L'Eggo My Lego

In L'Eggo My Lego, Maureen Martin shares the kind of story that would be ludicrously implausible as fiction — but it's true, and the people involved are proud of their actions:

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of "Rethinking Schools" magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes."

Why do pilots say "roger" on the radio?

Why do pilots say "roger" on the radio?:

Pilots and other military types say “roger” to acknowledge receipt of a message or instructions. “Roger” at one time was the phonetic designation for the letter R, which in turn stood for “received.” Why not just say "received"? From a safety perspective, it makes sense to use standardized language, particularly when dealing with international operations. An American pilot may not understand German, but they both understand aviation terminology. The International Civil Aviation Organization oversees this standardization and disseminates it accordingly.

The use of “roger” isn't all that old. In the military's phonetic alphabet, "roger" didn't become the designation for R until 1927. (Previously the designation had been "rush.") The first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary for “roger” in the sense of "received" dates from 1941, coinciding with U.S. entry into WWII. The term made the big time in 1943, when the Army Signal Corps incorporated it into one of its procedural manuals.

In 1957 "roger" was replaced by "romeo," the current designation, but by then "roger" = "received" was so entrenched that the brass knew better than to try and change it.

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?:

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder.

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But as I watched the video, I began to realize that all was not as it seemed. And the more I questioned the official story, the deeper into the rabbit hole I went.

Read the rest for the amusing bits.

Seeing things at Disney before they got rid of Eisner

In Seeing things at Disney before they got rid of Eisner, Art De Vany shares a piece he wrote after Disney's Treasure Planet failed to meet forecasts:

Where Disney went wrong is in having too much faith in their financial analysts. No one knows what a movie will gross. My research (Hollywood Economics: Chaos in the Film Industry) shows (and every movie fan knows) that motion picture revenues are not forecastable; the forecast error is infinite. There is no correlation between opening revenues and total revenues for any movies that are successful. Opening revenue is only a good predictor of total revenue for movies that die in their second or third week. All successful Disney movies (most of the animated ones are) enjoy long runs so that opening revenues become a small portion of their total revenue. And, all successful movies reach a point (about four or five weeks into the run) where they separate rapidly from the pack. This bifurcation point in the mapping is a signature of chaos in the non-linear dynamics of motion picture revenues.

Given how little information is contained in a movie's opening, the weight studios place on it is troubling, particularly at Disney which is a studio where film revenues depend on long runs.

(Emphasis mine.)

He-Man Opening Monologue

When I cited a recent article on rediscovering He-Man, I assumed that the text of the He-Man Opening Monologue would be all over the Net, but it was surprisingly hard to find. Even the ludicrously complete Wikipedia entry didn't have it:

I am Adam, prince of Eternia and defender of the secrets of Castle Greyskull.

This is Cringer, my fearless friend.

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said, "By the power of Greyskull! I have the power!"

Cringer became the mighty Battle Cat, and I became He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe!

Only three others share this secret — our friends, the Sorceress, Man-at-Arms, and Orko. Together we defend Castle Greyskull from the evil forces of Skeletor.

Petrol lit with a cigarette? Only in the movies

Petrol lit with a cigarette? Only in the movies:

From Hitchcock's The Birds to The Usual Suspects, it has been one of the staple cliches of Hollywood: the cigarette butt tumbling in slow motion into a pool of petrol unleashing a conflagration.

But if you find yourself tied up and doused in petrol don't worry if all your assailant has is a lighted cigarette: scientists have proved you won't end up as a human fireball.

"On the face of it it's a pretty simple problem," said Richard Tontarski, an expert in forensic fire at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms research laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Cigarettes burn at around 700C (1,292F) and the ignition temperature of petrol is 246C. "But it just isn't that simple," he said.

He began looking into the problem because arson suspects frequently claim a petrol fire was started by accident. "The person claims, 'I accidentally threw gasoline on my girlfriend, she was smoking and she burst into flames'," he said.

To find out whether this was possible, he and colleagues experimented. They dropped burning cigarettes into trays of petrol. They sprayed a fine mist of petrol at a lighted cigarette. They even used a vacuum device to produce the higher temperature (900-950C) of a cigarette being sucked. In more than 2,000 attempts the petrol did not ignite.

Dr Tontarski can only speculate why. The layer of ash on the tobacco, perhaps, or the petrol vapour convected away from the hottest part of the cigarette.

New York Comic Con 2007:

I wasn't at New York Comic Con 2007, but Stephen Colbert was, and he showed off the new Tek Jansen comic:

Stephen Colbert shows off Tek Jansen, an upcoming comic based on one of his characters' characters, at New York Comic Con 2007. Here, he gives our photographer his "Comic Book Friend" pose, based on an inside joke from The Colbert Report.

Want to stop disease from spreading? Open a window

Want to stop disease from spreading? Open a window:

Preventing the spread of disease in a hospital may be as simple as opening a window, an international team of researchers reported on Monday.

The low-tech solution could help prevent the spread of airborne infections such as tuberculosis -- and ironically, old-fashioned hospitals with high ceilings and big windows may offer the best design for this, they reported.

