Plato's Republic or Milton Friedman's Market?

Plato's Republic or Milton Friedman's Market?, Arnold Kling asks:

I call this the Fundamental Problem of Political Economy. How do we limit the power that idiots have over us?

One solution, that might be traced to the expression 'philosopher-king' associated with Plato, is to hand the reins of government to the best and the brightest. Since the late 19th-century, the Progressive Movement in American politics has championed this approach. The Progressive vision, which DeLong embraces, is to channel brains and technical know-how through government in order to improve people's lives. One hundred years ago, they sought to prohibit alcohol. Today, they are going after trans fats. One hundred years ago, they favored eugenics, based on the then-new science of evolution. Today, they embrace anti-growth economic policies, based on the contemporary science of happiness. Indeed, we get headlines like 'Tories promise to make happiness a priority'.

The other way to avoid having our lives run by idiots is to limit the power that others have over us. This is the approach that was embedded in our Constitution, before it was eviscerated by the Progressives. It is the approach for which Milton Friedman was a passionate advocate.

Steve Wozniak in Founders At Work

Jessica Livingston, a founding partner at Y Combinator, interviews Steve Wozniak for her new book, Founders At Work:

The Apple I, oddly enough was probably more important [than the Apple II], because it said that a computer of the future is going to have a keyboard and a video display and it's going to look like a typewriter. It's going to be roughly that size. And it's funny, but every computer since the Apple I, including the Polymorphics technology Sol computer that came next (it was out of our club), had a keyboard and a video display. No computer had done this before that. No small computer was coming with a keyboard yet. The Apple I was the first and the Apple II was the third. Basically every computer since then had a keyboard and a video display. The world has never gone back from that day.

What kind of person goes on to develop the Apple I?

Livingston: You were designing all of these different types of computers during high school at home, for fun?

Wozniak: Yes, because I could never build one. Not only that, but I would design one and design it over and over and over — each one of the computers — because new chips would come out. I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips."

The reason I did that was because I had no money. I could never build one. Chips back then were... like I said, to buy a computer built, it was like a downpayment on a good house. So, because I could never build one, all I could do was design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was competing with myself. But that's just the story of how my skill got so good. It's because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with.

The Terrifying Toothpick Fish

Alan Bellows calls it The Terrifying Toothpick Fish, but some of us know it as the dreaded candirú:

Though the candirú is a parasite, humans are not among its viable hosts. It lingers in the murky darkness at the river's bottom, quietly stalking its neighboring fish. Light is scarce in the soupy deep, but the candirú does not need to see… it can taste the traces of urea and ammonia that are expelled from breathing gills.

The tiny hunter shadows its prey, almost invisible due to its translucent body and small size. When the target fish exhales, the candirú detects the resulting flow of water and makes a dash for the exposed gill cavity with remarkable speed. Within less than a second it penetrates the gill and wriggles its way into place, erecting an umbrella-like array of spines to secure its position.

Unconcerned with the host's panicked thrashing, the firmly anchored parasite immediately nibbles a hole in a nearby artery with its needle-like teeth, feasting upon the bounty that gushes forth. Within two minutes the candirú's belly is swollen with the blood of its victim, and it retracts its gripping barbs. Though it may seem that the exploited host fish has escaped, its injuries are so extensive that chances of survival are grim. Meanwhile the victorious attacker slinks back into the river's dark places to digest its meal.

There are many troubling stories regarding human run-ins with the candirú, though until recent years these were not given much credence by the medical community. It is not uncommon for people swimming or bathing in the river to urinate in the water, an action which creates tiny water currents that are rich in urea and ammonia. It seems that the tiny, slender catfish cannot always distinguish a urinating human from an exhaling fish gill, and on occasion it will attempt its trademark high-speed attack on some unfortunate soul.

You may not want to read the rest.

Elites to Anti-Affirmative-Action Voters: Drop Dead

In Elites to Anti-Affirmative-Action Voters: Drop Dead, Heather Mac Donald harshly examines how California's universities have resisted Prop 209, despite its tremendous voter support:

That diehard center of race and gender obsession has managed to stay out of court (except for one sweetheart suit brought by pro-preference advocates) through fiendishly clever compliance with the letter of the law, while riding roughshod over its spirit. In doing so, university officials have revealed a fatalism about the low academic achievement of blacks and Hispanics that they would decry as rankest bigotry in a 1950s southerner.

After Prop. 209’s passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, “went through a depression figuring out what to do,” says Robert Laird, Berkeley’s pro-preferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system’s despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of “underrepresented minorities,” especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley’s liberal arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1,600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,” recounts that “they admitted people who could barely read.”

The downward trajectory of those students was inevitable, Searle says. “You’d be delighted to find that your introductory philosophy class looked like the United Nations, but that salt-and-pepper effect was lost after six to eight weeks,” he recalls. “There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by mid-terms. No one had taught them the need to go to class. So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university.” Searle recalls a black studies class before his that was “as segregated as Mississippi in the 1950s.” One day, Searle recounts, the professor had written on the blackboard that a particular tribe in Africa “wore colorful clothing.”

