The Truth About the Pay Gap

The Truth About the Pay Gap does not lend itself to moral outrage:

As the report acknowledges, women with college degrees tend to go into fields like education, psychology and the humanities, which typically pay less than the sectors preferred by men, such as engineering, math and business. They are also more likely than men to work for nonprofit groups and local governments, which do not offer salaries that Alex Rodriguez would envy.

As they get older, many women elect to work less so they can spend time with their children. A decade after graduation, 39 percent of women are out of the work force or working part time — compared with only 3 percent of men. When these mothers return to full-time jobs, they naturally earn less than they would have if they had never left.

Even before they have kids, men and women often do different things that may affect earnings. A year out of college, notes AAUW, women in full-time jobs work an average of 42 hours a week, compared to 45 for men. Men are also far more likely to work more than 50 hours a week.
[...]
Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap," she said in an interview.

Drive Fast, Save the World

Drive Fast, Save the World talks about the electric Tesla roadster and the chief engineer behind it:

JB Straubel, in 1999 an emerging superstar in Stanford University's school of engineering, had been haunting the student machine shop, fabricating parts for his '84 Porsche 944 from midnight until 4 in the morning. Working by trial and error, he developed his own power controller and charger. He mated together two electric motors with a homemade coupler and belt system. He gutted the car and crammed in 840 pounds' worth of lead-acid batteries. Start to finish, the project took him a year.

By early 2000, Straubel had taken a piece of once-state-of-the-art German engineering and transmogrified it into a pretty advanced science-fair project: The World's Fastest Electric Car. Or so he hoped. With 180 kilowatts at his disposal (about 240 horsepower), the car had enough power, he estimated, to set an electric-vehicle world record for the quarter mile. Just one problem: Total range was 20 miles. What good is it, he figured, to build an all-electric emission-free dragster, if you're just going to tow it to the racetrack on the back of a big truck?

And so Straubel set about doing what any driven, somewhat obsessive-compulsive engineering graduate student would do. He bought a Volkswagen Beetle for $500, chopped it in two with a shop saw, and used a trailer hitch to attach the back half — the part with the engine and driven wheels — to the rear of the Porsche. He ran a remote throttle and ignition from the VW to the Porsche's driver's seat. From there, he sat and steered while his mongrelized single-axle trailer pushed the 944 down the road.

Climate change hits Mars

Climate change hits Mars:

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

Grayson

I only just now found out about Grayson, a 2004 fan film made by a guy named John Fiorella to show off his filmmaking abilities.

The film presents a world after the golden age of superheroes. Batman has been murdered, and Dick Grayson takes up the mantle of Robin once more to track down the killers.

Watch the video. Fiorella manages a lot with no budget.

You Are What You Grow

In You Are What You Grow, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, notes that you can buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the processed food is:

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Definitely read the whole article.

Tim Ferriss at SXSW

If you find the notion of the four-hour workweek intriguing, listen to this audio of Tim Ferriss at SXSW.

One-Wheel Wonder

Ralph Kinney Bennett praises the One-Wheel Wonder:

Somewhere in ancient China, possibly in the 1st century B.C., a wagon or a horse cart carrying supplies in a military column was smashed to pieces in an accident. A soldier moving the damaged wagon out of the way picked up a shattered section which was still attached to one wheel. Using the wheel, he propelled the piece of wreckage off the roadway and as he did so he experienced one of those little practical epiphanies that have meant so much to civilization.

Rather than pick up and carry the rest of the wreckage and the contents of the wagon off the road, he balanced them on his impromptu one-wheeled 'tool' and swiftly cleared the way. Thus, perhaps, was born one of the most elegant and useful tools ever invented by man - the wheelbarrow.

The exact time and place of this ingenious mating of the principle of the lever and the mobility of the wheel cannot be exactly determined, shrouded as it is in the mist of time and legend. A Chinese general, Chuko Liang (181-234 A.D.) is often credited with the invention of the wheelbarrow and its subsequent use transporting military supplies. The Chinese army reportedly found that this device gave it such a logistical advantage that it tried to keep it a military secret for as long as possible.
[...]
Europeans seem to have come late to the wheelbarrow game but they vastly improved its capabilities by refining the design. References or depictions of wheelbarrows do not appear in Europe until the late 12th and early 13th centuries. But the European models were very different from the Chinese. They exploited the leverage principle to a much greater degree by simply moving the wheel to the front of the load and making it of smaller diameter. In addition, the European wheelbarrows had long handles, curved in various fashions to aid in lifting and balancing loads.

Get the Best Education in the World, Absolutely Free!

Bryan Caplan notes again that you can Get the Best Education in the World, Absolutely Free!:

The best education in the world is already free of charge. Just go to the best university in the world and start attending classes. Stay as long as you want, and study everything that interests you. No one will ever 'card' you. The only problem is that, no matter how much you learn, there won't be any record you were ever there.