They worked better than modern "negative pressure" rooms, with expensive design aimed at pumping out infected air, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

Where Daft Punk got their samples from

Watch and learn where Daft Punk got their samples from:

Here's where the samples on some of my favourite Daft Punk tracks came from. It's all legit, paid in full, above board. Still strange to hear, though.

The samples were spotted by ishkur.com and the music was collected by palmsout.

Death and the salesmen

Death and the salesmen looks at how changes in longevity are leading to new financial instruments — but longevity and finance go way, way back together:

The uncertainty about life span has existed since the start of modern finance. The very first time that the British state issued a bond — back in the 17th century to fund a war against France — it did so using a longevity gamble. Tucked in a glass case in the corridors of the Debt Management Office, the branch of the British government that sells national bonds, stacks of old leather files detail these bonds, known as "tontines" after a Lorenzo Tonti, a Neapolitan economist who first devised the scheme. "These were the first government bonds issued anywhere in the world," says a senior DMO official, who has spent hours reading these dusty files, with all the passion of an amateur historian.

By modern standards, the structure of these tontines was macabre. The government raised money by selling a bond, and then paid bondholders a lump sum each year, divided among the investor pool. So far, this looks similar to how modern bonds work. However, there was a crucial catch: tontines had to be held by a single, named investor — and these instruments expired when that person died. So bond payments were divided each year among the remaining tontine holders, ceasing when the last tontine holder died. Whoever lived longest collected most money — subsidised by the dead.

The government issued the first tontine in 1693, and it proved so popular that they were soon being sold across Europe. Geneva had a particularly lively tontine market. However, as the tontines piled up, they became more controversial. One problem was that they provided an incentive for murder or fraud. And while historians have not found any tangible cases of this happening, the theme permeated 18th- and 19th-century literature and lore — even providing the plot for Robert Louis Stevenson's The Wrong Box.

A second, more important, problem was that the government kept getting its estimates of longevity wrong. When it sold the first issue of tontines in 1693, it apparently expected tontine holders to live just a few decades. That seemed a reasonable bet at the time, and the dusty leather-bound files show that the early tontine holders included men and women of all ages. But by the middle of the 18th century, investors had become more canny, with the record showing most tontines being bought in the name of girls, usually around five years old. That was because girls lived longer than boys, and because there was a high level of infant mortality until about age four.

This produced great results for the tontine holders, some of whom kept collecting money until their nineties. But it was disastrous for government finances. And eventually, the tontine scheme became so costly that the government abandoned it.

In the 19th century, the word tontine vanished from popular use. But the issue of longevity and mortality risk did not die away. Nor did some of the principles behind the first tontines. They resurfaced in the new concept of life insurance, which paid out a lump sum when policyholders died.

Your real tax rate: 40%

You may be aware of your income-tax bracket, but your real tax rate is 40%, regardless of your income:

In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson have found that our all-in marginal tax rate is 40%, give or take a bit. Yes, you read that right: 40%.

Most workers will pay about that much on each dollar of income when all taxes — federal and state income taxes, sales taxes, taxes for benefit programs, etc. — are considered.

As a consequence, a 30-year-old couple earning only $20,000 a year has a marginal tax rate of 42.5%, while a 45-year-old couple earning $500,000 pays at 43.2%. There are some exceptions: A 30-year-old couple earning $50,000 a year, for instance, pays 24.4%, and a 60-year-old couple making $150,000 a year faces a tax rate of 47.7%.

The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

Drug may treat mental symptoms of Down syndrome

Drug may treat mental symptoms of Down syndrome:

An old drug once used to study epilepsy can help improve learning in mice with a form of Down syndrome and also might help people, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

The beneficial effects the drug, called pentylenetetrazole, or PTZ, continued for two weeks after treatment. This suggests the drug, like some other psychiatric drugs, can make long-term changes in the brain.

The secrets of Sid Meier

Dan Drezner shares some of the secrets of Sid Meier gleaned from The Weekly Standard's latest cover story:

Meier cites the strategy board game Risk as one of his major influences. "Conquer the world. All those cool pieces. You felt like you were king. It gave you a lot of power." What about the game Diplomacy? "You had to have friends to play Diplomacy so that kind of left me out."....

This surprised me a bit:

When Meier is not playing and testing his products, he spends his time with his wife and 16-year-old son (with whom he enjoys other videogames, like Guitar Hero). He plays keyboards and jams with a band consisting of members from his local church. The band's name is Faith Unlimited. The church he and his wife attend is Lutheran.

Religion plays a major role in Civilization and can be more vital to victory than military prowess. Competing civilizations can send out missionaries, found a religion, create temples, cathedrals, and even launch crusades. Meier is quick to point out, however, that the role of religion is just another dimension to gameplay. The same goes for choosing nuclear power or heading a government that isn't democratic--you could opt to run a fascist or Communist regime, though these choices all have consequences. (Your citizens may be less happy, but also less prone to rioting thanks to your secret police force.)