Even though preference beneficiaries often chose the easiest majors—there were, and still are, virtually no blacks and Hispanics in the most competitive engineering and computer science majors, for example—graduation rates also reflected the qualifications gap. The average six-year graduation rate for blacks and “Chicanos” (California-speak for Mexican-Americans) admitted from 1991 to 1997, the last year of preferences, was about 20 percent below that of whites and Asians. The university always put on a happy face when publicly discussing the fate of its “diversity” admits. Internally, however, even the true believers couldn’t ignore the problems. A psychology professor at UC San Diego recalls that “every meeting of the faculty senate’s student affirmative-action committee was a lugubrious affair. They’d look at graduation rates, grades, and other indicators and say, ‘What we’re doing is failing.’ ”

Eagle lugging a deer head causes outage

Eagle lugging a deer head causes outage:

About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.

Colorado: A Model for the Nation

Colorado: A Model for the Nation?:

Colorado's new law banning state spending on illegal immigrants has cost more than $2 million to enforce — and has saved the state nothing.

Less than a year after politically charged debates on illegal immigration, officials are reporting high costs, no savings and unexpected problems with the new laws....

Eighteen departments reported adding $2.03 million in costs while not saving any money. None of the departments could say how many, if any, illegal immigrants were being denied state-funded services.

Unhappy Meals

In Unhappy Meals, Michael Pollan reduces his diet advice to a few words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He then goes on to examine the history of nutritionism.

How sunshine triggers skin repair

Rachel Nowak explains how sunshine triggers skin repair:

A blast of sunshine could help fight skin diseases and cancer by attracting immune cells to the skin surface, according to a new study.

Eugene Butcher at Stanford University in California, US, and colleagues discovered an interesting immune process in human skin. Immune cells in the skin, called dendritic cells, convert vitamin D3 (produced in exposed skin in response to sunlight) into its active form.

This “active” vitamin D3 then causes T-cells to make surface changes that allow them to migrate to the uppermost layer of the skin, Butcher’s team found. T-cells are the immune cells that destroy damaged and infected cells, and they also regulate other immune cells.

The findings explain how T-cells “know” to go to the skin's surface once the skin has suffered some sun-induced DNA-damage, the researchers say.

“Sunshine is good for you, as long as it’s not too much,” says team member Hekla Sigmundsdottir.

List of gear for Afghanistan

I feel remarkably comfortable and content after reading this recommended list of gear for Afghanistan.

Randy Couture in Pros vs Joes

This video of Randy Couture in Pros vs Joes is great sadistic fun, particularly when the second "regular Joe" to go against him — in submission wrestling, not mixed martial arts — is introduced as a US Army close combat instructor.

Splendid Specimens: The History of Nutrition in Bodybuilding

In Splendid Specimens, Randy Roach examines "The History of Nutrition in Bodybuilding" — and includes this Daily Menu for the Three Saxon Brothers, from more than a century ago, as an appendix:

Breakfast
24 eggs
3 pounds smoked bacon
Porridge with cream and honey
Tea with plenty of sugar

Dinner
10 pounds of meat
Vegetables
Sweet fruit (raw or cooked)
Sweet cakes
Salad
Tea
Sweet puddings
Cocoa and whipped cream

Supper
Cold meat
Smoked fish
Lots of butter and cheese
Beer

Incomes and Inequality: What the Numbers Don’t Tell Us

Tyler Cowen examines Incomes and Inequality: What the Numbers Don’t Tell Us:

Much of the measured growth in income inequality has resulted from natural demographic trends. In general, there is more income inequality among older populations than among younger populations, if only because older people have had more time to experience rising or falling fortunes.

Furthermore, more-educated groups show greater income inequality than less-educated groups. Uneducated people are more likely to be clustered in a tight range of relatively low incomes. But the educated will include a greater range of highly motivated breadwinners and relaxed bohemians, and a greater range of winning and losing investors. A result is a greater variety of incomes. Since the United States is growing older and also more educated, income inequality will naturally rise.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days

Kyle Gabler, Kyle Gray, Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan share the lessons they learned as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center and explain How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. They even provide a Handy Cut-Out List summarizing their points:

Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

• Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
• Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
• Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
• Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
• Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming

• Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
• Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
• Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype

Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares

• Build the Toy First
• If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
• Cut Your Losses and "Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib"
• Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or "You Can't Polish a Turd")
• But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
• Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering

General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun

• Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
• Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep 'em Crawling Back for More
• "Experimental" Does Not Mean "Complex"
• Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
• Make it Juicy!

A Girl Like Me

A Girl Like Me is a short documentary video by a 16-year-old black girl named Kiri Davis.

The truly fascinating part comes about half-way through, when she repeats an old social psychology experiment from the 1950s and asks young black kids which doll they'd like to play with, the white doll or the black doll.

Whatever Hits the Fan is Never Evenly Distributed

John Jay's latest article, Whatever Hits the Fan is Never Evenly Distributed, explores the nature of social progress and conservatism. He opens it with a passage from from an interview with a Japanese Colonel Sumi, "talking about how the WWII generation wasted the gains of the Meiji and Russo-Japanese war generations":

When a man is bringing up a household he has to be capable enough himself, and work hard. This is true in business or any other activity. Whereas the father starts from scratch, the second generation doesn’t have to work so hard or have to face such travails. Still the son knows how hard the father struggled, and is able to carry on the business. Then comes the third generation boy, with no recollection of the difficult life of his father or grandfather. The grandson is very well educated, extremely cultured and sophisticated. He is superb in calligraphy and uses it to paint a sign: “House for rent”

John Jay notes that "in medieval times this was called the wheel of fortune," and it seems to apply to societies as well as families:

If I take a step or two back and look at recorded history with a macro view, I get the feeling that the fact that mankind has an extremely short recorded and civilized history relative to our species’ past is extremely important. Each generation of a successful society (prior to the modern world) wasn’t quite sure what parts of its culture contributed to its success, so it clung to tradition like a security blanket. That kept society going, but it perpetuated some ugly habits, too. We cling to some counter-productive habits, such as racism and sexism, but in their day, when other automatically meant danger, and when large numbers of women who didn’t produce lots of kids meant societal death, those were survival traits.

