Parliament of Clocks

Shannon Love presents "an old parable [that] explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint" — the parable of the Parliament of Clocks:

In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.

As he enters the street all the clocks in all the shops strike 1 o’clock in one massive group chime. The king marvels at the great accuracy of the clockmakers of the village, but a few moments later he hears another group chime. After investigating he finds that all the clocks in 9 of the 10 shops show the same time but that all the clocks in the 10th shop show a different time by several minutes. Puzzled, the king calls all the clockmakers together and ask why the clocks in the 10th shop do not chime at the same time as all the clocks in all the other shops.

The owner of the odd shop out immediately steps forward and says that due to his unusual skill and innovation his clocks keep more accurate time than the clocks of the other shops. The other shop owners protest loudly. The king is at a loss. The town lacks a master town clock or sundial, so he has no means of determining which clocks keep the best time. Confused, he decides not to buy any clocks and leaves town. Angered, the owners of the 9 agreeing shops burn down the shop of the odd man out to prevent such confusion from arising again. Now when someone comes to town, all the clocks will chime at the same instant. Customers will not become confused and everyone will sell more clocks.

The clockmakers destroy the nonconforming clockmaker among them because they know that as a practical matter we judge the accuracy of clocks by consensus.

Baby Tapir

Today's dose of cute comes from Vasan, the Baby Tapir:

Vasan, a baby Tapir explores its enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland, Friday March 30, 2007. The birth is a special event as it is the first time a Malayan Tapir has been born at the zoo and is also the first baby for this particular adult Tapir. Tapirs are hoofed mammals and are related to rhinos and horses.

Moira Hahn

Moira Hahn produces mildly subversive works in the classical Japanese print style.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Wakandan Vibranium

I can't believe that Colbert actually referenced Wakandan Vibranium. His geek-fu is strong.

Marvel's Joe Quesada is involved:

"I must confess that I am the culprit," states Quesada. After reading Cap's Last Will and Testament, I quickly snuck out of the Marvel's offices with the shield. As so many of you know, Steve Rogers was a humble man and wanted his last remaining wishes to be carried out as privately as possible.

"After a small "transfer of power" ceremony occurring on the Avenger's Quinjet, followed by several intense hours of introspection and deliberation with Mr. Colbert, we both felt it would be best to make a public statement of his inheriting the shield. Not as way of raising Mr. Colbert's status even further (How is that even possible?), nor as a cheap ratings stunt, but rather to let evildoers across the globe know that even with Cap's demise, there is no still place for them to hide. A clear message had to be sent that the mantle had been passed and that the Marvel Universe has gained a new (Colbert) Nation and remains secure."

Rio Bravo

I didn't realize that Rio Bravo "was made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne as a right-wing response to High Noon, which both men despised."

High Noon "was intended as an allegory in Hollywood for the failure of Hollywood people to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era."

Death of the cell phone charger

According to Death of the cell phone charger, "a Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you all the battery juice you need directly from the air." It all sounds a bit Atlas Shrugged. Here's the scoop:

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast's platform uses nothing more complex than a radio — and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device's battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril

If you value their safety, steer your daughters away from Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril:

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, and the rate of life-threatening injuries has startled researchers. Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. All sports combined did not surpass cheerleading.
[..]
In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program found that 25 percent of the money spent on claims for student-athletes since 1998 resulted from cheerleading. That made it second only to football. The ratio of cheerleaders to football players is about 12 to 100.

Navel Orange

Every Navel Orange comes from the same tree — sort of:

A single mutation in 1820 in an orchard of sweet oranges planted at a monastery in Brazil yielded the navel orange, also known as the Washington, Riverside or Bahia navel. The mutation caused each fruit on the tree to develop as a set of "siamese twins", with a smaller orange embedded in a larger one opposite the stem. From the outside, the smaller, undeveloped twin left a formation at the bottom of the fruit, looking similar to the human navel.

Because the mutation left the fruit seedless and therefore sterile, the only means available to cultivate more of this new variety is to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus tree. Two such cuttings of the original tree were transplanted to Riverside, California in 1870, which eventually led to worldwide popularity.

Today, navel oranges continue to be produced via cutting and grafting. This does not allow for the usual selective breeding methodologies, and so not only do the navel oranges of today have exactly the same genetic makeup as the original tree, they can even be considered to all be the fruit of that single, now centuries-old tree.

Oprah chooses McCarthy's "The Road" as book pick

Oprah chooses McCarthy's "The Road" as book pick:

Winfrey called the book "haunting and inspiring" with a lasting affect on the reader. "It is a quick read and a journey well worth taking," she added.

I wouldn't expect Oprah to pick for her book club a post-apocalyptic tale from a scribe of grim and gritty westerns.

1040 Form and Instructions in 1913, Only 4 Pages

Prof. Mark Perry notes that the 1040 Form and Instructions in 1913 were just four pages total, and the top tax rate was 6% — of all income over $500,000, equivalent to about $10 million today.