Nevertheless, Meier's faith puts him at odds with other game-design geniuses like John Carmack, John Romero, and Will Wright, who are all avowed atheists (and Meier is, incidentally, the only one from this group to have graduated from college). To be sure, Meier has the utmost respect for them and their pioneering work. But it is yet another factor that sets him apart.

Rediscovering He-Man

Sam Anderson discusses Rediscovering He-Man:

The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism — an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader.

In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs.

To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant.

Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!"

Once you start thinking along these lines, it's impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It's a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.

Blood brothers

Jonathan Green spends time with Germany's blood brothers, the members of its still active fencing fraternities, where they duel with live blades:

Drawn mostly from the German upper classes, the men wear uniforms denoting their allegiance to a fraternity. They live together, eat together, drink together, sing songs about honour, women and Germany. And they fight together. Despite the risk of permanent disfigurement, the rewards are great, they say.

The duel is a highly specialized affair:

The duel I am watching takes place at the house of a rival fraternity, the Brunsviga Corps. Strapped tightly on to the sweating faces of the two fighters are black steel goggles, with discoloured, steel-mesh lenses, modelled on 200-year-old designs. A steel guard covers the length of the nose.

Wound tightly around the neck, guarding the carotid artery, is a thick cotton bandage. Each man wears a chain mail shirt weighing about 7kg (15 pounds) and chain mail gloves under leather gauntlets on their right hands. The right arm is reinforced with a leather padded arm guard.

All this is intended as protection from the schlager, a sword based on the rapier and sabre. Modelled on a traditional European duelling weapon, it is 86cm long and weighs only 360 grams. With this sword the fighters will attempt to slash, cut or whip anything above their opponents' eyeline line — skull, forehead and ears are all fair game.
[...]
Clumsily, a wooden box is brought for the shorter man to stand on so he can fight his opponent on a level. They place their feet square on, a sword's length apart.

Only the right arm moves during a fight. To the left of each fighter is a figure in a fencing mask wearing a black padded apron. He too wears chain mail and clutches a schlager. He is the duellist's "second" and will protect his fighter in the instance of foul play. To hit below the eyeline is to fight "deep" — the equivalent of punching below the belt as a boxer, but to do that here means not only disqualification and shame but a scar and injury for life.

On the fighter's right is another ally, also wearing a neck brace and a butcher's steel-mesh glove. In his hand is a yellow cloth soaked in surgical spirit. After each round — which comprises four blade movements — he cleans the sword with surgical spirit to minimise the risk of infection. He also looks for nicks in the blade — a blemish may create a jagged cut that is harder to stitch.

For centuries, a scar has been a sign of good breeding in Germany, and the mensur was seen as a way to test and build character.

For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews

If you've ever had a sketchy teenager show up on your doorstep selling magazines, then you might have wondered about the details of the business. For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews:

Up at 7 a.m., typical crews start the day with a sales meeting where they rehearse their pitches. “We’re selling magazines to earn points in a contest to win a trip abroad” is the standard and sometimes fictitious spiel. Around 9 a.m., the crews pile into vans to be dropped off at the day’s territory. They switch neighborhoods every several hours and often work as late as 10 p.m.

“You work hard during the day, but you also party pretty hard at night,” said Stephanie Blake, 23, who wrote an e-mail message in November to Earlene Williams at Parent Watch because she said she wanted to tell the positive side of the work.

While she and others used methamphetamine, Ms. Blake said it was mostly marijuana, alcohol and sex that filled the nights.
[...]
For two years starting in February 2004, Mr. Simpson, a stocky former high school lacrosse player from Newburgh, N.Y., worked on several crews as an “enforcer.” His job, he said, was to beat crew members upon a manager’s request.

If sellers missed quota regularly or complained about the job, Mr. Simpson, 23, said he hit them while in their room or when they were alone in the van. On more than 30 occasions, he estimated, he and several other enforcers drew blood. In three instances, ambulances were called, he said. Dealing with the police was not a problem.

“You have one kid saying he was jumped and 20 others plus two managers saying he stole something or broke into a room and assaulted a girl,” Mr. Simpson said. “Who do you think the cops are going to believe?”

Daivet McClinton, 23, an enforcer who worked with Mr. Simpson, said talking in front of others about wanting to quit invited the worst beatings.

Why Smart Cops Do Dumb Things

Security expert Bruce Schneier explains Why Smart Cops Do Dumb Things:

Since 9/11, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective. In short: Much of our country's counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.
[...]
If someone left a backpack full of explosives in a crowded movie theater, or detonated a truck bomb in the middle of a tunnel, no one would demand to know why the police hadn't noticed it beforehand. But if a weird device with blinking lights and wires turned out to be a bomb -- what every movie bomb looks like -- there would be inquiries and demands for resignations. It took the police two weeks to notice the Mooninite blinkies, but once they did, they overreacted because their jobs were at stake.

This is Cover Your Ass security, and unfortunately it's very common.