Robin Hanson actually did just that:

As a researcher at NASA Ames Lab in the late 1980s, I found it easy to sit in on classes at nearby Stanford. I sat in on many classes in many departments, participating often in class discussions. I never applied for admission, or paid tuition, but no one ever complained. One professor even wrote me a letter of recommendation based on my work for his class.

So anyone can learn at the very best schools for free, if they are willing to forego the credential. This free ride would probably stop if more than a few people took advantage of it. But in fact almost no one is actually interested in just learning, without the credential.

As Caplan notes, "we have another deep puzzle that the signaling model of education can explain, and the human capital model can't."

How the Wii is creaming the competition

It's interesting to see a story like How the Wii is creaming the competition in a fairly mainstream business magazine (Business 2.0):

In addition to its standard TV campaigns targeting schoolkids, the company pumped 70 percent of its U.S. TV budget into programs aimed at 25-to 49-year-olds, says George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America.

He even put Wii ads into gray-haired publications like AARP and Reader's Digest. For Nintendo's core users, he took a novel, Web-based approach: "To reach the under-25 audience," he says, "we pushed our message through online and social-networking channels" including MySpace.

But Nintendo's most effective marketing trick was to give away its killer app, Wii Sports, with every $250 console. It was a calculated attempt to speed up the process that brought success to the DS. And because Nintendo makes about $50 in profit on every Wii sold, it can afford to give away a game.

Tim Ferriss

I'm trying to decide whether Tim Ferriss is my new hero or a shameless self-promoter — or both:

Serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond Timothy Ferriss has been featured by dozens of media, including The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, NBC, and MAXIM. He speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since 2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.
[...]
As a professional polymath, he has amassed a diverse roster of credentials and experience:

• Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering
• Cage fighter in Japan, vanquisher of four world champions (MMA)
• First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango (video)
• Advisor to more than 30 world record holders in professional and Olympic sports
• National Chinese kickboxing champion (video)
• Glycemic Index (GI) researcher
• Political asylum researcher and activist
• MTV breakdancer in Taiwan
• Hurling competitor in Ireland
• Actor on hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong

Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian Studies departments. He developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

His new book — pardon, magnum opus — The Four-Hour Work Week, argues that you can "outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants" and travel the world without quitting your job.

Shattering the Bell Curve

In Shattering the Bell Curve, David Shaywitz reviews Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan and notes that "the power law rules":

Mr. Taleb is fascinated by the rare but pivotal events that characterize life in the power-law world. He calls them Black Swans, after the philosopher Karl Popper's observation that only a single black swan is required to falsify the theory that "all swans are white" even when there are thousands of white swans in evidence. Provocatively, Mr. Taleb defines Black Swans as events (such as the rise of the Internet or the fall of LTCM) that are not only rare and consequential but also predictable only in retrospect. We never see them coming, but we have no trouble concocting post hoc explanations for why they should have been obvious. Surely, Mr. Taleb taunts, we won't get fooled again. But of course we will.

Writing in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne, Mr. Taleb divides the world into those who "get it" and everyone else, a world partitioned into heroes (Popper, Hayek, Yogi Berra), those on notice (Harold Bloom, necktie wearers, personal-finance advisers) and entities that are dead to him (the bell curve, newspapers, the Nobel Prize in Economics).

A humanist at heart, Mr. Taleb ponders not only the effect of Black Swans but also the reason we have so much trouble acknowledging their existence. And this is where he hits his stride. We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias (our tendency to reaffirm our beliefs rather than contradict them), narrative fallacy (our weakness for compelling stories), silent evidence (our failure to account for what we don't see), ludic fallacy (our willingness to oversimplify and take games or models too seriously), and epistemic arrogance (our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance).

Mac or Bonds: Who Roided It Up Better?

Mac or Bonds: Who Roided It Up Better? That's hard to say. Neither one resembles his rookie card — but I can't say I'd look like my rookie card either, if I had one.

Satire busts a hump

In Satire busts a hump, Patrick Goldstein praises Morissette's recent video:

Dressing herself Fergie-style, with baubles and bling, surrounded by black-clad male dancers, Morissette retained the original's visual sluttiness but replaced the Peas' thumping rhythm track with a pensive solo piano. By removing the intoxicating bass line and clearly enunciating the crass lyrics, she gave the song's sexpot swagger a new tone of sadness and desperation while simultaneously parodying her own artistic tendencies toward self-absorbed angst.

(I've blogged on the video before.)

Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business

I haven't been keeping up with The Onion, but this got a chuckle out of me — Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.

National Survey Reveals More than 70% of Americans Don't Know Plastic is Made from Oil

National Survey Reveals More than 70% of Americans Don't Know Plastic is Made from Oil:

• 72% of respondents do not know that plastic is made out of oil/petroleum
  
  
• On average, respondents estimated 38% of plastic is recycled (the reality is less than 6%, according to the EPA)
  
  
• Nearly 40% (38.1%) of respondents said plastic will biodegrade underground, in home compost, in landfills, or in the ocean (plastic will not biodegrade in any of these environments).