Knut Day

It was Knut Day in Berlin on Friday as Cute Knut made his public debut:

Knut stole the heart of Berliners after he was born in December but rejected by his mother Tosca. A bearded zookeeper moved into the enclosure to look after him round the clock.

But Knut's fate grabbed global attention after an animal rights campaigner said hand-rearing polar bears was a violation of animal rights. German media interpreted his comments as a call for Knut to be put to sleep.

If I were to engineer an animal for cuteness, it would look an awful lot like a polar bear cub. If you can withstand the cute overload, enjoy the slideshow and video.

Sherman — Stoic Warriors

James McCormick reviews Nancy Sherman's Stoic Warriors, and in the process examines the state of the world:

To summarize my argument then, (1) our prosperity and peace is far ahead of most of the world and increasing, (2) we don’t appear to have enough human capacity for combat to fix the world by force, and (3) money currently extracted from productive economies, filtered through unproductive economies, reappears as more combatants to start the cycle of disruption yet again. All in all, this seems more like a form of “Gap parasitism” enabled by the developed world’s good intentions.
[...]
Since industrialized nations are behaving, per Amy Chua, as a market-dominant minority for the entire planet, and setting the constraints (if not the standard) by which economics and politics are practiced for all humans, we are surrounded by those who not only disdain our solutions but cannot achieve them if they wanted to. America has such a dominant global role for at least a few coming decades that the nation is being cast as parent rather than hegemon. And it’s requiring inhuman levels of restraint from citizen and veteran alike to respond compassionately to cultures violently resisting any change. The world has become the G7’s resentful dependent — resentful of green cards, of food, of money, of irrelevance to the rest of the world’s economic and social progress. Defeated in war first, and then indulged in riotous violent peace.

What if, as some scholars suggest, the chaos and turmoil of pre-industrialized world is the norm rather than the exception, and tremendous effort must be expended to move it out of such a “steady state”? Perhaps the one-time military differential provided by gunpowder is now forever gone, and all future efforts at changing economic circumstances will be far more tenuous and violent than even the dramas of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings

How did this slip below my radar? Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings:

The first new Tolkien novel for 30 years is to be published next month. In a move eagerly anticipated by millions of fans across the world, The Children of Húrin will be released worldwide on 17 April, 89 years after the author started the work and four years after the final cinematic instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of biggest box office successes in history.

Amazon has it available for pre-order — and the publication date is not April 1.

Single-Payer Health Care,

Arnold Kling says, "Here is single-payer health care in a nutshell":

1. People are forced to buy something that they don't seem to want
2. Provided by a monopoly
3. Paid for by higher taxes

Drugs and Toxicity

Andrew Sullivan cites an article on Drugs and Toxicity and makes the following observation:

The least toxic drug known to humans is now illegal. The most toxic is available at Safeway.

The Real Shrek

One might say that old-time pro-wrestler Maurice Tillet was The Real Shrek.

Triumph Of The Vile

In Triumph Of The Vile, "war nerd" Gary Brecher describes 300 as the "Hoo-ah" version of Thermopylae:

Fact: Sparta was about as romantic as North Korea. Give or take a little egalitarianism, Sparta WAS North Korea. Spartan laws did everything they could to break down the family. Sparta was more anti-nuclear family than any Hollywood liberal could ever be.

Wanna know what a Spartan wedding night was really like? It's pretty hilarious, in an insane way. As soon as a Spartan girl got her first period, they grabbed her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, threw her down on her new husband's bed, and then, well, he had his way with her. What way was that? Since hubby had been in an all-male dorm since age seven, I'm betting that that night of lovin' was more like a skinny white boy's introduction to San Quentin after lights-out than it was like a chick flick. So when this movie shows the Spartan hero saying to his wife, "Goodbye, my love," I just had to laugh.

No Spartan ever told his wife he loved her. That would've been like treason, because the Spartan rulers wanted family ties snapped, so the only bond left was to the state. They left room for folks' natural urges by letting the women drink, which they did non-stop, and the men form what you might call close comradely bonds with their fellow soldiers.

In the ancient world, gay was a matter of who was on top. If you were a topper, that was fine; if you were the one getting in the ass, not so cool. In other words, prison rules. Sparta's leather-bar ways were a running joke to the ancient Greeks. The Spartans were stone killers — but they also preened like teenage girls before a battle. They grew their hair long, and before a fight they'd comb it, oil it, try out fetching new styles, put little baubles in their ears, anything to die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

None of that in this movie. Just the opposite.

He notes that the true heroes of the war against Persia were the Athenians, who understood combined-arms operations involving both army and navy:

Sparta understood only one kind of fighting: land battle, the hoplite shield-wall — a Big Ten offense from the old school, "three yards and a cloud of dust." In any shield-wall vs. shield wall battle, the bigger offensive line will break the opposing team's wall, leaving them open to massed spear thrusts. Once the opposition's wall was broken, the citizen-soldiers would scatter to fight another day — a totally sensible reaction, since the alternative was annihilation. In battles like that, psycho varsity offensive-line types like the ones Sparta bred did just fine. But vary the conditions of battle in any way, and they were as helpless as Woody Hayes' Ohio State teams were against a team that could stop the run.