Airplane security seems to forever be looking backward. Pre-9/11, it was bombs, guns and knives. Then it was small blades and box cutters. Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane, and suddenly we all have to take off our shoes. And after last summer's liquid plot, we're stuck with a series of nonsensical bans on liquids and gels.

Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense. The Transportation Security Administration wants to be sure that if there's another airplane terrorist attack, it's not held responsible for letting it slip through. One year ago, no one could blame the TSA for not detecting liquids. But since everything seems obvious in hindsight, it's basic job preservation to defend against what the terrorists tried last time.

300 Brings History to Bloody Life

Wired News interviews 300 director Zack Snyder on his new movie, in 300 Brings History to Bloody Life, and Snyder demonstrates some self-promotional talent:

Wired News: This is one crazy-looking movie.

Zack Snyder: No one should ever take drugs, ever. I want to go on the record on that. But if someone was to slip you a mickey, I would immediately get into a taxi and go to an Imax screening of 300.
[...]
WN: In the film, a tiny bunch of European freedom fighters hold off a huge army of Iranian slaves. Everyone is sure to be translating this into contemporary politics.

Snyder: Someone asked me, "Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?" I said, "That's an awesome question." The fact they asked tells me that this movie can mean one thing to one person and something totally different to another.

Wired News also has an eerie-but-beautiful gallery of images from the film.

Spear-wielding chimps snack on skewered bushbabies

Spear-wielding chimps snack on skewered bushbabies:

Many chimpanzees trim twigs to use for ant-dipping and termite-fishing. But a population of savannah chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) living in the Fongoli area of south-east Senegal have been seen making spears from strong sticks that they sharpen with their teeth. The average spear length is 63 centimetres (25 inches), says Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames, US, who observed the behaviour.

And the method of procuring food with these tools is not simply extractive, as it is when harvesting insects. It is far more aggressive. They use the spears to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa: bushbabies (Galago senegalensis).

Bushbabies are nocturnal and curl up in hollows in trees during the day. If disturbed during their slumbers – if their nest cavity is broken open, for example – they rapidly scamper away. It appears that the chimps have learnt a grizzly method of slowing them down.

Chimps were observed thrusting their spears into hollow trunks and branches with enough force to injure anything inside the holes, Pruetz’s research team says. The chimps used a “power grip” and made multiple downward stabs – much the same way as a human might wield a dagger.

Ten different chimps in the population were observed to perform this behaviour in 22 bouts. In one case the researchers saw a chimp remove a dead bushbaby and eat it.

The Fongoli chimps inhabit a mosaic savannah – patches of grass and woodland – where there are no red colobus monkeys. The absence of these monkeys, which are the favoured prey of several other chimp populations, may explain the Fongoli chimps’ unique spear-hunting behaviour.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Calvin & Hobbes Snowman Art

You simply have to love Calvin's Snowman Art.

List of unusual deaths

Wikipedia includes a list of unusual deaths. An excerpt:

1920: Baseball player Ray Chapman was killed when he was hit in the head by a pitch. He remains the only Major League Baseball player to date to have been killed in a game.

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1925: Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart, a circus strongman and Jewish folklore hero died during a demonstration in which he drove a spike through five one-inch thick oak boards using only his bare hands when his knee was accidentally pierced. The spike was rusted and caused an infection which led to fatal blood poisoning. He was the subject of the Werner Herzog film, Invincible.

New Zealand fishermen catch rare squid

New Zealand fishermen catch rare squid:

A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday.

The squid, weighing an estimated 990 lbs and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said.

The fishermen were catching Patagonian toothfish, sold under the name Chilean sea bass, south of New Zealand "and the squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep," Anderton said.

Florida teen stumbles upon mammoth tooth

Florida teen stumbles upon mammoth tooth:

A 16-year-old high school student stumbled upon what archaeologists say could be the biggest fossil find in Pinellas County in nearly a century. A shiny black rock caught Sierra Sarti-Sweeney's eye as she was taking pictures last month in Boca Ciega Millennium Park.

"I looked down and saw a huge bone that could not be a rock. Most of it was exposed, but we dug and found that it was bigger and bigger. I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what are these? Are they people bones?'" she said.

The jaw and tooth weigh 65 pounds and are about a yard long. Sarti-Sweeney took the bones home and, after some online research with her older brother, determined the football-sized rock was actually the tooth of a long-extinct mammoth.

Paleontology and archaeology experts have confirmed the find, and recent digging at the site has turned up teeth and bones from a second mammoth, giant sloths, camels, turtles with shells up to 6-feet-long, saber-toothed cats and giant armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

Scientists believe the remains are between 10,000 and 100,000 years old.

"It's possible that it's an old river valley, (and) the animals got caught in the muck or the river washed all these animals down into one place at one time," he said. "We can get a better handle on it by analyzing the soil," said Richard Estabrook, director of USF's Florida Public Archaeology Network.

Start-up demos quantum computer

Start-up demos quantum computer:

The Canadian company on Tuesday gave a public demonstration of Orion, its quantum computer, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. D-Wave said it is going to try to sell computing services to corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008.

