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...