From the first time I saw a trailer where a Spartan (Leonidas) kicks an envoy down an apparently bottomless pit, I was bothered:

Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he's evil. Everybody who talks in a normal tone of voice is evil. Miller shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. And both times, you're supposed to cheer.

Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq.

Abolishing the Middlemen Won’t Make Health Care a Free Lunch

Tyler Cowen notes that Abolishing the Middlemen Won’t Make Health Care a Free Lunch:

Medical insurance, whether private or government, is always going to be faced with a fundamental problem: patients and doctors will try to get the most out of any system. When they aren’t paying directly, patients will seek extra care and doctors will be happy to oblige. To deal with that problem, health care systems can offer services indiscriminately and write off the resulting losses, spend money on monitoring, or limit services and prices. An analogous problem is faced by retail stores: they must either put up with theft, hire security to limit theft, or carry lower-value items.

Just as some items are harder to shoplift than others, so some medical services are less prone to overuse. European systems are relatively good at providing prenatal care or mending someone hit by a car. Few people would try to get these services unless they were really needed. No one but an expectant mother, for instance, will show up for a prenatal checkup; nor would excess prenatal checkups cost a great deal. The unwillingness of European systems to spend on overhead means they will do best specializing in these kinds of services.

Health insurers cannot just offer expensive tests, technologies, hospital rooms and surgeries for older patients for the taking. Doctors will too often recommend these services and receive reimbursement, even to the point of financial abuse. Medicare has this problem to some extent.

When it comes to these discretionary benefits, European systems are more likely to make people wait for them, more likely to make the service inconvenient or uncomfortable, or simply not make the services available in the first place. All of these features discourage those who don’t really need care, and, of course, some people simply go elsewhere and pay out of their own pockets. Either way, the overhead costs have been shifted onto patients and their families.

On average, European systems are relatively good for the young, who are generally healthy and need treatment for obvious accidents and emergencies, with transparent remedies. European systems are less effective for the elderly, the primary demanders of discretionary medical benefits. American society has the reputation of paying less heed to the elderly than Europe does, but when it comes to medical care it is the other way around.

BrickArms Weapons

The Net has definitely made some shockingly niche goods available to the narrow markets that want them, like these BrickArms Weapons, realistic weapons for your Lego army:

BrickArms are designed using the latest Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools to allow for precise details, and yet still retain an artistic sculptural feel of the action weapons.

Injection molded to the highest of tolerances, all 21 BrickArms Weapons are made of durable ABS plastic — the same plastic that Lego uses in their own toys, to mesh perfectly with the Lego system you already own.

If you have any doubt who their market is, note that the rifle pictured above is an X41A "Xeno" Pulse Rifle — "Hicks tested, Ripley approved."

Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head

Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head notes that "the devastating derangements of autism also show up in the gut and in the immune system" — and that may point to new treatment options:

“I no longer see autism as a disorder of the brain but as a disorder that affects the brain,” Herbert says. “It also affects the immune system and the gut. One very striking piece of evidence many of us have noticed is that when autistic children go in for certain diagnostic tests and are told not to eat or drink anything ahead of time, parents often report their child’s symptoms improve — until they start eating again after the procedure. If symptoms can improve in such a short time frame simply by avoiding exposure to foods, then we’re looking at some kind of chemically driven ‘software’ — perhaps immune system signals — that can change fast. This means that at least some of autism probably comes from a kind of metabolic encephalopathy — a systemwide process that affects the brain, just like cirrhosis of the liver affects the brain.”
[...]
“What I believe is happening is that genes and environment interact, either in a fetus or young child, changing cellular function all over the body, which then affects tissue and metabolism in many vulnerable organs. And it’s the interaction of this collection of troubles that leads to altered sensory processing and impaired coordination in the brain. A brain with these kinds of problems produces the abnormal behaviors that we call autism.”

The Arbiter with the Golden Scepter: A Theory of Government

In The Arbiter with the Golden Scepter: A Theory of Government, Arnold Kling builds up to the following conclusion:

People on the Left tend to see society as consisting of individuals (often weak or poorly informed), markets (efficient but uncaring), and government (looking out for the collective good). Instead, what I see are many layers of institutions that can solve collective problems. These institutions of civil society are — unlike government — flexible, creative, and capable of downsizing or disappearing as they lose relevance or effectiveness.

The Left's view, static and impaired, is that when a social problem arises, any solution requires government. The Left's approach of referring every possible problem to the Arbiter would, if it were embedded in a corporate setting, be considered micromanagement and over-reaching of the worst sort.