Quantum computers, which researchers have experimented with for years but which haven't yet existed outside of the laboratory, are radically different than today's electronic computers. D-Wave's computer is based around a silicon chip that houses 16 "qubits," the equivalent of a storage bit in a conventional computer, connected to each other. Each qubit consists of dots of the element niobium surrounded by coils of wire.

When electrical current comes down the wire, magnetic fields are generated, which, in turn, causes the change in the state of the qubit. [...] Ultimately, D-Wave's computer is an analog computer, according to Alexey Andreev, a venture capitalist at Harris & Harris and an investor in D-Wave. Answers to programs run on the computer come in the form of a physical simulation.

The "probability distribution generator" didn't actually make the trip to California:

The computer itself — which is cooled down to 4 millikelvin (or nearly minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) with liquid helium — was actually in Canada. Attendees only saw the results on a screen.

(Hat tip to John.)

Killer Workouts

In Killer Workouts, Eugene Allen discusses rhabdomyolysis, the out-of-control release of muscle fiber contents into the bloodstream:

My interest in this topic peaked when a very close friend of mine spent a week in the hospital after I put him through his very first CrossFit workout. Brian was no couch potato who suddenly jumped into exercise, but he did have a long layoff from intense exercise for nearly two years before that fateful afternoon with me. He was a state champion wrestler from Iowa, an Army Ranger, and a pretty serious weightlifter and member of our department’s SWAT team. Although he was not working out hard he had not degenerated to full-blown spudhood. He was running and “staying in shape,” as he said, but he did nothing that could be described as intense. Until he came to my house.

Our workout was nothing crazy hard, but the thing that did him in was the swings. His second set of 50 swings (an eccentric contraction to be sure) was difficult for him and proved to be his undoing. Afterward, he was unable to kneel in my driveway to change from shoes to boots and had to sit. He could barely do that and had to use all the force of his will to get on his Harley and ride home. No pain to speak of during this time, just complete muscle weakness. Brian thought his muscles were tightening up (in fact they were dying) so he put on a heat pad to loosen things up. Instead of relaxing the muscles, the heat released even more fluid and within two minutes the pain started. Excruciating pain. Pain is frequently quantified in the medical community on a scale from 1 to 10. Brian said the pain was way past 10. Once he was at the hospital, our SWAT team doc, who works at the emergency room Brian went to, worked his morphine dose up to 16 mg every two hours, and Brian said that only dulled the pain enough that he didn’t scream.

The primary diagnostic indicator of rhabdomyolysis is elevated serum creatine phosphokinase or CPK. The normal value runs below 200; rhabdo brings the CPK level to at least five times this level. When Brian was admitted to the hospital his CPK level was at 22,000. Within two days it peaked at 98,000. He was pumped full of fluids to help flush the kidneys and he puffed up like the Michelin man. His head looked like a big fat white pumpkin from all the fluid and the medical staff was very concerned about mineral imbalances, which could cause heart problems. Any movement brought suppressed screams of pain through gritted teeth. He was out of the hospital after six days but was off from work for two months. The muscles in his lower back had been destroyed and no longer functioned. He was unable to sit or stand without leaning backwards or he would fall over. He brought an empty cereal bowl to the sink one morning and when he reached slightly forward with his arms to put the bowl in the sink he started to fall and would have gone straight to the ground had he not had the edge of the sink to stop his fall.

A Tool Worthy of Batman's Utility Belt

A Tool Worthy of Batman's Utility Belt:

It takes about six minutes for a firefighter with a full load of gear to reach the top of a 30-story building by running up the stairs — and when he gets there, he's tired. A group of MIT students have designed a rope-climbing device that can carry 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second.

Seven steps to remarkable customer service

Joel Spolsky offers up his seven steps to remarkable customer service, starting with this first step: fix everything two ways:

Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.
[...]
We treat each tech support call like the NTSB treats airliner crashes. Every time a plane crashes, they send out investigators, figure out what happened, and then figure out a new policy to prevent that particular problem from ever happening again. It’s worked so well for aviation safety that the very, very rare airliner crashes we still get in the US are always very unusual, one-off situations.

This has two implications.

One: it’s crucial that tech support have access to the development team. This means that you can’t outsource tech support: they have to be right there at the same street address as the developers, with a way to get things fixed. Many software companies still think that it’s “economical” to run tech support in Bangalore or the Philippines, or to outsource it to another company altogether. Yes, the cost of a single incident might be $10 instead of $50, but you’re going to have to pay $10 again and again.

FitDeck

Years ago I read about an interesting workout routine. If I recall correctly, it was brought back from Japan by shootfighter Bart Vale.

The idea is simple. Grab an ordinary deck of playing cards, and assign each suit an exercise — e.g. hearts are push-ups, diamonds are squats, clubs are sit-ups, and spades are jumping jacks. Then, draw a card, and do that many of that exercise — e.g. 7♣ means seven sit-ups. Face cards might mean 10 reps, or 15, or whatever. Go through the deck as quickly as possible.

