollo has been followed by several more white elephants that have much more to do with showing off the power and glory of federal bureaucrats than with military advantage or practical business.

Colbert the Paladin

Fans of Stephen Colbert, the Nerd King, should know that Colbert the Paladin, one of the entries in the green-screen challenge, is on line.

The neglected swing voters

The Economist calls libertarians the neglected swing voters:

America may be the land of the free, but Americans who favour both economic and social freedom have no political home. The Republican Party espouses economic freedom — ie, low taxes and minimal regulation — but is less keen on sexual liberation. The Democratic Party champions the right of homosexuals to do their thing without government interference, but not businesspeople. Libertarian voters have an unhappy choice. Assuming they opt for one of the two main parties, they can vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.

In a new study from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, David Boaz and David Kirby argue that libertarians form perhaps the largest block of swing voters. Counting them is hard, since few Americans are familiar with the term “libertarian”. Mr Boaz and Mr Kirby count those who agree that “government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses”, that government, rather than promoting traditional values, “should not favour any particular set of values”, and that “the federal government has too much power”. Using data from Gallup polls, they found that, in 2005, 13% of the voting-age population shared all three views, up from 9% in 2002.

That is easily enough libertarians to tip an election. And their votes are up for grabs. In 2000 George Bush won 72% of the libertarian vote, to Al Gore's 20%, by repeating the mantra “My opponent trusts government. I trust you.” But in 2004, after Mr Bush increased the size of government and curtailed some civil liberties as part of the war on terror, his margin dropped to 59%-38%.

Why aren't politicians courting libertarians?

Libertarians are ignored partly because they are hard to find, not least because they just want to be left alone. (There is a Libertarian Party, but it gets hardly any votes.) Politicians can reach social conservatives through churches or union members through their unions, but where do libertarians gather? Parties will always court the votes that are cheapest to court because, for once, they are spending their own money.

Gold mine holds life untouched by the Sun

Gold mine holds life untouched by the Sun:

The first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine.

The bacteria exist without the benefit of photosynthesis by harvesting the energy of natural radioactivity to create food for themselves. Similar life forms may exist on other planets, experts speculate.

The bacteria live in ancient water trapped in a crack in basalt rock, 3 to 4 kilometres down. Scientists from Princeton University in New Jersey, US, and colleagues analysed water from the fissure after it was penetrated by a narrow exploratory shaft in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. The shaft was then closed.

There were many species of bacteria present, but RNA sequencing showed most were a previously-unknown type of bacteria dubbed Desulfotomaculum.

How do the live without photosynthesis?

Uranium and other radioactive elements in the rock emit radiation that shatters water molecules, producing high-energy hydrogen gas that is able to cleave chemical bonds.

The bacteria exploit this hydrogen gas to turn sulphate (SO₄) molecules from the rock into hydrogen sulphide (H₂S). It is the energy-trapping equivalent of photosynthesis. The energy of radiation, which makes hydrogen gas energetic enough to form these bonds, replaces the energy of the Sun.

Which country is the best colonizer?

Joel Waldfogel asks, Which country is the best colonizer?:

Feyrer and Sacedote's key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births.
[...]
To be sure, Europeans have not always been benevolent masters. Before the Enlightenment, they tended to view natives as savages who were better off dead than not baptized. After about 1700, however, attitudes began to change. While 16th-century explorers like Magellan set out to spread Christianity as well as make money, later voyages, like those of English Capt. James Cook between 1768 and 1779, had more explicitly scientific aims. The experience of island colonies reflects the difference. When the authors divide the islands into those that were colonized in the centuries before 1700 and those that were colonized after, current island income is 64 percent higher per century for the post-Enlightenment group but only 11 percent higher per century for the pre-Enlightenment one. And, no, the effects don't appear to stem from the replacement of decimated low-income native populations with higher-income Europeans.

The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France. Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.

There is no disputing that thousands died in the wake of European explorers' discovery of the New World. That's bad. But we can still give a small cheer for Columbus, because European colonization brought riches in its wake.

The Man for All Seasons

Dr. Henry I. Miller calls Norman Borlaug, the Father of the Green Revolution, The Man for All Seasons:

Borlaug introduced several innovations. First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest; this raised yields 20 to 40 percent.

Second, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties that would not fall over in the field when aggressively fertilized to achieve maximum yields.

Third, he devised an ingenious technique called "shuttle breeding" — growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico. The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the years required for breeding new varieties. Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting new early-maturing, rust-resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes and soil types. This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed. Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation.
[...]
How successful were Borlaug's efforts? From 1950 to 1992, the world's grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland — an extraordinary increase in yield of more than 150 percent.

Drugs for Africa: A Modest Proposal

In Drugs for Africa: A Modest Proposal, David Friedman presents his suggestion:

Let charitable donors in rich countries buy out the patent on the second best AIDS drug or combination of drugs and public domain it — let anyone who wants make it. Buying the second best drug should not be that expensive, since it probably is not making much money any more. And even if the same company owns the first best drug, it should not lose too many sales, since most customers who can afford the best drug will keep taking it.

This proposal has one large advantage over the usual alternative of forcing drug companies to make their drugs available at a low price in poor countries, with the threat that if they do not the countries in question will simply refuse to enforce their patents. That proposal makes the development of new drugs less profitable and so buys a short run gain in availability at the long run cost of slowing the development of new drugs. It could be a very large long run cost if the practice spreads from very poor countries up to less poor countries.

My proposal, on the other hand, makes the development of drugs more profitable.

Actually, that's his palatable suggestion. He also makes a less palatable "modest proposal":

FDA rules on testing should be designed to encourage drug companies to make not yet approved drugs available abroad in order to use the information so generated to meet the requirements for approval in the U.S. That would bring down the cost of finding out whether new drugs are safe and getting them approved. At the same time it would provide low cost — albeit somewhat risky — drugs for people in poor countries.
[...]
Opponents will argue that it is unjust for rich people to get the best drugs and poor people the second best — even if the realistic alternative is poor people not getting any drugs at all. They will make good demagogic use of the idea that it is wicked to use human beings as guinea pigs for potentially dangerous drugs — despite the fact that using humans as guinea pigs is the only way we have of finding out whether or not drugs are safe.

Adding Passengers to the Titanic

Arnold Kling argues that increasing the government's role in health care, as Jacob Hacker recommends, amounts to Adding Passengers to the Titanic:

According to the 2006 report of the Medicare Trustees, the unfunded liability in Medicare over the next 75 years is $11 trillion. This is the gap between the promises that the system makes to future beneficiaries and the taxes that will be collected under current law to pay for those benefits.

Kling's recommendations:

1. We need rigorous cost-benefit analysis of medical protocols. For heart disease, when is bypass surgery the best solution, when are angioplasties the answer, and when is treatment with medication most cost-effective? Is screening for colon cancer using colonoscopy the best approach, or would other procedures be most cost-effective for lower-risk patients? The United Kingdom uses a commission of experts to undertake this sort of analysis, and perhaps we could use something similar.