The alternative view, dynamic and entrepreneurial, is that solutions to social problems can emerge in many ways from the institutions of civil society. Government should function as an Arbiter only when necessary. It should not use its Golden Scepter to force its way into decision-making processes that are working peacefully. People who want to improve society should be encouraged to form associations that produce constructive solutions, rather than to root for politicians.

Top US Marginal Income Tax Rates, 1913-2003

If you study the Top US Marginal Income Tax Rates, 1913–2003, you may find some surprises.

For instance, the top marginal tax rate in 1963 — not that long ago, really — was 91 percent, on all income over $400,000 (for a married couple).

Your Mom Was Wrong: Horseplay Is An Important Part Of Development

From the Journal of Duh — pardon, Current Directions in Psychological Science — new evidence that Your Mom Was Wrong: Horseplay Is An Important Part Of Development:

For example, adult rats deprived of peer interaction, (and thus rough and tumble play), reveal an inability to comprehend the hierarchy of social structures. In the rat kingdom, when a young male attempts to establish residency in a colony, he is promptly targeted for attack by the dominant male rat. Rats that have been reared with peers quickly learn to remain crouched and motionless in such an instance in order to avoid the dominant male's attention. Play deprived rats, on the other hand, continue to scurry about which ultimately invites further serious attacks.

Coordinated movements appear to suffer in the absence of rough and tumble play as well. Rats, as most other mammals, rely heavily on coordinated movement for both cooperative (e.g. sex) and competitive (e.g. defending a piece of food) situations. Rats that are reared in isolation have impaired ability to coordinate their movements appropriately with opponents. This coordination, say the authors, can be learned through the constantly shifting body motions that take place during playfighting.

Deprivation from peer interaction appears to have neurological consequences as well. Juvenile play fighting has been found to stimulate the release of certain chemical growth factors in the cerebral cortex, an area the authors describe as the "social brain." Among the structures in the social brain is the orbitofrontal cortex, an area known to be involved in social discrimination and decision. As logic would tell us, the less growth is promoted in this area, the greater the likelihood of impaired movement coordination, perception of social cues, and the like.

Once Again, Debt Is Miscast as the Villain

David Leonhardt says, Once Again, Debt Is Miscast as the Villain:

But whatever happens, it’s important to remember that the mortgage market is following a classic cycle that nearly every other form of consumer credit has also followed. When somebody comes up with an innovation, be it consumer loans, credit cards or creative mortgages, it inevitably leads to an explosion of borrowing that includes a good amount of excess and downright abuse. After the abuse is cleaned up, though, most families end up better off.
[...]
But think about what life was like before easy money. Think about how hard it would be to buy a house or pay for college if a 42 percent interest rate still seemed normal.

Some of the changes are surprisingly recent. Just a generation ago, a temporary setback, like illness, divorce or job loss, was much more likely to force a family to take drastic measures than it is today. That’s in large measure because of debt, which allows families to smooth out the rough edges of their financial lives.

You can see this change in the national statistics on consumer spending. Since the early 1990s, the peaks in spending growth rates haven’t been as high as they were in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but the valleys haven’t been as low, either. Not coincidentally, recessions have come less often over the last two decades and they have been fairly mild.

Mortgages are a big part of this story. Thanks to the enormous amount of foreign capital that has flowed into the market over the last decade — the same influx of capital, yes, that helped cause the boom to get out of hand — the mortgage business has become bigger, more competitive and more innovative.

If you take out a mortgage today, you’ll pay thousands of dollars less in upfront fees than you would have in the mid-80s. (Those fees have fallen by 80 percent in just two decades.) Home buyers who know they’re going to live in their house for only a few years now also have the ability to get an interest rate that reflects their situation. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage isn’t the only game in town.

Enemies of the State

In Enemies of the State, Daniel McCarthy reviews Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement and ends with these words:

It used to be that a libertarian who grew up became a Republican. Now it might be the other way around.

'300' a triumph of technology

Anne Thompson of Variety calls '300' a triumph of technology:

Beyond turning Gerard Butler into an action star and revitalizing the R rating, "300" is going to have a big impact, because it has proved the effectiveness of a moviemaking technique that blends stylized graphic and live-action elements seamlessly — and at $64 million, relatively inexpensively.

It's the birth of a new hybrid cinema, says genre marketing consultant Jeff Conner ("The Animatrix"). "Call it live-action anime. It's like doing a high school play on a stage with digital backdrops. It's a new visual language with a different reality."