What I did not realize was that the public would pay $18.95 plus shipping and handling for a custom FitDeck with printed exercises on the cards. Evidently former Navy SEAL Phil Black reported sales of $4.7 million last year with this totally stupid online business idea.

Truth In Advertising

Truth In Advertising is a not-safe-for-work spoof of the world of marketing, directed by Tim Hamilton, from the Cannes Film Festival, 2001.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Storm whips paraglider to heights of 32,000 ft

Storm whips paraglider to heights of 32,000 ft:

Wisnerska, from Germany, was preparing for the 10th World Paragliding Championships above the town of Manilla in New South Wales when the storm struck on Wednesday.

With terrifying speed she was whisked from 2,500 ft to an estimated 32,000 ft in about 15 minutes.

42-year-old Chinese paraglider, He Zhongpin, was also caught in the storm and died, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold.

His body was found nearly 50 miles from where he had taken off. Wisnerska said she encountered hailstones the size of oranges as the temperature dropped to minus 58 degrees fahrenheit.

“I was shaking all the time. The last thing I remember it was dark. I could hear lightning all around me,” she said.

Her ordeal was recorded by global positioning and a radio attached to her equipment.
[...]
Wisnerska landed safely 40 miles from her original launch site with ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite to her face.

Egalitarian Empires

Shannon Love does not believe that most ancient empires resulted from "the unusually aggressive nature of their parent-societies," which then "swept over their more pacific neighbors."

If anything, they were, if only initially, Egalitarian Empires, which benefited from a larger manpower pool, merit promotion, and easy assimilation of conquered peoples:

Genghis Khan welded the martially skilled but fractious Mongol tribes into history’s most proficient military. Prior to Genghis, every individual lived in a deeply hierarchical society where birth dictated station. Even the clans themselves existed in hierarchies. Occasionally, a militarily successful Khan would collect an army of follower clans but those armies were poorly disciplined and tended to evaporate at the first major reverse. Genghis disrupted this system by ruthlessly promoting strictly based on merit. He even killed his best friend and oldest ally in a quarrel over the practice. Not only did this improve the quality of leadership but it secured ironclad loyalty from those whose new position in life depended entirely on the continued rule of Genghis. Later he treated non-Mongols, such a Chinese and Arabic engineers with the same evenhandedness. He conquered nearly twenty-five percent of Eurasia in his own life.

Unfortunately, Genghis Khan broke his own rule when choosing his succession. He divided the empire among his sons and grandsons, many of whom could not handle the responsibility. The tradition of merit promotion disappeared and the Mongol Empire fractured and dissolved into the conquered cultures.

The Roman Empire’s life cycle divides neatly between the Republic and the Empire. The two labels apply not only to the form of government in each era but also the Empire’s egalitarian, expansionist phase and its inegalitarian, declining phase. The Republic seems to have arisen when the monarchy lost a series of wars and the nobility turned to the plebes in desperation. The plebes demanded representation and the Republic followed rapidly. Just by looking at the map one might think that the Republic conquered far less than the Empire but, proportionally, the Republic went much further. Moreover, the Republic fought against peer societies, opponents with similar technology, knowledge and population density. The Empire, by contrast won its victories largely against primitive societies with much smaller population densities. It failed to make any headway against the Persians, who more evenly matched the Empire in terms of population density and technology.

When the Republic devolved into the Empire, the Empire’s power-density began its long slide. The Empire struggled to field armies one-half of the size of those of the Republic, even though it possessed a much larger population to draw on. Neither could the Empire match the training and motivation of the armies of the Republic. The armies of the Empire increasingly became composed of mercenaries with no willingness to fight the pitched battles in which the armies of the Republic regularly engaged. In the end, Roman armies could fight no better than their “barbarian” opponents. Indeed, the armies of the late empire were usually nothing but ad hoc assemblies of “barbarian” mercenaries.

Mr. Counterintuition

Michael Spence, who studied under Thomas Schelling, calls the Nobel-winning game theorist Mr. Counterintuition:

He pointed out that it took the U.S. 15 years after World War II to learn to think seriously about the security of its weapons. Before that, weapons did not have combination locks, let alone complex electronic security codes. Now, most weapons will not detonate even if given the codes unless they are at their designated targets. He recalled that a friend who had a role in developing the weapons told him that one day in the late 1950s, he got off a plane at an air base in Germany and saw a military aircraft on the tarmac with a bomb beside it guarded by a single soldier. In those days there were not locks and codes. The man strolled over and asked the soldier what this was. The answer: "I believe it is a nuclear bomb, sir." When asked what he would do if someone started to roll the weapon away, the soldier replied that he would call his superiors for instructions. A further enquiry established that the phone was some 300 meters away.

That was the level of thinking the US had given the problem, and it spent years bringing other nuclear powers around to the idea that nuclear weapons are good for deterrence and not much else:

Terrorists, Tom insists, "also need to understand that nuclear devices are really only useful for deterrence. They would be unlikely to have the capacity to deliver them on planes or missiles, and would be more likely to smuggle them into a hostile country and hide them in cities, and then threaten to detonate them if attacked — or unless their aims and conditions are met. The object should be not to blow up a city but to deter attacks on their country, region or organization." One is struck, once again, by the counterintuitive nature of the strategic issues related to these weapons — one has, to a large extent, a powerful strategic interest in the sophistication of one's enemies.