2. We need to rethink what it means to have health insurance for people under 65. The real need is for insurance against really expensive illnesses, of the kind that require tens of thousands of dollars of spending over a period of years. Discretionary care and minor expenses ought not to be covered.


3. We need to examine options for putting Medicare on a sound financial footing. Ultimately, this will require changing to a system where people save more in personal accounts for the inevitable high medical expenses they will incur as they age.

Architecture and Security

Bruce Schneier notes that when it comes to Architecture and Security, "the problem is that architecture tends toward permanence, while security threats change much faster":

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody's mind. So the architects designed a college without the open greens of traditional college campuses. It's now 30 years later, but Syracuse University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.

Similarly, hotel entries in Montreal were elevated above street level in the 1970s, in response to security worries about Quebecois separatists. Today the threat is gone, but those older hotels continue to be maddeningly difficult to navigate.

Also in the 1970s, the Israeli consulate in New York built a unique security system: a two-door vestibule that allowed guards to identify visitors and control building access. Now this kind of entryway is widespread, and buildings with it will remain unwelcoming long after the threat is gone.

An Economic Agenda for Republicans

Tyler Cowen suggests An Economic Agenda for Republicans, then "handicaps" his ideas' chances of making it into law:

1) Institute means-testing for Medicare. "The graying of America threatens to bankrupt our national finances, mostly through forthcoming Medicare expenditures. Medicare should be a welfare program for the needy, not a source of comprehensive coverage for wealthy old people."

2) Eliminate all farm subsidies, quotas, and price supports. Eliminate all tariffs. Eliminate all budget earmarks. Eliminate all corporate welfare. "No, these are not the 'big fish' in the budget, but we need to take a stand against the totally outrageous."

3) Take in more high-skilled immigrants, and make them legal. "This is a win-win situation, and we are turning our back on it."

4) Phase out all forms of capital income taxation, including the corporate income tax, and replace them with a carbon tax, including a gasoline tax. "Savings and investment boost economic growth, but when it comes to energy, global warming threatens as a major problem and our dependence on Middle Eastern oil damages our foreign policy."

5) Institute full-scale experiments with school vouchers. "Competition is a needed tonic for many of America's worst schools; in any case, many simply cannot get worse. Make sure that the money is attached to the student, not to the school."

So how does Cowen handicap any of his ideas ever making it into law?

"The odds? No. 1 will happen sooner or later, but at the last possible moment. It won't be popular, and it will be introduced in sneak fashion, rather than transparently. No. 2 won't happen. No. 3 will happen only when the climate of opinion shifts on low-skilled immigrants. Don't hold your breath. [As for No. 4], I predict we will get a carbon tax under the next Democratic president but not sooner; capital income taxation won't fall more than it already has. On No. 5, we will try some more poorly thought out voucher experiments, not the real thing."

Yale poli sci professor Jacob Hacker offers up An Economic Agenda for Democrats.

Del Toro Talks At the Mountains of Madness

Guillermo del Toro, who directed the very Lovecraftian Hellboy, is gearing up to shoot Hellboy 2: The Golden Army in January, but he's got something even more Lovecraftian planned after that. Del Toro Talks At the Mountains of Madness:

"Mountains of Madness, which is a project I've had for several years, if it comes to fruition I'd rather do that immediately while the iron is hot," del Toro says. "But it all depends on so many factors — creative, personal — that every time I predict what I'm going to do next, I fail."

Details on when/how/if the project is going to happen are sketchy, but del Toro has a clear idea of how he will portray the classic horror tale on screen, and he says it will definitely be a studio picture. Adapting Lovecraft's unique style to the movies has proven to be a difficult undertaking for filmmakers in the past, but the helmer says that he's enhanced At the Mountains of Madness' story (about an expedition to Antarctica that turns creepy fast) so that it will work on screen.

"The albino penguins, the gigantic city… The hard thing about that novel is it's very much a record of an expedition, so the narrative is brilliant in that it's a little bit dry but it's not character-based," he says. "There are many characters that you don't know — you don't even know who the hell the expedition is [made up of] until you have it referenced in another book of Lovecraft's."

Fleshing out those characters will be key to making the film work, he explains.

"You need to create the character dynamics and the arc of the story, which is not in the book," says del Toro. "Also, the horror in the book is only ambiguous and it's kept open at the end. And you can still capture that atmosphere, but then you have to take it and go to a climax [in the movie]. Which in the book is really a climax by almost using negative space in the narrative; it's what you don't see that makes it. That essentially goes against the very essence of show business, because you don't show anything. I think that what we're doing is good and it's as good as we can [do when] adapting Lovecraft. But it's a project that's been with us for several years now. It's not an easy project to set up."

Darwin's entire works go online

Darwin's entire works go online:

The original notebook, which documents Charles Darwin's observations throughout his five-year voyage to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific aboard HMS Beagle, is presumed stolen, but using a microfilm copy, Cambridge University scientists today make it available free online, along with the entire works of the scientist credited with the most important advance in science of the past 300 years.

The collection brings Darwin's breathtaking range of writing together for the first time, with 50,000 pages of searchable text, and tens of thousands of images, many from previously unpublished manuscripts, together with notebooks, diaries and original publications such as The Origin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle (the Journal of Researches) and The Descent of Man. Audio versions of key works will be free to download at the project website, darwin-online.org.uk.

A Lesson From Europe on Health Care

A Lesson From Europe on Health Care:

So something beside administrative costs is at work here, and it involves a basic cultural difference. Americans seem to be less willing to take no for an answer and more willing to try almost anything, no matter how expensive or how slim the odds, to prolong life. (The United States is also a fatter, more diverse country with wider income disparity, which gives our medical system a harder task.)

There are enormous benefits to the American refusal to go gently into that good night. It has made us obsessed with medical advances and turned this country into the world’s research laboratory. If you followed this year’s Nobel Prize announcements, you may have noticed that every scientific prize went to an American. Even hernia surgery, which has been around for 5,000 years, is now based in significant part on American methods, notes Raymond C. Read, a retired surgeon who has studied its history. Some of our spending, in short, goes to support medical care in other countries.

But much of it is simply wasteful. Expensive procedures — like some Alzheimer’s treatments, some knee surgeries and many body scans — are often no more effective than basic ones, according to research. Yet doctors can keep on getting reimbursed for the expensive ones. “Basically, anything that doesn’t kill patients is paid for by Medicare and insurance companies,” said Jonathan Skinner, a health care researcher at Dartmouth College.

This, I think, is the main lesson that we could stand to learn from Europe and Canada. We Americans tend to treat any rejection of a health claim as some conspiracy by insurance companies, the government, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. In other countries, people have arrived at a better understanding that health care necessarily involves economic triage — that $10,000 spent on quixotic care is $10,000 that can’t be spent more usefully.

Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You

Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You looks at Professor Brian Wansink’s "quirky experiments in the psychology of overindulgence":

An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.

Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.

People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.

The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Paul Graham lists The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups:

1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
    
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort

U.S. Army sniper nails record shot

I don't know if this qualifies as a "feel good" story, but it is interesting. U.S. Army sniper nails record shot:

Gazing through the telescopic sight of his M-24 rifle, Army Staff Sgt. Jim Gilliland, leader of Shadow sniper team, fixed his eye on the Iraqi insurgent who had just killed an American soldier.