We are slowly casting off the bad habits of millennia, habits developed to defend against societal death in an age of scarcity, famine, and unpredictable natural and man-made disasters. Some of those habits are retarding progress in our modern world, and some are part of the over-stressed glue that holds us together. Trouble is, because of our limitations in making dynamic models that include a temporal dimension, we can’t always predict the effect of eliminating a habit of thought.

So, as Zenpundit pointed out, the opposite of progress can happen, too, when societies get to the third generation outlined by the Japanese Colonel, and decide to do away with all those notions to which the old fogies cling, forgetting that the experiences of the previous generation shape the next one – change the experience of your kids’ generation, and the grandkids may well grow up wild. The modern West, especially the generation of ’68, has assumed that the material success it enjoyed was either accidental or inevitable, and so set about dismantling social constructs that did not meet the approval of the avant garde, sometimes finding out the forgotten reasons for creating those ancient constructs when things fell apart.

He cites a long passage from Jane Galt's really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other:

Marriage, it turns out, is an incredibly important institution. It also turns out to be a lot more fragile than we thought back then. It looked, to those extremely smart and well-meaning welfare reformers, practically unshakeable; the idea that it could be undone by something as simple as enabling women to have children without husbands, seemed ludicrous. Its cultural underpinnings were far too firm. Why would a woman choose such a hard road? It seemed self-evident that the only unwed mothers claiming benefits would be the ones pushed there by terrible circumstance.

This argument is compelling and logical. I would never become an unwed welfare mother, even if benefits were a great deal higher than they are now. It seems crazy to even suggest that one would bear a child out of wedlock for $567 a month. Indeed, to this day, I find the reformist side much more persuasive than the conservative side, except for one thing, which is that the conservatives turned out to be right. In fact, they turned out to be even more right than they suspected; they were predicting upticks in illegitimacy that were much more modest than what actually occurred – they expected marriage rates to suffer, not collapse.

How did people go so badly wrong? Well, to start with, they fell into the basic fallacy that economists are so well acquainted with: they thought about themselves instead of the marginal case. For another, they completely failed to realize that each additional illegitimate birth would, in effect, slightly destigmatise the next one. They assigned men very little agency, failing to predict that women willing to forgo marriage would essentially become unwelcome competition for women who weren’t, and that as the numbers changed, that competition might push the marriage market towards unwelcome outcomes. They failed to forsee the confounding effect that the birth control pill would have on sexual mores.

But I think the core problems are two. The first is that they looked only at individuals, and took institutions as a given. That is, they looked at all the cultural pressure to marry, and assumed that that would be a countervailing force powerful enough to overcome the new financial incentives for out-of-wedlock births. They failed to see the institution as dynamic. It wasn’t a simple matter of two forces: cultural pressure to marry, financial freedom not to, arrayed against each other; those forces had a complex interplay, and when you changed one, you changed the other.

One last excerpt:

Most modern people take material progress for granted. Many on the Left see something wrong, and they want it corrected right now. They rarely ask more than rudimentary questions about how things got to be this way, and their mental models are usually lacking a time dimension. This is why I have such a huge problem with the historical revisionists who want to emphasize the slave-holding hypocrisy of many of the founding fathers or this or that other historical habit that offends modern sensibilities. It’s a form of temporal bigotry. American society of 1789 produced the children who became abolitionists of 1859. Why? Because those later generations had been given enough of a material advantage to be able to consider questions of morality. But they also carried on the traditions of their fathers, making them better. They had been given language in their political documents such as “all men are created equal”, and it fell to that later generation to begin to question the definition of “man”. But facing the slavery question head-on in 1789 would have destroyed the nascent confederation before it had time to grow abolitionists. I can celebrate the achievements of the generation of 1789 without buying in to their entire worldview.

Read the whole article.

RoboCop, PhD

If you've been watching the History Channel’s Engineering an Empire series, which I recommend, then you know that Peter Weller, who hosts it, is on his way to becoming RoboCop, PhD:

He spent much of the past two decades in Italy and, on a lark, enrolled in classes at the Syracuse University program in Florence. He soon discovered he had a thing for the aqueducts of long-dead civilizations, and now he’s working toward a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history from UCLA. This is no vanity degree; Weller teaches courses, writes papers, and is doggedly climbing the academic ladder. Buckaroo Banzai, the polymath who was arguably Weller’s most famous character — acclaimed neurosurgeon, race car driver, particle physicist, and, of course, rock star — would be proud. “I’ve always followed my passions,” Weller says, “even when it didn’t seem to make much sense.”

It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller’s two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing. “The Romans were an unbelievably complex people, and we are an unbelievably complex people,” Weller says. “We can learn so much about why things are the way they are by looking at what they did.” He goes on to explain how the absence of the concept of zero in Greek antiquity laid the foundation for Western philosophical thought.