We spoke, also, about bioweapons. "Three years ago," Tom explains, "there was a lot of interest in, and concern about, the use of smallpox as a weapon. I was involved in a meeting that included a number of bioweapons experts, and after considerable discussion, I asked how long it would take for a smallpox epidemic deliberately started in the U.S. to spread around the world. The answer was 'Not long.' Then how practical are infectious diseases as bioweapons? Is it really likely that terrorists in the Middle East would use smallpox against a neighbor? Because of these considerations the interest in infectious diseases as weapons (as opposed to anthrax for example, which does not spread infectiously from person to person) has declined. But I was struck by the fact experts in bioweapons are not strategists, and by the thought that if our experts hadn't thought of this, could we be sure that others, including terrorist organizations, had?" Smallpox, in a nutshell, cannot rationally be used as a weapon because it would spread too quickly, a kind of self-inflicted wound and mutually assured destruction.

Pilot and Passengers Thwart Hijacker in Canary Islands

Pilot and Passengers Thwart Hijacker in Canary Islands:

A fast-thinking pilot with passengers in cahoots fooled a hijacker by braking hard upon landing, then accelerating to knock the man down. When he fell, flight attendants threw boiling water in his face, and about 10 people pounced on him, Spanish officials said Friday.

The Air Mauritania Boeing 737 carrying 71 passengers and a crew of eight was hijacked by a lone gunman brandishing two pistols Thursday evening shortly after it took off from Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, for Gran Canaria, one of Spain's Canary Islands, with a planned stopover in Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania.

The hijacking alarmed Spanish officials because a trial of 29 people accused in the Madrid terrorist bombings of 2004 had begun the same day in Madrid. But the man's motives were not terrorism; he wanted the plane to fly to France so he could request political asylum, said Mohamed Ould Mohamed Cheikh, Mauritania's top police official.
[...]
The hijacker ordered the pilot to fly to France, but the crew told him there was not enough fuel. And Morocco denied a request to land in the city of Djala in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, so the pilot headed for Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, the original destination.

Along the way, speaking to the hijacker, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. So he used the plane's public address system to warn the passengers in French of the ploy he was going to try: brake hard upon landing, then speed up abruptly. The idea was to catch the hijacker off balance, and have crew members and men sitting in the front rows of the plane jump him, the Spanish official said.

The pilot also warned women and children to move to the back of the plane in preparation for the subterfuge, the official said.

It worked. The man was standing in the middle aisle when the pilot carried out his maneuver, and he fell to the floor, dropping one of his two 7 mm pistols. Flight attendants then threw boiling water from a coffee machine in his face and at his chest, and some 10 people jumped on the man and beat him, the Spanish official said.

Medieval Helpdesk

This Medieval Helpdesk video is dead on:

"Compared to the scroll..."

Robotic retina offers second chance for sight

Robotic retina offers second chance for sight:

Six blind patients have had their sight partially restored by a "bionic eye" surgically implanted onto their retina. Although it restores only very rudimentary vision, the device has proved so successful that its developers are about to begin a study of a more sophisticated version on between 50 and 75 patients.

If this trial goes to plan, the device could be available to patients in two years and one day it could be used to digitally enhance human sight.

The bionic eye works by converting images from a tiny camera mounted on a pair of glasses into a grid of 16 electrical signals that transmit directly to the nerve endings in the retina.

"It's amazing that even with 16 pixels how much our subjects have been able to do," said Professor Mark Humayun at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California who has pioneered the device.

"We were completely wrong...We thought from simulations that 16 would only give you distinction between light and dark and maybe some grey scale."

In fact, subjects are able to tell the difference between objects such as a cup, a plate and a knife. They can also tell which direction objects are moving in front of them. "The brain is able to fill in a lot of the information," he added.

The amazing flight of manta rays

Fogonazos has compiled a gallery of photos and videos celebrating the amazing flight of manta rays.

Shaolin Rabbit

It's hard not to like Shaolin Rabbit.

Allegro NonTroppo

Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro non troppo is an extremely uneven spoof of Disney's Fantasia, but the Bolero sequence is riveting — particularly the second half.

Office desks havens for bacteria

Study: Office desks havens for bacteria:

Your office desk harbors far more bacteria than your workplace restroom, and if you're a woman, chances are your workspace has more germs than your male co-workers', a new research report shows.

Women have three to four times the number of bacteria in, on and around their desks, phones, computers, keyboards, drawers and personal items as men do, the study by University of Arizona professor Charles Gerba showed. Gerba, a professor of soil, water and environmental sciences, tested more than 100 offices on the UA campus and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington, D.C. The $40,000 study was commissioned by the Clorox Co.

"I thought for sure men would be germier," Gerba said. "But women have more interactions with small children and keep food in their desks. The other problem is makeup."
[...]
The average office desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the average office toilet seat, Gerba said.

Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream

Ben & Jerry's has announced a new flavor: Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream. It's vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel — the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth:

"I'm not afraid to say it. Dessert has a well-known liberal agenda," Colbert said in a statement. "What I hope to do with this ice cream is bring some balance back to the freezer case."

Red

Red is a very cool Flash-based game that takes Missile Command and adds some physics to it.

Hand Signals

Commando hand signals are, of course, extremely cool — and fairly easy to make fun of.

Is It Worth Being Wise?

Paul Graham asks, Is it worth being wise?:

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a remedial character. To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own nature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. That's not all wisdom is, but it's a large part of it. Much of what's in the sage's head is also in the head of every twelve year old. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old it's mixed together with a lot of random junk.

The path to intelligence seems to be through working on hard problems. You develop intelligence as you might develop muscles, through exercise. But there can't be too much compulsion here. No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivating intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one's character—some tendency to be interested in certain types of things—and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.

The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom. So perhaps one reason schools work badly is that they're trying to make intelligence using recipes for wisdom. Most recipes for wisdom have an element of subjection. At the very least, you're supposed to do what the teacher says. The more extreme recipes aim to break down your individuality the way basic training does. But that's not the route to intelligence. Whereas wisdom comes through humility, it may actually help, in cultivating intelligence, to have a mistakenly high opinion of your abilities, because that encourages you to keep working. Ideally till you realize how mistaken you were.

(The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just that one's brain is less malleable. Another probably even worse obstacle is that one has higher standards.)

The Discomforts of Home

The Discomforts of Home looks at "an innovative new housing project outside Tokyo" that "aims to keep residents sharp by throwing them off balance":

Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort: a serene atmosphere, smooth walls and floors, a logical layout. Nonsense, says Shusaku Arakawa, a Japanese artist based in New York. He and his creative partner, poet Madeline Gins, recently unveiled a small apartment complex in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka that is anything but comfortable and calming. "People, particularly old people, shouldn't relax and sit back to help them decline," he insists. "They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses and invigorates their lives."

With that in mind, Arakawa and Gins designed a building of nine apartments known as Reversible Destiny Lofts. Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall. Even worse, there's no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. "You'll learn to figure it out," says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that's precisely the point. "[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you'll live better, longer and even forever," says the artist.

Completed in October, the apartments are now selling for $763,000 each — about twice as much as a normal apartment in that neighborhood.

Bats Eat Birds

Bats might eat birds, according to Spanish and Swiss researchers:

They said giant noctule bats, large bats with an 18-inch (45-centimetre) wingspan, were eating mostly insects during the spring but appeared to have a diet heavy in bird meat during the autumn.

No other animal preys on birds that migrate at night, and this species of bat may have switched to this abundant food source recently, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

"In the course of a few million years, bats colonized most ecological niches and learned to exploit a wide array of food sources including arthropods, pollen, fruit, small terrestrial vertebrates and even blood," Ana Popa-Lisseanu and Carlos Ibanez of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Seville, Spain, and colleagues wrote.

Engravings from St. Nicholas Magazine

Al Q. has collected some beautiful Engravings from St. Nicholas Magazine, a children's magazine created in 1873.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged

In The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged, Joseph Giglio explains that congestion pricing — charging to use roads at rush hour, when they're busiest — is not a liberal policy but a conservative one:

This [Communist] approach is the way we've always allocated access to most roadways in capitalist America — access is "free," just like for a public park. But our real cost skyrockets when we consider the time we spend crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and with no option to pay extra for a faster trip.

And even without factoring in the cost of time frittered away listening to satellite radio, highways have never really been "free," but subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Congestion pricing is not a tax increase, but a user fee, which, conservatives agree, is a better way to divide costs. Indeed, economists across the political spectrum have long waxed enthusiastic about the superior logic of levying market-based prices for access to roadways; but until recently it remained little more than an interesting classroom concept since there was no practical way to charge motorists directly.

The advent of Electronic Toll Collection technology changed all this. Now we can charge motorists for using roadways without forcing them to stop at toll-booths, or even slow down.

Fight Artillery Duels in Fascinating War Games

The December, 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine showed kids how to Fight Artillery Duels in Fascinating War Games — if they assembled all the extremely complex components:

The “explosive” targets, which fly to pieces when hit, are shown in Figs. 4 and 7, and the photographs. The construction can be easily understood from the photo, Fig. 3. They “explode” when a shot strikes from above and causes them to bend down slightly at the canvas hinge. The rubber band snaps the two sides up into a “V” shape throwing the turrets, fort, cannon, etc., into the air.

The sensitivity of the exploding mechanism may be adjusted by changing the angle which the two sides make at the hinge. Leather, cloth or canvas may be used for the hinge. The bottoms of the battleships are smoothed so they may be pulled over the carpet or floor if desired by the small clock works tractor to be described below. The parts of the ship and fort are not fastened together except where indicated, in order that they may fly to pieces when struck by a shell.