Senators Discuss Preventing College Attacks

Senators Discuss Preventing College Attacks — and psychologists present some hard-to-believe statistics:

Some of the most disturbing testimony came from Russ Federman, director of counseling and psychological services at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Federman ticked off statistics from a recent survey about the extent of mental health problems on campuses. He said that 94 percent of students reported feeling overwhelmed by all they have to do, and that nearly 50 percent reported having felt so depressed that it was difficult to function.

In the same survey, 9 percent of students reported seriously considering suicide and 1.3 percent actually attempted suicide. Colleges’ counseling centers are struggling to keep up, Dr. Federman said.

How Wal-Mart's TV Prices Crushed Rivals

How Wal-Mart's TV Prices Crushed Rivals:

Last "Black Friday," for its annual post-Thanksgiving sales blitz, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) decided to slash the price of one of the hottest electronics items for the holidays — the 42-inch flat-panel TV — to $988. The world's largest retailer had staked similarly audacious positions before, in numerous product categories, as part of its quest to remain U.S. retailing's "low-price leader." In turn, Wal-Mart's move caused a freefall in prices of flat-panel televisions at hundreds of retailers — to the glee of many people who were then able to afford their first big-screen plasma or liquid-crystal-display model.
[...]
The fallout is evident: After closing 70 stores in February, Circuit City Stores (CC) on Mar. 28 laid off 3,400 employees and put its 800 Canadian stores on the block. Tweeter Home Entertainment Group (TWTR), the high-end home entertainment store, is shuttering 49 of its 153 stores and dismissed 650 workers. Dallas-based CompUSA is closing 126 of its 229 stores, and regional retailer Rex Stores (RSC) is boarding up dozens of outlets, as well as selling 94 of its 211 stores. "The tube business and big-screen business just dropped off a cliff," says Stuart Rose, chief executive officer of Dayton-based Rex Stores. "We expected a dropoff, but nowhere near the decline that we had." Clearly, these retailers are taking such drastic measures because they don't see any respite in sight.

Interestingly, it wss Wal-Mart's small position in the flat-panel TV market that let it do so much damage without suffering much itself:

Despite its bold move last year, Wal-Mart currently is not the largest seller of flat-panel TVs. In fact, even though Wal-Mart set in motion the price drops, it has actually been a bit player in the high-definition TV segment. By most accounts, Wal-Mart had little to lose by dropping the price on the Panasonic TVs because it sold out its inventory nearly instantly.

When a firm has a near-monopoly on a market, it actually suffers disproportionately from lowering prices.

What Time is Dinner?

What Time is Dinner? Well, that has changed over the years:

The names of meals and their general times were once quite standard. Everyone in medieval England knew that you ate breakfast first thing in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day, and supper not long before you went to bed, around sundown. The modern confusion arose from changing social customs and classes, political and economic developments, and even from technological innovations.

Despite our stereotypes of big English breakfasts of sausages, kippers (sardines), toast, tomatoes, etc., big breakfasts weren't really common until the Victorian age. Breakfast before the 1800s was usually just toast or some variation of gruel or porridge, except when a lavish spread was offered to impress guests. The main meal of the day was dinner.

In the Middle Ages, great nobles ate the most formal dinner, around noon or one p.m. Their dinner was more than a meal; it was an ostentatious display, a statement of wealth and power, with dozens of servants attending in a ritualized performance. Cooking for this grand, daily show began hours in advance, and the preparations for presentation began at 10 or 11 a.m. The meal might take hours, and be eaten in the most formal and elaborately decorated chambers. Lesser nobles, knights and manor holders ate a far less formal dinner, but at the same time of day.

Middle-class tradesmen and merchants, however, had to eat a little later. Their day was bounded by work, not by feudal rituals. They couldn't leave their shops to see to their own dinners until clients and customers had gone off to their own. So merchants and traders would eat at one or two in the afternoon, and then hurry back to meet the afternoon customers. The middle-class dinner might be served by one or two servants and consisted of bread, soups, pies, and perhaps meats and fish. The dishes varied with the season, and from country to country.

Peasants broke off after six or seven hours of work in the morning to have dinner around noon. This was their main meal too, consisting of bread or porridge, peas or beans, perhaps with some cabbage, turnip or onions thrown in. Sometimes they had meat, fish, cheese or whey (a byproduct of cheese-making). Their meal was much like that of the middle class except there was usually less to eat, and little variety. They ate far more at dinner than at breakfast or supper.

Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin

I enjoyed reading Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin:

I was brought up in France, and although my grandfather died when I was very young, his work was always very much in evidence at home. My father, Christopher, the third of J.R.R. Tolkien's four children, according to his father's explicit wishes, has devoted himself to the publishing of my grandfather's massive archive of material ever since he began work on the "Silmarillion" papers in 1974. Ideally suited as he was through his 25 years of experience as a professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford, his work has always been that of the most rigorous editorial discipline. I have always been impressed by his ability to preserve his father's original writings as far as possible while applying the deft skill of an editor to make his volumes readable and not simply a catalogue of unpublished texts, something I was to learn first-hand when I undertook the daunting task of translating the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth for Christian Bourgois, the French Tolkien publisher. With these books, complete with Christopher's notes, as well as being able to discover some otherwise completely unknown tales, readers could begin to understand the way the author worked, and see how he would write and rewrite, often revisiting the same stories and passages after many years, keen to refine and improve his vast mythology, as well as to accommodate into his earlier writing the fruits of his later invention and to create a complete and seamless mythology, a saga spanning thousands of years.

Cro Cop toppled by Brazilian Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 70: Worlds Collide

I don't follow canada.com, but they have a remarkably non-sensational news story on the most recent UFC — Cro Cop toppled by Brazilian Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 70: Worlds Collide.

Nazi Manned Intercontinental Missile

Nazi super-weapons are endlessly fascinating. For instance, the Nazis had plans for a manned intercontinental missile. (The pilot would bail out before hitting the target. I suppose the Japanese would have skipped that last step.) Of course, in an era before atomic warheads, that's a lot of effort to go through to deliver one convential bomb.

Mursi Tribeswoman

Even in this day and age, the image of a Mursi Tribeswoman is still quite exotic — particularly with her AK-47 and iPod:

We'd been hearing for days about the Mursi tribe — the one where women split their lower lip and insert a round metal plate. As we were repeatedly told, the Mursi are neither fun nor friendly. And while they've kept their distance from the outside world — largely in part because their territory is a vast expanse of remote national park — they nevertheless have turned their small contact with foreigners into an art form of extortion. Pictures equal money. No exceptions.

Do schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson asks, Do schools kill creativity?:

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online.

Watch the video.

Report on Mesopotamia

A Report on Mesopotamia, by T.E. Lawrence — "Lawrence of Arabia" — was published in the Sunday Times, 22 August 1920:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.

Anybody planning a campaign in Iraq would — or should — have read Lawrence's classics on "his" WWI campaign and its aftermath.

'How we made the Chernobyl rain'

Russian military pilots explain 'How we made the Chernobyl rain':

Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would "wash out" radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities.

More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.

"The wind direction was moving from west to east and the radioactive clouds were threatening to reach the highly populated areas of Moscow, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl," he told Science of Superstorms, a BBC2 documentary to be broadcast today.

"If the rain had fallen on those cities it would've been a catastrophe for millions. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30km zone, but out to a distance of 50, 70 and even 100 km."

In the wake of the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, people in Belarus reported heavy, black-coloured rain around the city of Gomel. Shortly beforehand, aircraft had been spotted circling in the sky ejecting coloured material behind them.

Moscow has always denied that cloud seeding took place after the accident, but last year on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, Major Grushin was among those honoured for bravery. He claims he received the award for flying cloud seeding missions during the Chernobyl clean-up.

A second Soviet pilot, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to the programme makers that cloud seeding operations took place as early as two days after the explosion.

Alan Flowers, a British scientist who was one of the first Western scientists allowed into the area to examine the extent of radioactive fallout around Chernobyl, said that the population in Belarus was exposed to radiation doses 20 to 30 times higher than normal as a result of the rainfall, causing intense radiation poisoning in children.

Mr Flowers was expelled from Belarus in 2004 after claiming that Russia had seeded the clouds. He said: "The local population say there was no warning before these heavy rains and the radioactive fallout arrived."

Springtime for Taxes

John Stossel shares some tax facts in Springtime for Taxes:

Americans spent 6.4 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2005 — a chunk of time worth $265 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. That's more than the 2006 federal budget deficit.

Those of you who do your taxes yourselves spend an average of eight to 27 hours toiling for the U.S. government.

What a waste.

Other countries have made their citizens' lives better by simplifying and lowering taxes. Estonians need an average 10 to 15 minutes to file their income taxes. Most do it without leaving their desk: 84 percent file online.

Twelve years ago, Estonia became the first country to tax everyone — companies and individuals — at the same flat rate. It started at 26 percent, dropped to 22, and will go to 20 in 2009. There are a few deductions for things like mortgage interest, educational expenses, and charitable donations. Very low incomes are exempt.

Unsurprisingly, Estonia is booming. The former Soviet republic used to be poor, with an average income 65 percent below its European neighbors. Today, Estonians are almost as rich as their neighbors, and their economy is growing more than 11 percent a year.

Corporations like a tax system that is low and simple, too, and that leads them to do more business in flat-tax countries. American companies such as Microsoft, Colgate, 3M, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson opened businesses in Estonia after the flat tax was adopted. Twelve years ago, foreign investment in Estonia made up only 5 percent of GDP, but today, it's up to 20 percent. That means there's more money in the Estonian economy to tax. So while the tax rate dropped, government revenues actually increased.