Giant lions and kangaroos once roamed Australia

Giant lions and kangaroos once roamed Australia — but, apparently, they didn't fit on the Ark:

Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia's outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday.

The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor Desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves.

Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert — east of the west coast city of Perth — in October 2002. "Three subsequent expeditions produced hundreds of fossils so well-preserved that they constitute a veritable "Rosetta Stone for Ice-Age Australia," expedition leader Gavin Prideaux said of the find, detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

The team discovered 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, including eight new species of kangaroo, some standing up to 3 meters (9 feet) tall.

Protected from wind and rain, and undisturbed due to their remote location, the remains of the mega-beasts are in near-perfect condition, including the first-ever complete skeleton of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex.

"Unwary animals bounding around in the case of kangaroos, or running around in the case of marsupial lions and wombats, fell down these holes, as presumably most were nocturnal. It's very difficult to see a small opening on a flat surface at night," Prideaux said.

Research into the fossils challenges recent claims that Australia's megafauna were killed off by climate change, pointing the finger instead at fires, probably lit by the first human settlers who transformed the fragile landscape.

The lands inhabited by the megafauna once supported flowers, tall trees and shrubs. But isotopes extracted from skeletal enamels show the climate was hot and arid, similar to today.

The plants, the scientists said, were highly sensitive to so-called fire-stick farming, where lands were deliberately cleared by fires to encourage re-growth.

"Australian megafauna could take all that nature could throw at them for half-a-million years, without succumbing," said Richard Roberts, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong. "It was only when people arrived that they vanished."

Polar Bear Cub Knut in Berlin

Today's dose of cute comes from Polar Bear Cub Knut in Berlin:

Berlin zoo employee Thomas Doerflein plays with polar bear cub Knut in this undated picture, released on January 24, 2007. Knut, born on December 5, 2006, has had to be hand fed by Doerflein after its mother Tosca refused the baby.

French Lessons

In French Lessons, Alvaro Vargas Llosa looks at the lessons of the Battle of Algiers:

What lesson from that conflict is relevant today? The paramount lesson seems this: "First-world" armies and "third-world" guerrillas have different notions of time and space, and therefore of what constitutes defeat and victory. A "first-world" army can defeat "first-world" guerrillas and a "third-world" army can defeat "third-world" guerrillas because in both cases the army and the enemy operate under similar notions of time and space. The Italian security forces were able to defeat the Red Brigades, just as Germany's security forces were able to defeat the Baader-Meinhof Gang, because they were at war with each other under similar time and space horizons. Equally, Alberto Fujimori's dictatorship was able to defeat the Shining Path in Peru in the 1990s and Venezuela's Romulo Betancourt destroyed the Castro-inspired guerrillas in the 1960s because the warring sides shared a common idea of where and when they were fighting. That is not to say that in all such cases the army will triumph. Castro's victory in 1959 proves that the opposite can happen. But as long as the established power commands enough civilian support, which is usually the case against a terrorist insurgence, the security apparatus enjoys a big advantage.

In Algeria, the occupying force's notion of space was purely physical and military: The French paratroopers thought that as long as they smoked the terrorists out of the Casbah — the Muslim quarter in Algiers — they would win. The insurgents' notion of space was historic and civilian: As long as they gave the oppressed masses a sense of the anomaly that the century-old French presence in their land constituted, the liberation struggle would go on. The French army's notion of time was narrow, while the insurgents had a broad time horizon. The French won the battle of Algiers but in 1962 they had to give up the colony.

It was not a matter of how many troops there were on the ground. In 1960, France had 400,000 troops in Algeria — not far from the number the U.S. poured into Vietnam. And the moral legitimacy of the insurgents is not defined by the methods they employ, but by how close they are to the population and how effectively they help shape the people's perception of the enemy. Algeria's insurgents were tyrants, and once they liberated their nation they established a dictatorship. But the fact that they were perceived as legitimate by the civilian population — precisely because their notion of space and time attached them to that population and the country's history — meant that the occupiers ended up losing the war whose every battle they had won.

Don't you know your left from your right?

In the second part of Don't you know your left from your right?, Nick Cohen explores "the disgrace of the anti-war movement" that had a million people marching through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffing up Zarqawi's role in the violence — as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy — but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.

Don't you know your left from your right?

Observer columnist Nick Cohen grew up in a left-wing family and never considered any alternative — until recently. In Don't you know your left from your right?, he argues that the fall of Socialism and the rise of anti-Americanism have left the Left confused:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

Japanese marine park captures rare shark on film

Japanese marine park captures rare shark on film — before it dies:

A species of shark rarely seen alive because its natural habitat is 600 meters (2,000 ft) or more under the sea was captured on film by staff at a Japanese marine park this week.

The Awashima Marine Park in Shizuoka, south of Tokyo, was alerted by a fisherman at a nearby port on Sunday that he had spotted an odd-looking eel-like creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.

Marine park staff caught the 1.6 meter (5 ft) long creature, which they identified as a female frilled shark, sometimes referred to as a "living fossil" because it is a primitive species that has changed little since prehistoric times.

The shark appeared to be in poor condition when park staff moved it to a seawater pool where they filmed it swimming and opening its jaws.