You Snooze, You Lose

According to You Snooze, You Lose, if you're drinking coffee, "You might as well be commuting by buggy":

Old-school stimulants like caffeine, amphetamines and the drug Ritalin are about to be marginalized by eugeroics. This emerging breed of “wakefulness” pills promises to keep the workers of tomorrow not just awake, but alert, on-task and feeling fine through the night and well into the next day. Remember these names, because they’re your future: Modafinil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy and marketed in the U.S. as Provigil, is already giving a competitive edge to everyone from Air Force pilots on 40-hour missions to (less legally) college students cramming for exams. The drug’s maker, Cephalon in Frazer, Pennsylvania, is awaiting FDA approval for armodafinil, which promises even longer periods of wakefulness on a single dose, and Irvine, California–based Cortex is working on its own drug, code-named CX717 and developed with funding from the military. The drugs are targeted at sleep disorders like narcolepsy, but it’s their dramatic potential influence on the workplace that has researchers and efficiency experts buzzing.

Scientists understand how the drugs work only broadly. Unlike traditional stimulants, eugeroics don’t simply jazz up the whole body. Instead they tweak specific sleep-related mechanisms in the brain, so users don’t feel jittery or wired, just alert. And in experiments with CX717, sleep-deprived rhesus monkeys on the drug often outperformed their own well-rested but undrugged best efforts on mental-performance tests. Modafinil, too, “is definitely a cognitive enhancer,” says cognitive psychopharmacologist Barbara Sahakian of the University of Cambridge. In her studies of alert human volunteers, the drug improved planning, concentration and impulse-control skills, and even boosted some forms of memory.

An 18th-Century Brain in a 21st-Century Head

In An 18th-Century Brain in a 21st-Century Head, Virginia Postrel says, "Surviving the 21st century with our sanity and civilization intact will require less Nietzsche and more Hume."

Which raises another question: is Virginia Postrel an Ant Fan? From Room at the Top:

Made in England born and bred
An eighteenth century brain
In a twenty-first century head

The best unedited fight sequence ever

I have not seen The Protector, but some say it includes the best unedited fight sequence ever:

The crew spent over 1 month preparing and choreographing before they were able to get a perfect shot. When it came time to shoot, they could only do 2 takes per day because of the set repairing and prop replacement that needed to be done. It took 5 takes to get it right. A foreign cameraman was needed because the stedicam mount was built for american / european operators who are typically much larger than asian operators.

The foreign operator they hired could only do two flights of stairs at a time and simply gave up. They decided to use a Thai stedicam operator who physically prepared for a month for this job.

The reason the shot is 4 minutes is because reels of 35mm film are only about 4 min in length.

They shot the first take which had a number of problems with stuntmen cues, and even a stuntman bumping into the stedicam operator. After choreographing more dynamic action, an increase of extras and improving the set, the next take they did was 17 days after the first take.

The second take was better but when the stuntman was supposed to be thrown from the 3rd story, the safety mattress was not completely in place yet so Tony Jaa stopped the shot and saved the stuntman's life.

The third take was just about perfect but just before Tony Jaa was supposed to bust through the last doorway, the film ran out. The director finally decided that instead of simply cutting there, they would try again for perfection.

They thought the fourth take was perfect but after review there were some parts that weren't as good as the pervious takes. They decided on one more try.

On the fifth try, it was almost perfect. But there were 2 miscues. On the 2nd floor, Tony Jaa slams a door into the head of a stuntman and the small glass window on the door was supposed to break. It failed to do so, so they used CGI to fix this. The 2nd issue was the fight just before the sink gets thrown. The timing was off as planned but the end result looked natural so they decided this was the take to use in the final film. Simply amazing.

A few thoughts:

• In some cases, the camera definitely becomes a character — for instance, when the camera runs up the stairs.


• The extended fight has pro-wrestling-style pacing — you can't coordinate a frenetic, chaotic fight scene with dozens of guys over the course of four minutes.

(Hat tip to John.)

It's All Geek to Me

Of 300, Neal Stephenson says, It’s All Geek to Me:

Many reviews made the same points:

• “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.


• “300” is campy — meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres — yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.


• All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)

But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence

I do not know who Fjordman is — a conservative Scandinavian, I'd assume — but he makes some frightening points in Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence:

Filmmaker Pierre Rehov tells how a friend of his is a retired chief of police who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. According to him, 80% of the rapes in the area were made by Muslim young men. In most cases, the parents would not understand why they would be arrested. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, was the temptation that the male children had to face from infidel women.

The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007

Cringely foretells The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007:

Maybe you have wondered, as I have, why it takes a pretty robust notebook computer to play DVD videos, while Wal-Mart will sell you a perfectly capable progressive-scan DVD player from Philips for $38? In general, the dedicated DVD player is not only a lot cheaper, it works better, too, and the simple reason is because it decodes the DVD's MPEG-2 video stream in hardware, rather than in software. They won't run a spreadsheet, true, but DVD players are brilliant at doing what they are designed to do over and over again. And if the expedient here is a $7 MPEG-2 decoder chip, it's a wonder why such chips didn't appear long ago in PCs.

Well they are about to, after a fashion.

Chest presses, not breaths, better CPR

Chest presses, not breaths, better CPR:

A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published in Friday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

Perhaps more importantly, bystanders are willing to perform chest compresses on a stranger.