So why can't we do that here?

Simple Approximations to a Fractal World

Matt McIntosh cites an insightful comment that moral rules are Simple Approximations to a Fractal World:

The picture that results is of a set of limits, or metaphorically speaking a set of fences that you are not to cross, not to trespass. It is not a set of valuations assigned to every possible thing you might do. . . . morality is a set of fences where, if you cross them, you will be violating morality and will be in the wrong, but if you do not cross them, then you are fine. . . .

This also explains why the rules are easy to understand and to state, and why they have exceptions. They’re easy to understand because they need to be easily knowable by everyone. Simple rules are like straight fences. Rules aren’t actually visible, they’re in the mind and not in the physical world as actual fences. And similarly, if you were constructing invisible fences, the best sort of fence you could construct would be a straight fence, because it’s a lot easier to guess where all the different parts of an invisible straight fence are than it is to guess where all the different parts of a crazy curvy fence.

Germs and the City

In Germs and the City, Peter W. Huber takes a long look at the history of public health and its shift toward "health care":

Public authorities are ponderous and slow; the new germs are nimble and fast. Drug regulators are paralyzed by the knowledge that error is politically lethal; the new germs make genetic error — constant mutation — the key to their survival. The new germs don’t have to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers.

(Emphasis mine.)

Read the whole article.

The Radical Incrementalist

Nick Gillespie of Reason interviews libertarianish political journalist Jonathan Rauch, The Radical Incrementalist:

I also believe, on the other hand, that stability and order are an important part of life and shouldn't be taken for granted. I fully understand the need for government to be around to do what it does. I'm also something of a Burkean, or a Hayekian. Which means I've come to have a lot of respect for institutions that have evolved in society over time. I'm well aware I may not understand why they do the things they do, and that if something's been around the way it has been for a long time, that doesn't make it immune to criticism. But I think it deserves at least a second or third look, so I'm no radical. I'm very anti-radical. It puts me in an odd position because I'm a big advocate of gay marriage, but I square that circle by saying the right way is to try it in a few states, to do it slowly. Remember, we're messing with an age-old institution. I'm very much in that square.

I'm a radical incrementalist. I believe in fomenting revolutionary change on a geological timescale. Life is long. We don't have to do everything right away. I'm a little bit of a fatalist about solving problems and reforming things for the sake of it. I think we have to be careful that a lot of reform is just movement.

(Emphasis mine.)

Carefully designed to make you look stupid

Seth Godin notes that the apostrophe was carefully designed to make you look stupid.

Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds

Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds:

Adding ethanol — the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits — boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.

Any colored fruit might be made even more healthful with the addition of a splash of alcohol, they report in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

Dr. Korakot Chanjirakul and colleagues at Kasetsart University in Thailand and scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture stumbled upon their finding unexpectedly.

They were exploring ways to help keep strawberries fresh during storage. Treating the berries with alcohol increased in antioxidant capacity and free radical scavenging activity, they found.

Why did the Virginia Tech massacre happen?

Why did the Virginia Tech massacre happen? I think cartoonist Scott Stantis understands better than most.

How many children should you have?

Tyler Cowen cites some recent research that answers the question, How many children should you have?:

In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers' happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter. The first child's sex doesn't matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don't add to parents' happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child — though still happier than women with no children.

The Patriarchy at Work

Alex Tabarrok cites Does Science Promote Women? Evidence from Academia 1973-2001 on The Patriarchy at Work:

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

(Alex's blog-mate, Tyler, commented on an earlier version of the paper.)

Matrimony Has Its Benefits, and Divorce Has a Lot to Do With That

Tyler Cowen summarizes Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, whose research says that Matrimony Has Its Benefits, and Divorce Has a Lot to Do With That:

In the United States, the availability of divorce has increased with unilateral divorce, which allows either member of the couple to dissolve the union. The change has been associated with lower rates of female suicide and domestic violence, and fewer wives murdered by their husbands. Unilateral divorce shifts the bargaining power to the person who is getting less out of the marriage and thus is most likely to leave. The partner getting more from the marriage has to work harder to keep the other person around, which can be good for the marriage and good for the couple. In other words, unilateral divorce benefits victims and potential victims.

When unilateral divorce was adopted, divorce rates rose sharply in the two years that followed, reflecting a pent-up demand for divorce. But after 10 years had passed, the divorce rate went back to normal or in some cases, compared with states without unilateral divorce, it had fallen further.

In fact, the divorce rate for married couples peaked in the United States in 1979, when it was 22.8 per thousand married couples per year. Since then it has continued to decline, reaching 16.7 divorces per thousand married couples in 2005.