"We believe moving pictures of a live specimen are extremely rare," said an official at the park. "They live between 600 and 1,000 meters under the water, which is deeper than humans can go."

"We think it may have come close to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters," the official said.

The shark died a few hours after being caught.

Frilled sharks, which feed on other sharks and sea creatures, are sometimes caught in the nets of trawlers but are rarely seen alive.

Lasersharking

Lasersharking is combining two things that are cool on their own to make something stupid.

As someone named Jack Spencer said, in obvious reference to Austin Powers, "If a gamer had made Jaws it would not have been a shark but a shark with a laser on its head."

The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden

The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden have finally come out — or at least some of them have:

For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.

As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.

The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away.

Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.

At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.

To the Shores of Tripoli

The title, To the Shores of Tripoli, gives away the punchline, but I enjoyed this article, which cites Sam Ser at the Jerusalem Post, who "retells the story from the vantage of Michael Orren's book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present":

The meeting in London was doomed from the outset. The Arab strongman's envoy held all the cards — three craft had already been hijacked, their passengers and crew held hostage in an inhospitable and almost unreachable land. The American ambassador knew the ransom demand would be high, but even he could not have imagined just how exorbitant it would be. To meet it would require one-tenth of America's annual budget.

Lest the adventurous Yanks dare to contemplate a military attack to rescue their captured comrades, Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar provided a most unpleasant revelation: the Koran declares that any nation that does not bow to the authority of the Muslims is sinful, and it is the right and duty of Muslims to make war upon it and take prisoner any of its people they may find. Further, any Muslim slain in battle against such an enemy would be promised a place in Paradise.

"We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever," the furious but helpless ambassador relayed to his government. Congress would authorize no such fight, however, and voted instead to pay the ransom.

Wretchard adds some important commentary:

It's now forgotten that capitulation didn't work. Simply didn't work. The Barbary Pirates raised their demands until the Pashas were taking nearly 20 per cent of Federal Revenue. But in the beginning the policy of appeasement seemed perfectly. The initial extortion demand of $70,000 was far smaller than the astronomical $2 million dollars requested by Thomas Jefferson to build a Navy. In the end it proved cheaper to crush them.

Here's a bit of historical trivia that caught my eye:

Before he revised it in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key's "Star-Bangled Banner" — which would become the American national anthem — described "turbaned heads bowed" to the "brow of the brave."

Springtime for Ethanol

Springtime for Ethanol notes that the fashionable alternative fuel "yields a third less energy than petroleum-based gasoline and still relies on a federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to remain competitive."

I like traffic lights, but only when they're dismantled

Martin Cassini says, I like traffic lights, but only when they're dismantled:

Think of all the hours in your life wasted as your car journey is stopped by lights to let non-existent traffic through. And then ask yourself this: who is the better judge of when it’s safe to go — you, the driver at the time and place, or lights programmed by an absent regulator? Traffic lights exist as a “cure” for a man-made malady — the misconceived priority rule. This rule confers superior rights on main-road traffic at the expense of minor-road traffic and pedestrians. To interrupt the priority streams, lights are “needed”.

Before 1929 when the priority rule came into force, a sort of first-come, first-served rule prevailed. All road users had equal rights, so a motorist arriving at a junction gave way to anyone who had arrived first, even the humble pedestrian. Motorists had a simple responsibility for avoiding collisions, and a duty of care to other road users.

In other walks of life the common-law principle of single queueing applies, but the law of the road, based on the priority rule that licenses queue-jumping and aggression, creates battlegrounds where we have to fight for gaps and green time.

But when lights are out of action — when we’re free of external controls and allowed to use our own judgment — peaceful anarchy breaks out. We approach slowly and filter in turn. Courtesy thrives and congestion dissolves. And when the lights start working again, congestion returns.

Poke in the eye saves shark victim

I am a sucker for shark-attack stories. From Poke in the eye saves shark victim:

Eric Nerhus, a 41-year-old professional diver is in a serious but stable condition, and is expected to survive, after being half swallowed by the three-metre shark at Cape Howe, near Eden, on the NSW south coast, about 9.30am today.

The shark seized Mr Nerhus by the head, crushing his face mask inwards and breaking his nose, said friend and fellow diver Dennis Luobikis.

"He was actually bitten by the head down, the shark swallowed his head," Mr Luobikis said.

Taking a second bite, the white pointer clenched its jaws around his torso, tearing deep lacerations in either side of his body.

Against the odds, Mr Nerhus, a well-known local diver of more than five years' experience, managed to free himself from the shark's jaws, and was pulled back aboard the boat by his son.

Two other young divers in a nearby boat rendered immediate first aid and one radioed his father, who was flying overhead in a spotter plane, to call for emergency help.

I hadn't heard the great white referred to as a white pointer before. By the way, a three-meter great white is fairly small, as far as great whites go.

Why the world's greatest stock picker stopped picking stocks

Henry Blodget explains why the world's greatest stock picker stopped picking stocks:

First, in the seven decades since [Benjamin] Graham wrote Security Analysis, the stock market has gone from being a playground for amateurs to a battlefield dominated by full-time professionals. One result is that pricing errors that once might have gone unnoticed for months in Graham's day are now discovered and exploited instantly. Second, the amount of information available about the most obscure stock today dwarfs what was available about even the bellwethers a half-century ago, making it harder to dig up information that other investors don't know. The moment the information is released, moreover, it is dissected, discussed, and debated by thousands of analysts, until most reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from it have been. Today's technology also allows even part-time investors to screen tens of thousands of stocks in dozens of markets in the time it would have taken a Graham-era analyst to compute the "net current assets" of a single company.