His quarry stood nonchalantly in the fourth-floor bay window of a hospital in battle-torn Ramadi, still clasping a long-barreled Kalashnikov. Instinctively allowing for wind speed and bullet drop, Shadow's commander aimed 12 feet high.

A single shot hit the Iraqi in the chest and killed him instantly. It had been fired from a range of more than three-quarters of a mile, well beyond the capacity of the powerful Leupold sight, accurate to 3,300 feet [1000m].

"I believe it is the longest confirmed kill in Iraq with a 7.62mm rifle," said Sgt. Gilliland, 28, who hunted squirrels in Double Springs, Ala., from the age of 5 before progressing to deer — and then to insurgents and terrorists.

"He was visible only from the waist up. It was a one-in-a-million shot. I could probably shoot a whole box of ammunition and never hit him again."

Later that day, Sgt. Gilliland found out that the American soldier who had been killed by the Iraqi was Staff Sgt. Jason Benford, 30, a good friend.

The insurgent was one of between 55 and 65 Sgt. Gilliland estimates that he has shot dead in less than five months, putting him within striking distance of sniper legends such as Carlos Hathcock, a Marine who recorded 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam.

I don't think we'd have a military if it weren't for the south...

World's Smallest GPS System

With some hyperbole, you could say that an ant's body comprises the World's Smallest GPS System:

Despite zigzagging across flat, monotonous terrain looking for food, Saharan desert ants always head home via the shortest possible route. Like many insects, the ants use polarized sunlight to get direction, but how do they measure distance? To find out, neurobiologist Harald Wolf of the University of Ulm in Germany caught ants at a feeder 30 feet away from their nest. Some ants' legs were extended by gluing on pig bristles, while other ants' legs were severed below the knee. On the return trip, the ants on stilts overshot the nest, while those with severed legs stopped short. Wolf concludes the ants count their steps via an internal pedometer that is part of their nervous system, making them the only creatures known to do so.

Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes

Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes looks at the various household products that mimic hormones:

In a 1998 paper in the journal Clinical Pediatrics, Dr. Chandra Tiwary, the former chief of pediatric endocrinology at Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, reported an outbreak of early breast development in four young African-American girls who used shampoos that contained estrogen and placental extract. The early puberty reversed once the shampoo was stopped.

In the tradition of previous physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to possible pathogens, Dr. Tiwary tried the shampoos on himself. He carefully measured his own levels of various male and female sex hormones to establish his baseline, used the shampoos for a few days, then repeated the tests.

While Dr. Tiwary is quick to admit that his unpublished findings must be interpreted with great caution, some of his sex hormone levels changed by almost 40 percent after he used the shampoos. In some cases, substances other than sex steroids may also disrupt normal sexual development. In Boston at the annual Endocrine Society meeting in June, Clifford Bloch of the University of Colorado School of Medicine presented several cases of young men who had developed marked breast enlargement from using shampoos containing lavender and tea tree oils, which are widely used essential oil additives that present no problem for adults.

Dr. Bloch collaborated with scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina to test the oils on human breast cells grown in test tubes. Lavender and tea tree oil had the same effect on the cells as estrogen.

Rare meteorite found in Kansas field

I can't be the only person to see a headline like Rare meteorite found in Kansas field and wonder if the rock was green...

Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video

Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video is so surreal that I cannot prepare you for it. Seriously.

White & Nerdy

If you're reading this, there is a high probability that, like Weird Al, you are White & Nerdy.

What it means to be a liberal

Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, compiles a ten-point list of what it means to be a liberal and concedes that "not all liberals embrace all of these propositions, and many conservatives embrace at least some of them."

Stephen Bainbridge, in The Communitarian Connundrum, takes issue with Stone's sixth proposition, which reads (in part):

It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

Bainbridge notes, "It is this communitarian aspect of modern liberalism, of course, which marks a principal difference between the modern version and classical liberalism."

In A Dialogue with a Liberal, Arnold Kling also takes issue with that same point:

I believe that in reality what has helped the less fortunate is economic growth. Today's elderly are affluent not because of Social Security, but because of all of the wealth created by private sector innovation over their lifetimes. Government involvement in health care and education is an impediment to progress in those fields. Job training and welfare are demonstrable failures. I think that treating a national community like a family is a grave intellectual error. A national unit is an institution that creates a legal framework for a large group of strangers to interact. A family is a small group that interacts on the basis of personal bonds. Strengthening government serves to weaken families and other vital civic institutions. If Professor Stone is truly as open-minded as he says, then he ought to examine what economists have found about the sources of economic growth and the ways that poverty has been alleviated over time.

He then presents his own list of libertarian propositions.

When North Korea Falls

Robert Kaplan looks at what happens When North Korea Falls:

Meanwhile, China’s infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing’s Korean cronies once the KFR [Kim Family Regime] unravels. This buffer state will be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny it will replace. So from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese look to be offering a better deal than the Americans, whose plan for a free and democratic unified peninsula would require South Korean taxpayers to pay much of the cost. The more that Washington thinks narrowly in terms of a democratic Korean peninsula, the more Beijing has the potential to lock the United States out of it. For there is a yawning distance between the Stalinist KFR tyranny and a stable, Western-style democracy: in between these extremes lie several categories of mixed regimes and benign dictatorships, any of which might offer the North Koreans far more stability as a transition mechanism than anything the United States might be able to provide. No one should forget that South Korea’s prosperity and state cohesion were achieved not under a purely democratic government but under Park Chung Hee’s benign dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s. Furthermore, North Koreans, who were never ruled by the British, have even less historical experience with democracy than Iraqis. Ultimately, victory on the Korean peninsula will go to the side with the most indirect and nuanced strategy.

There is much more to the article. If you're interested in North Korea, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Suffering Schools Gladly

In Suffering Schools Gladly, George Leef takes issue with the recent national Report Card and its contention that American "economic leadership" will be at risk if more people don't go to college:

Many students benefit greatly from their college coursework, in ways that improve their productivity. Individuals who work in the fields of science and engineering require a strong academic background. Although it isn't inconceivable that people doing such work might learn what they need to on the job — the Wright brothers, after all, mastered the physics of heavier-than-air flight even though they had never taken any college courses — it's probably efficient to have college and university programs provide that background.

On the other hand, it is clear that for many American undergraduates, their college years provide them with little knowledge or skill essential to, or even useful, in their later work. They don't study math or science. For all the talk about "the knowledge economy," few jobs actually call for knowledge that one can only acquire through years of study in a formal academic setting. Rather than a period of intense concentration that substantially builds vital human capital, for a large number of American students, college is four, five, or six years of — to borrow the title of one of Professor Murray Sperber's books — beer and circus.