In Praise of His Competition

Bryan Caplan, who has a new book out, speaks in praise of his competition, Steve Landsburg. Landsburg's new book bears the risqué-yet-Freakonomics-esque title, More Sex is Safer Sex, and its title essay demonstrates the power of model-building in an unusual problem domain:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of these monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramartial partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

Boxing's biggest fight

The BBC says that boxing's biggest fight is with mixed martial arts (MMA), better known as ultimate fighting:

Boxing legend Barry McGuigan called it "dirty" and "undignified", but statistics suggest it is safer than boxing.

Ultimate Fighting Championship is coming to Britain — and British boxing is rattled.

On Saturday, UFC lands at Manchester's MEN Arena, and 16,000 people, including Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Girls Aloud, will be there to welcome it.

Across the Atlantic, it's already big news. UFC, the leading brand within the sport of mixed martial arts, outsold boxing on the box twice over in 2006 and has just finalised a deal with HBO, the traditional home of boxing in America.

UFC champions Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell are household names, which is more than you can say for Floyd Mayweather, arguably boxing's biggest talent.

And it has even caught the imagination of the A-list, with a host of Hollywood stars — and Paris Hilton — regulars at UFC shows.

ThinkGeek Power Tie

When it comes back in stock, I may need the ThinkGeek Power Tie:

100% silk ties with repeating silk power symbols woven into the ties themselves. Background of tie is black with silver/gray power symbols. Note: power symbols are actually woven into the tie and not screen printed so they are extremely durable. ThinkGeek simultaneously does and does not condone the use of ties.

The Horrible Truth about Super-Science

David Weigel of Reason interviews Jackson Publick, real name Christopher McCulloch, co-creator of Venture Bros., on The Horrible Truth about Super-Science:

The basic idea of The Venture Brothers was taking the world of Jonny Quest and jumping back into 30 years later, seeing how someone who grew up like Jonny — with that kind of space race enthusiasm and disregard for other cultures — would turn out. Dr. Venture is a boy genius who didn't grow up to be what he should have been. Doc has really said it best: The beauty of failure is the beauty of human beings.

$78 million of red ink?

$78 million of red ink? That's how much money Sahara lost, according to some highly confidential documents that have come out:

• "Sahara," an action-adventure based on the bestselling novel by Clive Cussler, has lost about $105 million to date, according to a finance executive assigned to the movie. But records show the film losing $78.3 million based on Hollywood accounting methods that count projected revenue ($202.9 million in this case) over a 10-year period.


• About 1,000 cast and crew members worked on "Sahara." The highest-paid was McConaughey, who received an $8-million fee, or $615,385 for each week of filming, not including bonuses and other compensation. Cruz earned $1.6 million. Rainn Wilson, who since has raised his profile through roles in "Six Feet Under" and "The Office," was paid $45,000 for 10 weeks of work.


• "Courtesy payments," "gratuities" and "local bribes" totaling $237,386 were passed out on locations in Morocco to expedite filming. A $40,688 payment to stop a river improvement project and $23,250 for "Political/Mayoral support" may have run afoul of U.S. law, experts say.


• Ten screenwriters were paid $3.8 million in fees and bonuses — highlighting the increasingly common practice of hiring and firing numerous writers on big-budget features. David S. Ward, who won an Academy Award for "The Sting," received $500,000.


• The production firm owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz got $20.4 million in government incentives to film and edit parts of "Sahara" in Europe.


• Unlike most financial failures, "Sahara" performed reasonably well, ranking No. 1 after its opening weekend and generating $122 million in gross box-office sales. But the movie was saddled with exorbitant costs, including a $160-million production and $81.1 million in distribution expenses.

An interesting bit of legal trivia:

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. companies from paying any foreign official to secure an "improper advantage" or influence a decision. The act permits small "grease" or facilitation payments for routine services such as the provision of visas, licenses and permits.

The "local bribes" probably would fall under the "grease" exemption because of the routine nature of the payments, said Alexandra Wrage, president of TRACE, an anti-bribery business association in Annapolis, Md.

Appalachian School of Law shooting

The Appalachian School of Law shooting a few years back played out a bit differently from the Virginia Tech massacre:

On January 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, of Nigeria, who had recently flunked out of the Appalachian School of Law, arrived at the school. Odighizuwa first discussed his academic suspension with professor Dale Rubin, where it is reported that he told Rubin to pray for him. Odighizuwa then walked to the offices of Dean Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell, where Odighizuwa opened fire with a .380 ACP semi-automatic handgun. According to a county coroner, powder burns indicated that both people were shot at point blank range. Killed along with the two staff members was a student, Angela Denise Dales, age 33. Three other people were wounded.

When Odighizuwa exited the building where the shooting took place, he was approached by two students with personal firearms. At the first sound of gunfire, fellow students Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross (an off-duty police officer), unbeknownst to the other, had run to their vehicles to grab their personal firearms (with Bridges pulling his .357 Magnum pistol from beneath the driver's seat of his Chevy Tahoe). As Bridges later told the Richmond Times Dispatch, he was prepared to shoot to kill.