Third, inside information that used to be quite valuable is now illegal to trade on. And, finally, the establishment of research centers such as the Center for Research in Security Prices (CSRP) has allowed analysts to study markets and investing in ways that the young Benjamin Graham could only have dreamed of — and, in so doing, to assemble a body of knowledge that makes much of the "investment wisdom" of the early 20th century seem as primitive and unscientific as bloodletting.

Requiem for the Magic Bullets

Requiem for the Magic Bullets describes the rise and fall of antibiotics:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.

By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.
[...]
Developing and testing a new antibiotic can take 10 years and cost more than $800 million, and pharmaceutical companies face an ever-changing maze of federal regulations to successfully bring a product to market. Several major drug manufacturers — including Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly and Company — have either drastically reduced their development of new antibiotics or given up on antimicrobial R&D altogether as an unprofitable enterprise.

The fact that antibiotics are usually prescribed for only a short time — seven to 14 days, long enough to beat the infection or fail — makes them unattractive investments. Instead, the big money in Big Pharma is flowing toward the development of lifelong treatments for chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and HIV infection. Only two truly novel classes of antibiotics have been brought to the marketplace in the past decade.

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq is a normally innocuous bacterium — Acinetobacter baumannii — that has become resistant to most antibiotics, killed immune-compromised troops after surgery, and spread to the wider healthcare community:

The wounded soldiers were not smuggling bacteria from the desert into military hospitals after all. Instead, they were picking it up there. The evacuation chain itself had become the primary source of infection. By creating the most heroic and efficient means of saving lives in the history of warfare, the Pentagon had accidentally invented a machine for accelerating bacterial evolution and was airlifting the pathogens halfway around the world.

To stem the outbreak at its source, the epicon team proposed sweeping reforms throughout the combat zone. The CSHs had to be run more like real hospitals, with frequent scrub-downs, stringent hand-washing, and HEPA filters to clean the air. The dead tissue surrounding "frag" wounds turned out to be an ideal colonization site for the bugs, so it had to be removed more aggressively up front. "If you don't have that necrotic tissue, your own innate defenses help keep the wound clean," says Kim Moran, a tropical-disease specialist who assisted the investigation when she worked at Walter Reed. Wound dressings needed to be changed less often, so bacteria from the hospital environment had less opportunity to get in. And the broad-spectrum antibiotics had to be reserved for the treatment of identified bugs.

Cheaper oil appears certain this year

Cheaper oil appears certain this year:

After a year of oil prices so high that analysts warned they might hit $100 a barrel soon, prices are falling, financial speculators are running for the exits and analysts are pondering whether oil could fall below $30 a barrel by spring.

Oil cost $41 a barrel on average in July 2004, when its price began its long climb. It's not farfetched to think that it might fall back to that soon. Back then, gasoline sold nationally for about $1.90 a gallon.

There's no guarantee that it'll happen again, but several factors point to at least a few months of lower oil and gasoline prices:

• Oil production globally is no longer drum-tight. A warm winter eased demand and a mild hurricane season allowed damaged production to come back on line. That weakens sellers.
  
  
• Oil producers are in some disarray now that it's a buyer's market. A few vocal OPEC members want to cut production to shore up slumping prices, but OPEC's most important producer, Saudi Arabia, has nixed that for now. Saudi Arabia now boasts 3 million barrels per day of spare production capacity, after two years when global oil supplies barely could match demand.

Some analysts suggest privately that Saudi opposition to OPEC cuts is based more on politics than business. The Saudis, they say, want to starve rival Iran of needed oil revenues because Saudi rulers are Sunni Muslims and increasingly worried about Iran's backing of fellow Shiite Muslims who rule Iraq.

It's almost as if oil prices follow a random walk...

Strange DIY Film Hits Sundance

Watch the trailer for We Are the Strange. I don't know what to make of it, but I take it as a good sign that someone is out there experimenting with the medium. From Strange DIY Film Hits Sundance:

The handmade quality makes We Are the Strange like no other animation you've seen. Strange's influences include Japanese Kabuki theater, Lajos Egri's book The Art of Dramatic Writing and Tecmo's early Ninja Gaiden games.

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

Matt Richtel of the New York Times notes that in the raw world of sex movies, High Definition could be a view too real:

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Battery Breakthrough?

Has secretive startup EEStor made a Battery Breakthrough?:

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The ivory trade

The ivory trade explains "what makes America's colleges such clever investors":

The biggest endowments are big investors: between them, Harvard and Yale have some $50 billion, around one-seventh of the total. They tend to do better than their smaller peers and pretty much everyone else. Indeed, these eggheads even beat the quants. Endowments larger than $1 billion returned 15.2% on average last year, more than the main hedge-fund index (see chart). The best-performing endowment in 2005-06, which belonged to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gained a handsome 23%. That put it a whisker ahead of Yale's (22.9%), run for more than 20 years by David Swensen.