As more and more young people go to college, a college degree means less and less:

Last year's National Assessment of Adult Literacy showed that just 31 percent of college graduates could be regarded as "proficient" in their ability to read prose. When the NAAL was done in 1992, the figure was 40 percent, which seems to support the widespread anecdotal evidence that academic standards have been declining under the pressure to retain students who don't have much interest or ability in academic pursuits. The NAAL also shows weakness among college graduates in their ability to do simple math problems and the 2003 report of the National Commission on Writing found widespread dissatisfaction among employers with the writing skills of graduates.

So are Americans "less prepared" just because they have fewer college degrees — or because there has been an erosion of academic standards deep into our entire educational system?

How can the US economy remain so strong with such poor education. It's pretty simple really: Schools do not have a monopoly on learning.

A Cult of Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning

It's sad to see what has happened to chemistry sets and model rocketry. From A Cult of Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning:

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the extreme rocketeers have seen their ranks dwindle. In many parts of the country, rockets are prohibited. Local groups face a welter of ordinances and safety codes, as well as F.A.A. restrictions. Tripoli extreme rocketeers also need federal low-explosives permits. On Tuesday, lawyers representing Tripoli and the National Association of Rocketry and officials of the firearms bureau will head to Federal District Court in Washington to resolve the seven-year-old dispute over the hobbyists’ use of a flammable propellant, ammonium perchlorate composite, or APCP. The chemical is the main ingredient on the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

The firearms bureau classifies APCP as an explosive and, amid post-Sept. 11 security concerns, requires that anyone who uses more than two ounces of propellant undergo federal background checks.

“If I was an 18-year-old and told my mom I needed a low explosives permit and that an A.T.F. agent would come to my house, she’d say, Why don’t you just continue with your guitar lessons?” grumbled Ken Good, the president of Tripoli and a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland.

What happens when police kill?

What happens when police kill?

"Everybody in our nation, including law enforcement, gets their training about police shootings from Hollywood," says Dr Lewinski, professor of sociology at Minnesota State University.

That ignorance extends to police, judges and juries. It wasn't until Dr Lewinski started conducting experiments in the early 1990s that anyone had looked at how quickly suspects could move and how long it took police officers to react to that movement.

He discovered that in the two seconds it takes an officer to draw and pull the trigger, a suspect can fire nine rounds. A person can turn and move as much as 13ft (4m) in one second.

So an officer facing an attacker may decide to shoot — and later swear they were facing them — when in reality their victim has turned to run and been shot in the back.

In the US, an astonishing 70% of victims of police shootings are shot in the back or the side.

The stress of such an encounter affects recall:

In a pilot study in Minneapolis in August, the results were alarming. The officers did not know how many shots they fired and their description of the suspect was inaccurate.

"One of the things lost in the stress response is the counting. Mathematical ability is certainly suppressed. We know that people can't think and shoot simultaneously in this kind of high stress situation," says Dr Lewinski.

If police officers cannot remember key details, it raises serious concerns about the reliability of their evidence. But it does not mean they are lying.

'This Meeting Is Over'

In 'This Meeting Is Over', Alan Dowd looks back at Reagan's Reykjavik meeting with Gorbachev, which most observers considered a failure, and America's subsequent victory over the "evil empire":

We can measure its evil in many ways, but perhaps the easiest way is its utter contempt for human life: One historian estimates the Soviet regime's murder toll at a staggering 62 million. And Lenin's victims died on nearly every continent. The trail of blood stretches across eight decades and spans four generations.

In short, Reagan was not overstating when he called the USSR "evil."

Economist wins Nobel Peace Prize

I'm excited to see that an Economist has won the Nobel Peace Prize — and so is Tyler Cowen:

The winner is Muhammad Yunus, economist (!) and founder of the micro-credit movement, along with his Grameen Bank. Here is the story. Here is his Wikipedia entry. Here is my New York Times column on micro-credit. Here is the best piece on what we know about micro-credit. Here is Yunus's book on micro-credit, which also serves as a memoir and autobiography. It is a captivating and well-written story.

This is a wonderful choice. The funny thing is, they never would have considered this guy for the Economics prize.

‘300′ comic to screen comparison

This ‘300′ comic to screen comparison has me excited to both read the graphic novel, which I don't own yet, and watch the movie, which isn't out yet.

It looks like the director is sticking quite closely to Miller's vision.

Despite a Doctorate And Top Students, Unqualified to Teach

Despite a Doctorate And Top Students, Unqualified to Teach:

As virtually everyone in the audience knew, Mr. Huyck would be leaving Pacific Collegiate, a charter school, after commencement. Despite his doctorate in classics from Harvard, despite his 22 years teaching in high school and college, despite the classroom successes he had so demonstrably achieved with his Latin students in Santa Cruz, he was not considered “highly qualified” by California education officials under their interpretation of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Rather than submit to what he considered an expensive, time-consuming indignity, a teacher-certification program geared to beginners that would last two years and cost about $15,000, Mr. Huyck decided to resign and move across town to teach in a private school. And in his exasperation, he was not alone.

It's almost as if the rules aren't there to ensure quality education...

Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs

A "new" Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs:

With standard techniques exhausted, [Professor Jennifer] Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient's ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again.

"I've used honey in a dozen cases since then," said Eddy. "I've yet to have one that didn't improve."

Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.

Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed.

Glassy Metals

Glassy Metals are stronger than steel and can be injection-molded like plastic:

It is called metallic glass, or amorphous metal, and it appears to be nothing less than an entirely new class of material that can be used to build lighter, stronger versions of anything. “Everything from an Abrams tank to an F-16 jet to a bicycle can be made out of this, and because it is two to three times the strength of conventional alloys, you can halve the weight or more. That’s not evolutionary, it’s revolutionary,” says Johnson. “This is the structural material of the future.”

Strength is not its only virtue. It can also be formed like a plastic. So instead of laboriously making sheet metal and then cutting, machining, and drilling, say, a car fender, all of which weakens the part, a glassy metal fender could be injection-molded in one piece — a breakthrough. “The idea that you can cast something like a plastic part with very high strength is a completely new development,” says materials science professor William Nix of Stanford University, an adviser to Liquidmetal Technologies, which is trying to commercialize the metal.

Better yet, it can be readily made into a foam. “With most metals that’s difficult, because the bubbles want to rise to the surface of the molten metal,” says Johnson. The fact that amorphous metal is thick and like plastic when molten permits the formation of a foam panel that is 99 percent air but roughly 100 times stronger than polystyrene. A sandwich made of two thin sheets of amorphous metal flanking amorphous foam would be strong, light, insulating, fireproof, bug-proof, rustproof, sound dampening, and difficult to penetrate with bombs. Such panels could form buildings, ship hulls, airplanes, and car bodies.

In Madagascar, Digging Up the Dead Divides Families

In Madagascar, Digging Up the Dead Divides Families:

In a culture where the ancestors are revered, many families are splitting along religious lines over whether ritual exhumation of the dead is an act of respect or an act of sacrilege.

Madagascar, an island nation half again the size of California, has long had an uneasy relationship with Christianity. During the 19th century, Queen Ranavalona I suspected that missionaries were colonial agents, so she ordered her soldiers to push Christian converts off a cliff, which they did.