Bridges and Gross approached Odighizuwa from different angles, with Bridges yelling at Odighizuwa to drop his gun. Odighizuwa then dropped his firearm and was subdued by a third student, Ted Besen, who was unarmed. Once Odighizuwa was securely held down Gross went back to his vehicle and retrieved handcuffs to help hold Odighizuwa until police could arrive. Police reports noted there were two empty eight round magazines belonging to Odighizuwa’s handgun. It is unclear whether Odighizuwa ran out of ammunition or if there was still a round in the chamber at the time that he dropped his firearm.

Virginia Tech Killer's Violent Writings

If this one-act play is in fact one of the Virginia Tech Killer's Violent Writings, he was (a) troubled and (b) a terrible writer:

The college student responsible for yesterday's Virginia Tech slaughter was referred last year to counseling after professors became concerned about the violent nature of his writings, as evidenced in a one-act play obtained by The Smoking Gun. The play by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled "Richard McBeef," Cho's bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer's play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child's mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with "a deadly blow."

Addendum: AOLNews appears to have two of his plays — although it is hard to imagine that they were produced by a senior English major.

The Depressive and the Psychopath

A few years ago, five years after the Columbine killings, Dave Cullen described the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as The Depressive and the Psychopath.

I don't know how much those diagnoses explained, but Cullen made another important point — Harris and Klebold planned on killing many, many more people than they did, using explosives that didn't, in the end, go off:

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after — Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term — they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Feeling Safe

In Feeling Safe, Jesse Walker points out a grim irony by citing the Roanoke Times from January 31, 2006:

A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly....

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Charles Whitman and Future Shock

This past weekend, while chatting at a party, I happened to mention the famous case of the Austin sniper, Charles Whitman, and how, since he was shooting at folks in Texas in the 1960s, the Texans all went to their trucks and got their own rifles to shoot back. Don't mess with Texas!

The story's a bit deeper than that though, as Charles Whitman and Futureshock, 40 Years Later (which I cited last year) points out:

What struck me as most fascinating were the accounts from several sources of how the police dealt with the lack of covering fire that a SWAT team would provide today. They just went to citizens in the area and asked them to bring their rifles and shoot at the tower, and they all went to their pickups, got their deer rifles and did what they could to help. Their covering fire kept Whitman down and limited him to shooting through a drain opening, pretty much stopping the killing and giving officers the opportunity to get into the building. The officers also deputized one of the citizens to go with them into the tower to give them a bit more firepower, although he didn't end up facing Whitman.

What a different world. First, it was taken for granted that a bunch of people in the area would be carrying powerful rifles openly in their trucks in the middle of the state's capitol city. What's more, the police felt no hesitation in asking those citizens to help out in a dangerous situation and the citizens were eager to do their part. None of this was seen as out of the ordinary or unexpected at the time. Everyone had guns openly in public and they were willing to take responsibility and use them when asked. Perhaps most remarkably, the police saw armed citizens as an asset rather than as a threat.

(Emphasis mine.)

Naturally one has to wonder about the situation at Virginia Tech.

Ensuring that Victims are Unarmed

Before the recent Virginia Tech massacre, Art De Vany cited a John Lott piece arguing that gun-free zones ensure that victims are unarmed:

Gun free zones may be well intentioned, but good intentions that is not enough. It is an understandable desire to ban guns. After all, if you ban guns from an area, people can’t get shot, right? But time after time when these public shootings occur, they disproportionately take place in gun free zones.

It is the law-abiding good citizens who would only use a gun for protection who obey these bans. Violating a gun free zone at a place such as a public university may mean expulsion or firing and arrest, real penalties for law-abiding citizens. But for someone intent on killing others, adding on these penalties for violating a gun free zone means little to someone who, if still alive, faces life in prison.

Unfortunately, instead of gun free zones ensuring safety for victims, ensuring that the victims are unarmed only makes things safer for attackers.

Insult to Injury

Victor Davis Hanson calls this adding Insult to Injury:

The worst thing about the global oil spike brought on by increased consumption is not worries over global warming, or the idea that the United States is not “energy independent” (Japan does not overly worry that it must rely on others for food), but that our thirst has driven up the world price — and with it the importance of the Middle East while sending half-a-trillion dollars in petroprofits to a primordial region.

And now we are seeing the wages of that circulating cash, as the Gulf monarchies are racing to acquire nuclear reactors ($4 billion a pop) to counter Iran’s soon to be on-line nuclear arsenal.

In other words, a region that has neither the innate economic resources to fund such a program nor the scientific expertise to see it through nor the stability that is the precursor for economic development, has the cash from oil (that someone else found, exploited, and developed) to buy Western help in creating the very weapons that might soon be turned against the West.

Two Kinds of Judgement

Paul Graham says that there are Two Kinds of Judgement: the first kind, where judging you is the end goal, and the second kind, where judging you is only a means to something else.