Endowment managers would no doubt like to claim this is all down to skill. But they do enjoy certain advantages over their rivals. In principle, their investment horizon lasts not weeks, months or years, but forever. Their capital is extremely patient. Each endowment has a single client — itself — that needs to extract only a small sum annually to keep the wheels of scholarship turning. Therefore, unlike pension funds, they do not have to fret about matching assets with liabilities. This means endowments can tolerate lots of volatility, which in turn allows them to make, and stick to, contrarian bets. They have been “incredibly gutsy” in going against the grain, says Will Wechsler of Greenwich Associates, a financial-services consultancy. Perhaps they can stay solvent longer than the market can stay irrational.

A second advantage is the university environment. “Whereas pension trustees are naturally risk-averse, universities are all about innovating, financially as well as intellectually,” says James Walsh, who runs Cornell's $5 billion endowment. Investment constraints are kept to a minimum. Alumni with Wall Street experience are encouraged not only to donate money but also to sit on investment committees. Many are happy to oblige. “This gives us access to minds we couldn't otherwise afford,” says Mr Walsh. The brainpower on tap at the university itself is not always as useful. According to one former Harvard official, its endowment fund has done so well because it has avoided taking advice from the economics faculty.

Bats In Flight Reveal Unexpected Aerodynamics

Bats In Flight Reveal Unexpected Aerodynamics to researchers Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz at Brown University:

Bat wings are highly articulated, with more than two dozen independent joints and a thin flexible membrane covering them. The videos, shot from four angles simultaneously and then synchronized, show how the complex movements of each wing stroke relate to overall flight speed, body position and angle of attack. Reflective markers placed on joints, along bones and at key points on the wing membrane allowed the researchers to accurately track the position and shape of bones throughout the wing stroke.

Birds and insects can fold and rotate their wings during flight, but bats have many more options. Their flexible skin can catch the air and generate lift or reduce drag in many different ways. During straightforward flight, the wing is mostly extended for the down stroke, but the wing surface curves much more than a bird’s does — giving bats greater lift for less energy. During the up stroke, the bats fold the wings much closer to their bodies than other flying animals, potentially reducing the drag they experience. The wing’s extraordinary flexibility also allows the animals to make 180-degree turns in a distance of less than half a wingspan.

Walking like a Bomber

A new technology may allow guards to spot someone with a concealed bomb — or someone simply walking like a bomber:

A new radar-imaging technology expected to reach market later this year could solve the problem by directing low-power radar beams at people--who can be 50 yards or more away — and analyzing reflected radar returns to reveal concealed objects. And early research indicates that this method could one day be augmented with video-analysis software that spots bombers by discerning subtle differences in gait that occur when people carry heavy objects.
[...]
The first generation of the CounterBomber works by continuously steering a low-power radar beam toward the moving subject. The radar then repeatedly "interrogates" the subject. "The characteristics of the reflected radar beam are affected by weapons hidden beneath the clothing," Burns says. Signal processing software can detect those weapons or bombs without creating an under-the-clothes image that could violate the person's privacy, he says.

And this technology is helped by novel technology that tracks the subject — thereby enabling the radar to be continuously aimed at the moving person. Software developed by Rama Chellappa, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, uses a form of "gait recognition" to do this.

Endurance sports may harm the heart

Art De Vany has been saying this for some time now. Endurance sports may harm the heart:

Ventricular arrhythmia (VA), a disturbance that occurs in the ventricles or lower chambers of the heart, is a condition that can cause sudden death in top athletes who have had no previous symptoms of the disorder.

After studying Dutch and Belgian endurance athletes with VA and other healthy sportspeople and volunteers, the researchers found that in the athletes with the problem the right ventricle (RV) of the heart was not functioning normally.

They believe VA, which could have many underlying causes, may be triggered by intense exercise or that endurance sports could promote the arrhythmia along with genetic or environmental factors.

Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud

Every baseball used in the American League, the National League, and most minor leagues is rubbed with Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud before play:

It all began in 1938 when an umpire complained to Lena Blackburne, a third base coach for the old Philadelphia Athletics, about the sorry condition of the baseballs used by the American League. Back then a ball was prepped simply with mud made of water and dirt from the playing field. The result? The ball's cover was too soft, leaving it open for tampering. Something was needed to take off the shine but not soften the cover.

Blackburne took on the challenge. Next time he returned to his home in Burlington County, he checked out the mud along tributaries of the Delaware River until he found some muck (the whereabouts of the mud hole is still a dark secret) with a texture he felt would do the job. Taking a batch to the Athletics' field house, he rubbed some balls with the stuff. It worked like a charm! What's more, it had no odor and didn't turn the balls black. The umpires were happy, and Lena Blackburne was in the mud supply business.

Soccer Ball

I did not realize that the iconic soccer ball was designed to show up on black-and-white televisions:

Most modern balls are stitched from 32 panels of waterproofed leather or plastic: 12 regular pentagons and 20 regular hexagons. The 32-panel configuration is similar to the polyhedron known as the truncated icosahedron, except that it is more spherical, because the faces bulge due to the pressure of the air inside. The first 32-panel ball was marketed by Select in the 1950s in Denmark. This configuration became common throughout Continental Europe in the 1960s, and was publicised worldwide by the Adidas Telstar, the official ball of the 1970 World Cup.