Tokyo's Irish fans parade for St. Patrick's Day

Tokyo's Irish fans parade for St. Patrick's Day:

For a city with far more Sakamotos than O'Sullivans, Japan's capital still manages to go all out to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Although many Japanese know little about Ireland — some even confuse it with chilly Iceland — the small European nation has nonetheless attracted a band of die-hard fans halfway around the globe.

A week earlier, Kyoto had its own St. Patrick's Day parade, complete with Irish Setters and an Irish Wolfhound.

Turning fantasy into a reality that helps others

Turning fantasy into a reality that helps others tells the story of "Lucifer" Chu, who has made millions and is now directing an effort to translate MIT's Open Courseware into Chinese:

At 18, Chu began working as a part-time columnist for a local computer magazine and in his spare time translated fantasy and science-fiction novels from English to Chinese.

His life was set to change in the late 1990s, when he first began reading the English editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings. On hearing that a movie version of Tolkien's trilogy was in the pipeline, Chu approached a local publisher and offered to translate the works into Chinese for a minimal fee.

The deal was that if the translated works sold less than 10,000 boxed-sets, or 40,000 individual copies, Chu would donate his translation services for free. If, however, sales surpassed the 10,000 mark he would receive 9 percent of the retail value of each book.

It was a gamble, but within weeks of the release of the first of director Peter Jackson's big-screen trilogy in December, 2001, Chu's translation had become a national bestseller.

The number of boxed-sets sold in Taiwan to date stands somewhere in the region of 220,000 and Chu is now worth in excess of a cool NT$27million. And all because he preferred to play video games, read fantasy novels and doodle in his notebooks rather than pay attention in class.

Radioactive Boy Scout

Thiago Olson is a new Radioactive Boy Scout:

For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion — an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.

Olson’s apparatus won’t work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a “star in a jar,” a tiny flash of hot plasma. “The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,” Olson says modestly, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”

The original radioactive boy scout was David Hahn, who built a crude breeder reactor in his backyard in 1994.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Despite its provocative title, The Great Global Warming Swindle seems reasonable. Watch the video.

(Hat tip to mon père.)

Why Apple is the best retailer in America

Why Apple is the best retailer in America:

Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany's for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.

That astonishing number, from a Sanford C. Bernstein report, is merely the average of Apple's 174 stores, which attract 13,800 visitors a week. (The Fifth Avenue store averages 50,000-plus.) In 2004, Apple reached $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history; last year, sales reached $1 billion a quarter.

Trading with the Enemy

Trading with Dubai often means Trading with the Enemy:

The open secret is that Dubai buys far more than it keeps. More than a quarter of its $23 billion in annual nonoil imports are reexported, and Iran gets the biggest share. Interviews with private businesspeople and U.S. officials, along with court documents, reveal a simple scheme. Companies located around the world sell goods — from cigarettes to medical devices and PCs — to buyers in the U.A.E. Dubai traders repackage the items and send them along by air or ship to agents in, say, Tehran, Pyongyang, Damascus or Islamabad.

Smoking out the offenders is tough. Outside of free zones foreigners are not permitted to own a majority of a business in Dubai, and local partners aren't subject to export-control laws. These realities leave bureaucrats in Washington pessimistic. "Whenever there are third-party transactions, there is only so much you can do to follow the path of the transaction," admits a U.S. Treasury official.

Smuggling isn't new to the Persian Gulf. But the system really took off around 1987, when the U.S. imposed its first trade embargo on Iranian goods and services in response to Tehran's sponsoring of terrorism in the Middle East. By the time the 1995 oil sanctions took effect, it was a well-greased mechanism. Virtually all trade and investment with Iran was prohibited in 1997, though the ban on caviar, nuts, dried fruits and carpets was lifted in 2000. The penalties — fines of up to $250,000 for individuals and ten years in the slammer — should have deterred violators.

Yet it didn't take long for U.S. products to seep through the cracks. As long as a decade ago, more than a quarter of the roughly $1 billion in American goods exported to Dubai ended up in Iran, estimates the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a nonproliferation advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Last year U.S. companies sold $3.4 billion worth of goods to the U.A.E.; export licenses have jumped 47% over the last five years. "When you blow off the dust, the Dubai region sometimes means Iran and Libya," says Paul DeBenedictis, chairman of the American Business Council of the Gulf Countries.

Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization

Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization:

At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people have the right to play video games — and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right — then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool.

How does a consumer product become so involving that, after 57 hours of using the product, the consumer would rather use the product for one more hour than eat or sleep? (I suppose one could argue that the consumer makes a rational decision that they'd rather play Starcraft for the next hour than live out the rest of their lives, but let's just not go there. Please.)

A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point in tastespace that wasn't in the training dataset — an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs. Tastiness, formerly representing the evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has been reverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance. Unfortunately there's no equally powerful market incentive to make the resulting food item as healthy as it is tasty. We can't taste healthfulness, after all.