Today, 52% of Malagasy practice indigenous religions, while 41% are Christians, according to the CIA World Factbook. The reality, however, is far more complicated. Many families include both Christians and animists. And many individuals blend Christianity with a belief that the ancestors can intercede with the Creator to bless the living with wealth, health and happiness or, if mistreated, curse them with unemployment, disease and misery.

The melting pot often comes to a boil over the turning of the dead, or famadihana, as the ceremony is called in Malagasy. Although the Malagasy are an ethnic blend of Malaysians, Indonesians, Africans and Arabs, the origin of the famadihana itself is a mystery. Elie Rajaonarison, an anthropologist at the University of Antananarivo, says that the ceremony survives in part because it reinforces social order. People lead good lives so that they, too, will be honored as ancestors some day.

Generally, the exhumations are held in the dry season every five or seven years, after a family member has a dream in which a dead relative complains that he is cold in the tomb.

Exhumation ceremonies can be very expensive in a country where the average person earns roughly $900 a year. The new shrouds range from about $3.50 for a synthetic fabric to $110 for a fine shroud of light-brown raw silk. Buying a cheap one raises the specter of offending the ancestors, and the living.

Leif Erikson Day

Happy Leif Erikson Day!

A Dying Population

In case you haven't heard, Russia has A Dying Population:

The former Soviet Union, with almost 300 million people, was the world's third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics.

A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.

The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of its power, the Soviet Union's people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.

Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia's parliament, said last year that if the trend didn't change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.

Second Life Figures Get a Life

I had assumed that someone was already doing this. From Second Life Figures Get a Life:

Buckbee is the first to get his service off the ground. The virtual designer creates a three-dimensional model of a client's avatar using screenshots taken in the world of Second Life. He uses an open-source design tool known as the OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam OpenLab. After tweaking the model to make sure that there are no overly fragile parts — hair has been a big worry — Buckbee sends the design to the client for final approval. The digital file is then turned into reality using a 3-D printer made by Z Corp.

The final price? Typically less than $100, which has convinced some denizens of Second Life to give the process a go.

Observations on Arabs

Stephen Browne graduated with an anthropology degree, lived in eastern Europe for a while, and did a year in "the Kingdom" — Saudi Arabia. He "went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances," and came back with some Observations on Arabs:

1. They don’t think the same way we do.
2. When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.
3. Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.
4. Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.
5. They do not think of obligations as running both ways.
6. In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.
7. In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.
8. They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.
9. They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.
10. We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.
11. We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.
12. Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Read the whole article.

Who do they hire?

From Creating Passionate Users:

Judo Newaza

I highly recommend this video of judo newaza (matwork) — all very dynamic. Just turn down the volume before you start it up — unless you really want the hip-hop soundtrack playing.

Sleeping with Cannibals

In Sleeping with Cannibals, Paul Raffaele describes his trek into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to visit the Korowai, a tribe known for killing and eating khakhua, the (male) witches who cause disease:

After we eat a dinner of river fish and rice, Boas joins me in a hut and sits cross-legged on the thatched floor, his dark eyes reflecting the gleam from my flashlight, our only source of light. Using Kembaren as translator, he explains why the Korowai kill and eat their fellow tribesmen. It's because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. "The khakhua eats the victim's insides while he sleeps," Boas explains, "replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he's being eaten. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart." When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and kill the khakhua. "Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the name of the man he knows is the khakhua," Boas says. "He may be from the same or another treehouse."

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they've killed in battle. "Of course not," he replies, giving me a funny look. "We don't eat humans, we only eat khakhua."

An example:

On our third day of trekking, after hiking from soon after sunrise to dusk, we reach Yafufla, another line of stilt huts set up by Dutch missionaries. That night, Kembaren takes me to an open hut overlooking the river, and we sit by a small campfire. Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other naked save for a necklace of prized pigs' teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip of his penis. "That's Kilikili," Kembaren whispers, "the most notorious khakhua killer." Kilikili carries a bow and barbed arrows. His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow.

The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili's brother Bailom, pulls a human skull from a bag. A jagged hole mars the forehead. "It's Bunop, the most recent khakhua he killed," Kembaren says of the skull. "Bailom used a stone ax to split the skull open to get at the brains." The guide's eyes dim. "He was one of my best porters, a cheerful young man," he says.

Bailom passes the skull to me. I don't want to touch it, but neither do I want to offend him. My blood chills at the feel of naked bone. I have read stories and watched documentaries about the Korowai, but as far as I know none of the reporters and filmmakers had ever gone as far upriver as we're about to go, and none I know of had ever seen a khakhua's skull.

The fire's reflection flickers on the brothers' faces as Bailom tells me how he killed the khakhua, who lived in Yafufla, two years ago. "Just before my cousin died he told me that Bunop was a khakhua and was eating him from the inside," he says, with Kembaren translating. "So we caught him, tied him up and took him to a stream, where we shot arrows into him."

Bailom says that Bunop screamed for mercy all the way, protesting that he was not a khakhua. But Bailom was unswayed. "My cousin was close to death when he told me and would not lie," Bailom says.

At the stream, Bailom says, he used a stone ax to chop off the khakhua's head. As he held it in the air and turned it away from the body, the others chanted and dismembered Bunop's body. Bailom, making chopping movements with his hand, explains: "We cut out his intestines and broke open the rib cage, chopped off the right arm attached to the right rib cage, the left arm and left rib cage, and then both legs."

The body parts, he says, were individually wrapped in banana leaves and distributed among the clan members. "But I kept the head because it belongs to the family that killed the khakhua," he says. "We cook the flesh like we cook pig, placing palm leaves over the wrapped meat together with burning hot river rocks to make steam."

Such noble savages, uncorrupted by civilization...

Where the Races Relate

Steve Sailer makes a simple but fascinating point in Where the Races Relate (from the National Review, back in 1995):

Much ink has been spilled bemoaning the rancorous state of race relations on our nation's elite campuses. Our colleges, however, has barely even considered any new solutions, due to the academic industry's institutional tendencies toward timid conformity combined with myopic self-absorption. Rather than look beyond the cloisters for novel answers, administrators at our great research universities merely resort to ever greater doses of the hair of the dog that bit them — more affirmative action, more diversity workshops, more victims' studies — with predictably dire results. Yet, during the same quarter century when colleges have managed to exacerbate racial tension among 18-24 year old students, the U.S. Army — using radically different techniques — has tremendously reduced racial strife among 18-24 year old soldiers.

Astonishingly, though, colleges have overlooked an even more obvious source of guidance on how to manage race on campus. University presidents methodically ignore the techniques for forging solidarity among their black and white students that are successfully used by their own best paid, best known employees: their football and basketball coaches.

What could colleges learn from the Army and from their own athletes about race?

War Is Hell

James Cramer recommends five books that illustrate how War Is Hell:

1. The Irish Guards In the Great War by Rudyard Kipling (Doubleday, 1923).
2. Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein (Regnery, 1958).
3. Some Desperate Glory by Edwin Campion Vaughan (Henry Holt, 1981).
4. Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920).
5. But Not for the Fuehrer by Helmut Jung, with Mike Nesbitt (AuthorHouse, 2004).