Another Reconstruction

Victor Davis Hanson says our efforts in Iraq are Another Reconstruction, like the one after the Civil War:

We are in our fourth year of Reconstruction, and it is eerily similar to the Union efforts from 1865 to 1877. Militias like the Kuklux Klan proliferated. Marshal Law was declared in Tennessee. Judges were shot. Northern troops were too few and far between to protect Republican and black reformers. The public was exasperated that armies like Sherman’s that by late 1864 and 1865 had once sliced through the Confederacy in mere months could not even keep order in a conquered South, despite five military districts initially run by tough veteran Union generals.

Assassinations, kidnappings, and terrorism were committed against supposed “collaborators” such as Republican politicians and black elected officials. Reconstruction administrators were often themselves thoroughly corrupt. And after the scandalous deal of 1876, over a century later books are still being written, as they are of Vietnam and will be of Iraq, about how Reconstruction would have finally worked — despite its legion of terrible mistakes — had only a weary public not given up on it.

Creating Ethanol from Trash

Creating Ethanol from Trash may become economically viable via arcs of plasma:

The technology, developed originally by researchers at MIT and at Batelle Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), in Richland, WA, doesn't incinerate refuse, so it doesn't produce the pollutants that have historically plagued efforts to convert waste into energy. Instead, the technology vaporizes organic materials to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide, a mixture called synthesis gas, or syngas, that can be used to synthesize a wide variety of fuels and chemicals. The technology has been further developed and commercialized by a spinoff called Integrated Environmental Technologies (IET), also based in Richland, WA. In addition to processing municipal waste, the technology can be used to create ethanol out of agricultural biomass waste, providing a potentially less expensive way to make ethanol than current corn-based plants.

The new system makes syngas in two stages. In the first, waste is heated in a 1,200 �C chamber into which a small amount of oxygen is added--just enough to partially oxidize carbon and free hydrogen. In this stage, not all of the organic material is converted: some becomes a charcoal-like material. This char is then gasified when researchers pass it through arcs of plasma, using technology developed in the 1990s at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The remaining inorganic materials, including toxic substances, are oxidized and incorporated into a pool of molten glass, made using PNNL technology. The molten glass hardens into a material that can be used for building roads or discarded as a safe material in landfills.

The next step is a catalyst-based process for converting syngas into equal parts ethanol and methanol. Ethanol is now widely used as a fuel additive, and it can also be used as a substitute for gasoline in some vehicles. Methanol is important for producing biodiesel and is currently made from methane in natural gas.

There is enough municipal and industrial waste produced in the United States for the system to replace as much as a quarter of the gasoline used in this country, says Daniel Cohn, a cofounder of IET and a senior research scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

According to Jeff Surma, another cofounder and the CEO and president of IET, the multistage system makes it possible to produce fuels from waste at competitive costs. The economics look even better when including the fact that cities and manufacturers will pay to have waste removed, he says. This makes possible costs of between 10 and 95 cents per gallon of fuel, depending on the size of IET's system and how much it is paid to take waste. IET is currently in talks with a major Midwest utility and several municipalities interested in employing its technology, Surma says.

A colleague dubbed it the trash laser beam. (Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

The Colombian Competitive Advantage in Illegal Drugs

Tyler Cowen calls The Colombian Competitive Advantage in Illegal Drugs: The Role of Policies and Institutional Changes by Francisco Thoumi the best piece on Colombia I have read:

Besides being a principle drug producer, Colombia is also the world's largest manufacturer of counterfeit U.S. dollars; it is the main producer and user of assassins for hire (sicarios); it is the first or second Latin American exporter of prostitutes; it produces very high quality counterfeit documents, particularly passports; and it is a large producer of pirated software and CDs. Colombia is the only country of which this author knows where owners of urban lots and vacant houses place large "not for sale" signs to prevent fraudulent sales. Colombia is a country where the state has been a bounty, and where white-collar crime has grown dramatically judging by frequent newspaper reports. In Colombia, soldiers find a hidden guerrilla treasure accumulated through drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnappings and consider it normal to keep such treasures as a "prize" for serving in the armed forces. It is a country where police officials negotiate the transfer of captured cocaine with drug traffickers and where the terms "millionaire stroll" and "throw away person" were coined as euphemisms for a quick kidnapping of a person taken to A.T.M. machines to empty his or her bank account and for social cleansing. All these facts show that Colombia has developed a competitive advantage in economic activities that require law breaking or illegal skills. They also highlight the predatory nature of Colombian capitalism and the illegitimacy and weakness of property rights in the country.

Video game playing may fulfill innate human need

Video game playing may fulfill innate human need:

In four studies reported in the journal Motivation and Emotion, Rigby and his colleagues sought to understand people's motivation for playing the games and the games' immediate effect on well-being.

In the first study, they had 89 people play a simple game involving jumping to different platforms. In the second phase, the researchers compared the experience of 50 people who played two 3-D adventure games, one very popular and one less so. In the third study, 58 people tried four different games, while in the fourth the researchers surveyed 730 members of an online gaming community who were experienced in playing "massively multiplayer online" games.

Players' enjoyment of games depended on whether the games made them feel competent and independent, and, in the case of multiplayer games, connected to other players. Players who enjoyed their experience showed increases in well-being, self-esteem, and vitality after playing, while those whose needs weren't satisfied reported lowered vitality and mood.

Pareil Tale of Bridled Passion

Years ago I meant to write a story in the same style as this Pareil Tale of Bridled Passion:

How I met my wife
by Jack Winter
Published 25 July 1994 - The New Yorker

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since