The now-famous Dove Evolution video shows the painstaking construction of another superstimulus: an ordinary woman transformed by makeup, careful photography, and finally extensive Photoshopping, into a billboard model — a beauty impossible, unmatchable by human women in the unretouched real world. Actual women are killing themselves (e.g. supermodels using cocaine to keep their weight down) to keep up with competitors that literally don't exist.

And likewise, a video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality, even through a simple computer monitor, that someone will play it without food or sleep until they literally die. I don't know all the tricks used in video games, but I can guess some of them — challenges poised at the critical point between ease and impossibility, intermittent reinforcement, feedback showing an ever-increasing score, social involvement in massively multiplayer games.

Yudkowsky leaves us "with a final argument from fictional evidence":

Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens — not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time. Where are the advertising billboards that say "BREED"? Who will pay professional image consultants to make arguing with sullen teenagers seem more alluring than a vacation in Tahiti?

"In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence."

Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals

The New York Times has a content-light article, Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals, about how the Florida school system has embraced girls' weightlifting — sort of.

It mentions clean & jerk, one of the two lifts contested in weightlifting, and bench press, one of the three lifts contested in powerlifting. Both are popular lifts for football players — perhaps they're mixing and matching sports down in Florida?

These Boots Were Made for 22 M.P.H.

These Boots Were Made for 22 M.P.H. looks at a zany Russian invention that never made money — gasoline-powered piston boots — and the difficulties the Russian economy faces:

And, in contrast to the United States, venture capital firms and start-up companies in Russia have not congregated near technology universities. Russian computer programmers, successful in Silicon Valley, are best known at home for hacking.

“Venture capital firms are starting to work here, but as a rule, if something comes to their attention it is an exception,” said Igor R. Belousov, a Hewlett-Packard executive who coordinates the company’s research at Russian universities.

Meanwhile, natural resources account for 80 percent of Russia’s export revenue; crude oil and natural gas alone account for 65 percent.

To encourage foreign companies to invest in cities rich in scientific talent, Mr. Gref’s ministry is setting up technology parks with tax breaks in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk.

(Emphasis mine.)

Victor Davis Hanson on 300

Victor Davis Hanson on 300:

There are four key things to remember about the film: it is not intended to be Herodotus Book 7.209-236, but rather is an adaptation from Frank Miller’s graphic novel, which itself is an adaptation from secondary work on Thermopylai. Purists should remember that when they see elephants and a rhinoceros or scant mention of the role of those wonderful Thespians who died in greater numbers than the Spartans at Thermopylai.

Second, in an eerie way, the film captures the spirit of Greek fictive arts themselves. Snyder and Johnstad and Miller are Hellenic in this sense: red-figure vase painting especially idealized Greek hoplites through “heroic nudity”. Such iconographic stylization meant sometimes that armor was not included in order to emphasize the male physique.

So too the 300 fight in the film bare-chested. In that sense, their oversized torsos resemble not only comic heroes, but something of the way that Greeks themselves saw their own warriors in pictures. And even the loose adaptation of events reminds me of Greek tragedy, in which an Electra, Iphigeneia or Helen in the hands of a Euripides is portrayed sometimes almost surrealistically, or at least far differently from the main narrative of the Trojan War, followed by the more standard Aeschylus, Sophocles and others.

Third, Snyder, Johnstad, and Miller have created a strange convention of digital backlot and computer animation, reminiscent of the comic book mix of Sin City. That too is sort of like the conventions of Attic tragedy in which myths were presented only through elaborate protocols that came at the expense of realism (three male actors on the stage, masks, dialogue in iambs, with elaborate choral meters, violence off stage, 1000-1600 lines long, etc.).
[...]
Fourth, but what was not conventionalized was the martial spirit of Sparta that comes through the film. Many of the most famous lines in the film come directly either from Herodotus or Plutarch’s Moralia, and they capture well, in the historical sense, the collective Spartan martial ethic, honor, glory, and ancestor reverence (I say that as an admirer of democratic Thebes and its destruction of Sparta’s system of Messenian helotage in 369 BC).

Baby Elephant

Today's dose of cute comes from this Baby Elephant:

In this photo released by The San Diego Zoo, A one-day-old African elephant calf peeks out from underneath his mothers legs at the San Diego Zoos Wild Animal Park Monda, March 12, 2007, in San Diego. The male calf, the first of three African elephant calves expected in 2007 at the park, was born at 9:14 p.m. Sunday. The mother, Litsemba was one of seven African elephants rescued by thepPark in August 2003, when officials in Swazilands Big Game Parks felt they had two options, kill a number of their elephants or export them to a zoo willing to care for the pachyderms.