Making Water From Thin Air

Making Water From Thin Air is now feasible, and it can save the military a lot of money and logistical hassle:

Once deployed, the machines could reduce the cost of logistical support for supplying water to the troops in Iraq by billions of dollars, said Stuart Roy, spokesman of the DCI Group, Aqua Sciences' public affairs firm.

The cost to transport water by C-17 cargo planes, then truck it to the troops, runs $30 a gallon. The cost, including the machines from Aqua Sciences, will be reduced to 30 cents a gallon, Roy said.

Several systems on the market can create water through condensation, but the process requires a high level of humidity.

Aqua Sciences' machines only require 14 percent humidity, Roy said. "That's why this technology is superior and why they are getting the contracts."

Your Ancestors Disgust Me

Scott Adams (Dilbert) says, Your Ancestors Disgust Me:

It has come to my attention that many of your ancestors were pedophiles. They probably didn’t know it, since marrying 15-year old girls was considered “normal” by those perverts. And I’m sure they had excuses such as the fact that the life expectancy was 17. So maybe they rationalized it by saying they had to start pinching out new farm hands before the plague got them. Blah, blah, blah. But that’s no excuse for being a pedophile.

I also have it on good authority that your ancestors from several thousand years ago rarely washed their hands with soap after pooping in the desert, or forest, or igloo, whatever. You come from a long line of unhygienic child molesters.

If you follow your repulsive blood line far enough back, you will find that your ancestors were atheists at best, but more likely worshippers of phalluses.

That’s right: You are the genetic fruit of unhygienic, penis-worshipping, child molesters.

And they couldn’t read – those illiterate, unhygienic, penis-worshipping, child molesters.

Keep going back in time and there’s a virtual guarantee that somewhere a cousin married a cousin, or a brother married a sister. Statistically speaking, you’re probably an inbred spawn of illiterate, unhygienic, penis-worshipping child molesters.

College Rankings Reformed

College Rankings Reformed notes that schools aren't ranked by the quality of education they provide:

But the U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine’s rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity. They directly or indirectly account for 95 percent of a school’s ranking, as Table 1 on page 3 reveals.

Free Education Valued at Cost

Bryan Caplan notes that a Free Education [is often] Valued at Cost:

Mankiw notes that Yale is offering some free education over the web, and wonders whether this is "the beginning of a big change in the industrial organization of higher education?"

I say: No Way. Lots of people want an Ivy League diploma without the work of an Ivy League education. But almost no one wants an Ivy League education without the benefit of an Ivy League diploma.

Indeed, as I've often told my students, an Ivy League education is already free. If you want to learn, start attending classes. No one's going to "card" you. Unfortunately, after four years, no one will vouch for you, either.

Exposing the organic myth

Exposing the organic myth notes how the tiny organic-food industry has grown and changed:

So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield's organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. "It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house," he says. "But once you're in organic, you have to source globally."

There's a reason farming went "inorganic" in the first place:

Since the widespread use of synthetic pesticides began, around the time of World War II, food producers have reaped remarkable gains. Apples stay red and juicy for weeks. The average harvested acre of farmland yields 200% more wheat than it did 70 years ago. Over the past two decades chickens have grown 25% bigger in less time and on less food. At the same time, the average cow produces 60% more milk, thanks to innovations in breeding, nutrition, and synthetic hormones.

It's also worth remembering how inexpensive food is these days. Americans shell out about 10% of their disposable income on food, about half what they spent in the first part of the 20th century. Producing a budget-priced cornucopia of organic food won't be easy.

A Student's Guide to Startups

In A Student's Guide to Startups, Paul Graham points out another big distinction between real life and school:

We noticed a lot of similarities between the startups that seemed to be falling behind, but we couldn't figure out how to put it into words. Then finally we realized what it was: they were building class projects.
[...]
Often the only value of most of the stuff you build in the first six months is that it proves your initial idea was mistaken. And that's extremely valuable. If you're free of a misconception that everyone else still shares, you're in a powerful position. But you're not thinking that way about a class project. Proving your initial plan was mistaken would just get you a bad grade. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of work.

That leads to our second difference: the way class projects are measured. Professors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are now. If someone has achieved a lot, they should get a good grade. But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.

Old but Not Frail

Old but Not Frail looks at those who age well — and those who do not:

The researchers published their data in the May 3 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, finding that being unable to walk a quarter mile within five minutes portended troubles. For each minute beyond five, the risk of dying in the next four years increased by a third, the risk of having a heart attack increased by 20 percent, and the risk of having a disability increased by half.

Those who took more than six minutes for the quarter-mile walk had the same risk of dying or having a heart attack as those who could not walk the distance at all, and the effect was independent of age.

Fear of the Horizon

Most people, when they think of slavery, think of the race slavery of the American South. A small fraction think of ancient slavery, as in Rome. In Fear of the Horizon, John Derbyshire discusses another kind of slavery, religious slavery:

There was in fact, says Prof. Davis, something of religious revenge in the depredations of the Muslim slavers. The slave trade really got going after 1492, the year the last Muslims were expelled from Spain — what Osama bin Laden calls “the tragedy of Andalusia.” Says the author: “In Barbary, those who hunted and traded slaves certainly hoped to make a profit, but in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad — for the wrongs of 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim that has continued to roil the Mediterranean world well into modern times.”

One of the most impressive parts of Prof. Davis’s book is his computation of the numbers of Europeans enslaved by these Muslim raiders. Combing through the historical sources, he concludes that there were about 35,000 enslaved Christians on the Barbary Coast at any one time. He then sets about estimating attrition rates. Slave numbers declined through four causes: death, escape, redemption (i.e. by ransom), and conversion to Islam. Davis gets annual rates from these causes of 17 percent, 1 percent, 2-3 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. This implies a total number of slaves, from the early 1500s to the late 1700s, of one to one and a quarter million. This is an astonishing number, implying that well into the 17th century, the Mediterranean slave trade was out-producing the Atlantic one. Numbers fell off thereafter, while the transatlantic trade increased; but in its time, the enslavement of European Christians by Muslim North Africans was the main kind of enslavement going on in the world.

Christians were captured by two methods. First, there was the seizing of ships by straightforward piracy. The ship itself became a prize along with its crew and passengers. Second, there were raids on the coasts of European countries. Spain, France, and Italy were worst affected, but the pirates sometimes ventured further afield. In 1627 they kidnapped 400 men and women from Iceland.

The victims in either case would be taken back to one of the Barbary ports — the main ones were Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — and sold in a slave market, by auction. They ended up either as the domestic slaves of private persons, or as slaves owned by the state, to be put to work rowing galleys, or constructing public works. The first of these two fates was usually preferable, as there was some chance of humanity from a private owner. Prof. Davis’s account of the lives of galley slaves is hard to read, and state slaves employed on public works were not much better off. There was no large-scale private-enterprise slavery as in the plantations of the Old South. The North African states had little commercial culture.