Why Singapore is Superior Despite So Many Faults

Why Singapore is Superior Despite So Many Faults — from a military perspective:

The city of Singapore was founded by the British in 1819, on an island at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. The British considered the local Malays rather too laid back, and brought in thousands of Chinese and Indians to work the booming port city. Within six years, the population exploded from a few hundred, to over 10,000. Two years later, Chinese became the most numerous ethnic group. They eventually came to dominate the rich port of Singapore, providing administrators, as well as traders and laborers. The British kept the key jobs, but otherwise ran a meritocracy. When Malaysia, which Singapore was a part of, became independent in 1963, many Chinese in Singapore protested being ruled by the Malay majority. The Malays also resented the more entrepreneurial and economically successful Chinese. Although most Singapore residents wanted to be part of Malaysia, it didn't work out. In 1965, Malaysia basically expelled Singapore, which become a separate, mainly Chinese, country. Over the next three decades, the Singaporean economy grew an average of nine percent a year, and Singapore became the wealthiest, on a per-capita basis, nation in the region.

With so much to defend, the Singaporeans developed, early on, a strong military. This was prompted by Britain withdrawing its garrison in 1971 and, in effect, telling the Singaporeans they had to defend themselves. Singapore asked Israel to help it develop a force similar to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). That is, a large reserve force, with a small active force to handle training and any immediate military needs. The two countries have been close allies ever since.

Thus Singapore has an active duty force of 60,000, most of them reservists undergoing training. There are only about 20,000 full time, professional troops. In wartime, there are 300,000 trained reserves who can be mobilized, plus nearly has many who have had military training, but are no longer in reserve units. Like Israel, Singapore can mobilize a force that can defeat any of its neighbors.

London calling

In London calling, James Harding explains how London is rising as New York is falling:

In business terms, London’s claim to be the world’s favourite marketplace is not just a boast, it’s a statistic: the report found that in the past five years international companies have not been choosing to list on the New York stock exchanges but to float their businesses in London. In 2001 the US accounted for 57 per cent of all stock market flotations over $1 billion — otherwise known as initial public offerings (IPOs). By 2006 this had fallen to 16 per cent. In the same period, Europe’s share of the world’s big IPOs had risen from 33 per cent to 63 per cent.

Small companies as well as big ones have been choosing London. The Alternative Investment Market, which is where start-ups tend to go to sell their shares in the UK, listed 870 new companies in the five years since 2001, while Nasdaq, the market for new ventures in the US, listed 526.

Just to be clear, IPOs account for only a fraction of the investment banking business. New York still has much more money flowing through it than London. The financial stock of America’s business capital, which means the amount of money that flows through it in shares, debt and bank deposits, was $51 trillion in 2005. In Europe as a whole it was $38 trillion.

But London has the momentum. [...] London’s financial workforce has been growing while New York’s has been shrinking — the City added 13,000 jobs between 2002 and 2005, expanding by 4.3 per cent to bring London’s total financial labour market to 318,000, while New York’s slipped back 0.7 per cent to 328,000. If the trend continues, at the end of next year there will be more people working in finance in London than in New York.

Wall Street has blamed the resurgence of London on regulation, immigration laws and the tax regime for foreign residents. There is some truth to this. After a spate of high-profile corporate collapses, Congress passed a set of new corporate governance rules known as Sarbanes-Oxley that made the whole business of operating a company in the US a lot more tiresome. Foreign companies used to consider a New York listing a badge of honour. In the past three years, many have come to see it as an unnecessary bother. They have come to London instead.

You have won second prize in a beauty contest; collect $10

I haven't played Monopoly since I was a kid, so I've never played it strategically. In You have won second prize in a beauty contest; collect $10, Bo Madison explains a few of the actual rules and why the game should not go on for hours when these rules are used:

• Nothing happens when you land on Free Parking.
• If a player lands on an unowned property and does not buy it, it is to be auctioned.
• The bank never runs out of money, but the bank does run out of houses and hotels.

Baby Lemur

Today's dose of cute comes from this Baby Lemur born outside Paris:

One of two babies crowned lemurs (Propithecus verreauxi coronatus) born in early January 2007 is seen in this recent photo at the Parc Zoologique de Paris in nearby Vincennes. The birth of the two baby lemurs, part of the European Endangered Species Breeding Programmes, increases the population to ten lemurs in captivity at the Zoo.

New leopard species found in Borneo

New leopard species found in Borneo:

Genetic tests by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute revealed that the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra islands is a unique cat species and not the same one found in mainland Southeast Asia as long believed, said a statement by WWF, the global conservation organization.

Boeing unveils a radically new kind of aircraft

Boeing unveils a radically new kind of aircraft, which it hopes to have ready to carry commercial passengers by 2030:

Last November a team from MIT and Cambridge University unveiled the SAX-40, a blended-wing design that promises to be more fuel-efficient than a Toyota Prius — and thanks in part to the engine placement, just as quiet (at 63 decibels).

These designs still have a bumpy ride before they'll be accepted by airlines: How to build a flat pressurized cargo hold is one challenge; another is asking passengers to sit 25 seats away from the window.

Why your home isn`t the investment you think it is

Why your home isn`t the investment you think it is<