The effect on the European coastal populations was dramatic. Entire areas were depopulated. The author even sketches out an argument that the culture of baroque Italy was determined in part by a turning inward from the terrors of coastal life — from the “fear of the horizon” that afflicted all the regions subject to slave raiding. He tells us (he is professor of Italian Social History at Ohio State University, by the way) that to this day there is an idiom in Sicilian dialect to express the general idea of being caught by surprise: pigliato dai turchi — “taken by the Turks.” The distress of those left behind, deprived of a husband of father, is painful to read about.

Wealthy Europeans were often ransomed back to their families:

A side benefit of their work, for the slavers, was the opportunity to extract a ransom from the family of a well-born captive. Many European families beggared themselves to pay ransom for a family member taken by the slavers. The novelist Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, unfortunately had a letter from the Duke of Alba on him when he was captured at sea by slavers in 1575. This caused his captors to think his family must be very rich, and they demanded a hefty ransom that Cervantes’s family could not pay. The novelist was ransomed at last, after five years’ captivity, by the Trinitarians, one of the religious orders that made the ransoming of Christian slaves a part of their mission.

You can imagine what kind of incentive those well-meaning Trinitarians provided:

There was in fact an entire Mediterranean sub-economy based around the ransoming of slaves, which Europeans felt to be their Christian duty, and a proper object of charity, and which orders like the Trinitarians and Mercedarians made their main business. This sometimes had unintended consequences. Willingness to pay ransom on the part of nations, for example, encouraged the slavers to ask higher ransom prices for citizens of those nations: “By 1700 there is the clear beginning of an inflation spiral that would lead to ransoms more than doubling by the 1760s. Moreover, nations that let it be known that they were disposed to buy back their enslaved citizens more or less promptly ran the further risk of making prime targets out of their own ships and citizens — as the United States would find to its immense cost in the 1790s.” No wonder economics is called “the dismal science.”

Baby monkeys make faces

As Olivier points out, "The first thing you notice about today's paper by mirror-neurons famous Giaccomo Rizzolatti's team, just published in PLoS biology, is that it is sooooooo cute."

Why? Because it demonstrates that baby monkeys make faces.

Dereliction express

In Dereliction express, Roger Sandall looks at why things fall into disrepair in Africa:

Three things are thought to explain much Third World decline and dereliction. In Africa misappropriated funds heads the list — the Big Man at the top plays Winner Takes All — and there’s no question this is fundamental. Others point to the lawlessness of life where nothing gets done because even the smallest investment is always at risk… so, nothing gets done.

A third explanation sees communal claims and the parasitism of extended family, clan, and tribe making individual progress impossible and nepotism inevitable. These reasons for the engulfing mess and hopelessness come variously combined in different places — as we find in the reports of Tim Harford, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul.

He cites a passage from The Undercover Economist:

There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there’s no point being a phone company.) There’s no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is under-funded and looks even harder for bribes.) There’s no point getting an education because jobs are not awarded on merit. (And you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank can’t collect on the loan.)

The Multicultural Persian Wars

Roger Sandall looks at The Multicultural Persian Wars, the academic conflict over whether Herodotus was sufficiently magnanimous in his treatment of the Persians, and notes that (a) there are no Persian accounts of the war on Greece, and (b) Herodotus is far more even-handed than most modern academics.

I enjoyed this passage on early Greek democracy versus Persian despotism:

All this was happening in the years between about 520 BC and the year of the Battle of Marathon, 490 BC. So just as a matter of interest, while Darius was using blood and fire to impose on his realm “one immense administrative unit” centered on himself — a system resembling Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler — what were the Greeks doing?

In Athens, a mercifully different dispensation was laying the foundations of democracy. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 507 BC were nothing less than that. Paraphrasing and summarising Tom Holland’s discussion, on pages 134–135 of Persian Fire, we find the most complete imaginable contrast with Persian imperialism. The new political rules introduced by Cleisthenes made equality before the law the chief political virtue; made Athens a city in which all citizens enjoyed freedom of speech; made government policy something requiring debate in open assembly; and made it impossible to pass new laws except by popular vote.

From an organisational point of view Cleisthenes’ reforms were just as radical. The dynastic feuding of ‘tyrants’ had brought Athens to the point of ruin. It had to be stopped. Cleisthenes’ solution was to firmly suppress a citizen’s political identification with family and neighborhood, with mafia bosses and clan chiefs. He sliced the country into 150 electoral districts called ‘demes’, and it was from these — and no longer from clans and families — that the citizens of Athenian democracy were obliged in future to take their second names. This applied to the haughtiest aristocrat and the humblest plowman alike.

Tom Holland draws a number of historical parallels between the ancient and modern worlds and the continuing clash of East and West. But nothing is more revealing than the determination of Cleisthenes to stamp out despots and despotism by severing the connection between clan power and political representation. This was in 507 BC. Today, 2,500 years later, throughout most of the Middle East and conspicuously so in Iraq, they still haven’t got the point.

Jaguar Cub at La Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City

Today's dose of cute comes from this Jaguar Cub at La Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City:

A child watches a jaguar cub at La Aurora zoo in Guatemala city, in 2003. The United States announced its biggest ever "debt-for-nature" swap, forgiving 24 million dollars of Guatemala's foreign debt to Washington in exchange for a pledge to protect tropical forests in the central American nation.

New Book on Nazi-Era Humor

A New Book on Nazi-Era Humor shares some of the jokes going around Germany before and during the war:

• Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting.
  
  "Why aren't you saluting like the others?" Hitler barks.
  
  "Mein Führer, I'm the nurse," comes the answer. "I'm not crazy!"
  
  
• Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. "Why don't you just jump?" suggests Göring.
  
  
• "A senior Nazi visits a factory and asks the manager whether he still has Social Democrats among his workforce.
  
  "Yes, 80 percent," comes the reply.
  
  "Do you also have members of the Catholic Center Party?" "Yes, 20 percent," the manager responds.
  
  "Don't you have any National Socialists?"
  
  "Yes we're all Nazis now!"
  
  
• "Göring has attached an arrow to the row of medals on his tunic. It reads 'continued on the back.'"
  
  
• "Two Jews are about to be shot. Suddenly the order comes to hang them instead. One says to the other "You see, they're running out of bullets."
  
  
• Two men meet. "Nice to see you're free again. How was the concentration camp?"
  
  "Great! Breakfast in bed, a choice of coffee or chocolate, and for lunch we got soup, meat and dessert. And we played games in the afternoon before getting coffee and cakes. Then a little snooze and we watched movies after dinner."
  
  The man was astonished: "That's great! I recently spoke to Meyer, who was also locked up there. He told me a different story."
  
  The other man nods gravely and says: "Yes, well that's why they've picked him up again."
  
  
• "My father is in the SA, my oldest brother in SS, my little brother in the HJ (Hitler Youth), my mother is part of the NS women's organisation, and I'm in the BDM (Nazi girls group)."
  
  "Do you ever get to see each other," asks the girl's friend?
  
  "Oh yes, we meet every year at the party rally in Nuremberg!"
  
  
• The German army HQ receives news that Mussolini's Italy has joined the war.
  
  "We'll have to put up 10 divisions to counter him!" says one general.
  
  "No, he's on our side," says another.
  
  "Oh, in that case we'll need 20 divisions."
  
  
• "What will you do after the war?"
  
  "I'll finally go on a holiday and will take a trip round Greater Germany!"
  
  "And what will you do in the afternoon?"

How Not To Dismantle the Caste System

Jayant Bhandari explains How Not To Dismantle the Caste System:

I was brought up in a well-off family. I did my schooling in a private, missionary school. We all wore the same kind of uniform. And we had to sing a relatively secular prayer in the mornings. All this meant that our understanding of the caste system of India was mostly academic. This equanimity about the caste system did not last. After school when we went to the state-run university, most of us soon learned to look down on the lower caste — courtesy of the state.

After finishing the school, I went through an extremely competitive entrance examination to get admission into engineering. Those who gained admission were to become social heroes. I remember that the minimum required of the higher caste to gain admission was a score over 70 percent. Because of affirmative action, those of the lower caste had reserved seats.

Unfortunately, the state of public school education — in 'schools' that often had no buildings or teachers — is so utterly bad that most of the lower-caste people who joined us knew close to nothing. Most of them had entered the university with exam scores under 10 percent. (Even negative scores were not unheard of.)

As a part of the social engineering process, I was not to get my own room in the student hall of residence. I was allotted a room with someone from a lower caste. We had nothing in common. Even our Hindi was so entirely different that we hardly understood each other. My roommate had probably never seen a proper road or slept under a non-thatched roof until he moved in. He certainly had no concept of gas cooking and was unaccustomed to the usage of electricity.

Lioness adopts third baby antelope

Lioness adopts third baby antelope:

A lioness in Kenya has adopted another baby oryx — her third in as many months, game wardens at the northern Samburu National Park have reported.

The lioness is said to allow a female oryx several minutes each day to feed the new-born calf.

The oryx would normally represent a tasty meal to a lion, but this is not the first time the lioness has placed a calf under her protection.

One was seen in her company in December last year, but it was eaten by other lions after two weeks. Another calf was taken away from her in February and placed in a zoo because it showed signs of malnourishment.

From Far Left to Libertarian

Arnold Kling recounts his odyssey From Far Left to Libertarian:

The question of how I became a libertarian ultimately is a question about how I changed my mental model of the political system from one of "good guys vs. villains" to one of the importance of limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. I travelled the route from Far Left to libertarian. I think that quite a few libertarians have travelled that route, and yet I cannot think of anyone who has gone the other direction. This leads me to suspect that:

1. Far Leftists and libertarianism have much in common.
2. Libertarians know something that Far Leftists do not.

What I believe that Far Leftists and libertarians have in common includes:

1. A passion for social and political issues. I grew up in a household where the dinner conversation often was politics. Far Leftists and libertarians both care more than the average person about what goes on in public policy.
2. Frustration with political incumbents. Far Leftists and libertarians both have a tendency to exaggerate the flaws in Presidents while in office and to overstate the virtues of past leaders. For example, Presidents Clinton and Kennedy are much more popular with the Far Left today than when they were in office. Similarly, during his Administration, President Reagan was considered a disappointment by libertarians.
3. Anti-elitism. Both Far Leftists and libertarians are willing to reject what they see as elitist views among politicians and political pundits.

What I believe that Libertarians have learned is what social psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error. The error is to attribute behavior to a person's character when this behavior is in fact based on context. In one classic experiment, the subject is asked to watch a person read a speech that the subject knows that the speaker did not write. Subjects attribute to the person the beliefs contained in the speech.

The Far Left believes that bad policies come from evil motives. In this view, villains, such as powerful corporations, oppose good policies, and political incumbents lack the strength and courage to overcome the villains.

Libertarians believe that context is more important. We believe that government power is inherently corrupting, regardless of who holds leadership positions or how they are influenced. We believe that the market does a relatively good job of channelling self-interest toward socially desirable ends.

In my journey from Far Left to libertarianism, studying economics played an important role. My undergraduate economics professor, the late Bernie Saffran, exposed students to a variety of viewpoints, from Marxist to libertarian. But he revelled in showing us cases where policy intentions conflicted with policy results. The point that self-interest in a market context can lead to good outcomes, while good intentions in government regulation can lead to bad outcomes, was driven home.

Read the whole thing.

Neolithic Boyz

In Neolithic Boyz, Jay Manifold reviews three books on human nature and shares this amusing point from Lee Silver's Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life:

Consider the controversy that would attend the introduction of "another high-risk reproductive technology ... from 2 percent to 10 percent of women who avail themselves of this technology are seriously harmed by it. The risk of death to embryos is about 50 percent; and of the embryos that survive, 20 percent die during the fetal stage of development. Finally, for babies born alive, the risk of a serious birth defect is 4 percent." But "this technology is the primary one used by our species since we first came into existence — sexual intercourse, fertilization in a woman's reproductive tract, and development of the embryo and fetus in her uterus." (p 342)

Ring-Tailed Lemur and Fennec Fox

Today's dose of cute comes from this Ring-Tailed Lemur and Fennec Fox at the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo.

Parent criticizes book 'Fahrenheit 451'

You'd think this was an Onion article. Parent criticizes book 'Fahrenheit 451':

Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.

"The book had a bunch of very bad language in it," Diana Verm said. "It shouldn't be in there because it's offending people. ... If they can't find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn't have a book at all."

Alton Verm filed a "Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials" Thursday with the district regarding Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.

"It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451. "The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class."

Hole-in-the-Wall Experiment

Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research at NIIT in New Delhi, but his passion is for "minimally invasive" education for poor children.

To test his ideas, he launched the Hole-in-the-Wall Experiment:

He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

With access to a computer and the Internet, the children become functionally literate in a subset of English:

At first, I made a Hindi interface for the kids, which gave them links for hooking up with Web sites in their own language. I thought it would be a great hit. Guess what they did with it? They shut it down and went back to Internet Explorer. I realized that they may not understand the dictionary meaning of [English] words, but they have an operational understanding. They know what that word does. They don't know how to pronounce F-I-L-E, but they know that within it are options of saving and opening up files ...

The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them from accessing it.

They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass-shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something.

Education Arbitrage

Jonathan of Chicago Boyz noted that this is "education arbitrage":

Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour — in India.

"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English — a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.

"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks' coffee," Robison said. "We did our own form of summer school all summer."

His comment:

The real story is that it potentially undercuts the entire govt-schools system. If you have kids going from failure to excellent performance based on a couple of hours' tutoring per day, how much better would they perform if they spent four or six hours every day with their online tutors and blew off their schools entirely? That's what parents will be thinking. The teachers' unions are going to try to make this kind of tutoring illegal or so larded up with mandated bulls*** that it won't be effective. I don't think the unions can succeed, however.

Yippee. Education arbitrage.

What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us

Robert Harris looks at the pirate attack on Ostia in 68 B.C. and explains What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us:

The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Top ten geek business myths

Ron Garret shares his top ten geek business myths, including Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something:

Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.

The Fisherman and The Investment Banker

Enjoy the parable of The Fisherman and The Investment Banker:

The American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, only a little while.

The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.

The American then asked, "but what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life."

Read the whole parable for the punchline.