As children, we tend to face the first — grades, competitions, etc. — much more than the second, so we're indignant when we're misjudged:

One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.

Humans are hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

Humans are hot, sweaty, natural-born runners:

Specifically, we developed long, springy tendons in our legs and feet that function like large elastics, storing energy and releasing it with each running stride, reducing the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There are also several adaptations to help keep our bodies stable as we run, such as the way we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, our large butt muscles that hold our upper bodies upright, and an elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady.

Even the human waist, thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly-off-center forces exerted as we stride with each leg.

Once humans start running, it only takes a bit more energy for us to run faster, Lieberman said. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a lot more energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances.

Though those adaptations make humans and our immediate ancestors better runners, it is our ability to run in the heat that Lieberman said may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game.

Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat.

“We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,” Lieberman said.

While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop.

All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.

Most animals would develop hyperthermia — heat stroke in humans — after about 10 to 15 kilometers, he said.

By the end of the process, Lieberman said, even humans with their crude early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. Adding credence to the theory, Lieberman said, is the fact that some aboriginal humans still practice persistence hunting today, and it remains an effective technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of meat.

Men work as much as women do

Men work as much as women do, according to a new study:

Throughout the world, men spend more time on market work, while women spend more time on homework. In the United States and other rich countries, men average 5.2 hours of market work a day and 2.7 hours of homework each day, while women average 3.4 hours of market work and 4.5 hours of homework per day. Adding these up, men work an average of 7.9 hours per day, while women work an average of — drum roll, please — 7.9 hours per day. [...] The averages sound low because they include weekends and are based on a sample of adults that included stay-at-home parents as well as working ones, and other adults.

Let's Abolish High School

Let's Abolish High School, Robert Epstein says:

The first compulsory education law in the United States wasn’t enacted until 1852. This Massachusetts law required that all young people between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school three months a year — unless, that is, they could demonstrate that they already knew the material; in other words, this law was competency-based. It took 15 years before any other states followed Massachusetts’ lead and 66 years before all states did. Along the way, some powerful segments of society staunchly opposed the mandatory education trend. In 1892, for example, the Democratic Party stated as part of its national platform, “We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children.”

Restrictions on work by young people also took hold very gradually. In fact, the earliest “child labor” laws in the United States actually required young people to work. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that laws restricting the work opportunities of young people began to take hold. Those laws, too, were fiercely opposed, and in fact the first federal laws restricting youth labor — enacted in 1916, 1918, and 1933 — were all swiftly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. After all, young people had worked side by side with adults throughout history, and they still helped support their families and their communities in countries around the world; the idea that there should be limits on youth labor, or that young people shouldn’t be allowed to do any work, seemed outrageous to many people.

Eventually, multiple forces — the desire to “Americanize” the tens of millions of immigrants streaming into the United States to get jobs in the land of opportunity, the effort to rescue millions of young laborers from horrendous working conditions in the factories and mines, the extreme determination of America’s growing labor unions to protect adult jobs, and, most especially, the extremely high unemployment rate (27 percent or so) during the Great Depression — created the systems we have today: laws severely restricting or prohibiting youth labor, and school systems modeled after the new factories, established to teach “industrial discipline” to young people and to homogenize their knowledge and thinking.
[...]
Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history. This trend is continuing. Just last year, Reg Weaver, the second-term president of the National Education Association, while lamenting the fact that 30 percent or more of our young people never complete high school, called for extending the minimum age of school leaving to 21. When adults see young people misbehaving or underperforming, they often respond by infantilizing young people even more, and the new restrictions often cause even more distress among our young.

Are the rich really different?

Are the rich really different? explains some of the reasons why CEO pay is so much higher than it used to be:

But in fact, the tax rates of the 1950's didn't necessarily reduce CEO consumption; it just reduced their reported taxable income. The high income tax rates in the 1950's were paired with a corporate tax system that allowed companies much more generous deductions for things like business lunches, business-travel-with-spouse, and so forth. Right now you pay Rick Wagoner a squillion dollars, and he entertains important people on his own dime; in 1955, you paid him less, but he expensed all his entertaining to the company. Descriptions of 1960's expense account procedures for even entry-level management are enough to make this journalist rather faint with envy.

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?

Duncan Watts asks, Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?:

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

He tested this online:

In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab, and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.
[...]
In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

Christina Ricci gears up for "Speed Racer"

Christina Ricci gears up for "Speed Racer":

Christina Ricci is joining Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski's live-action adaptation of the 1960s cartoon Speed Racer.

Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman already have boarded the high-octane Warner Bros. project, which is based on the anime series created by Tatsuo Yoshida for Japanese audiences and later imported to the U.S.

Black-footed Ferrets

Black-footed Ferrets were thought to be extinct, but they're making a comeback:

Bert, a male black-footed ferret peers out from a burrow in a cage at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Wellington, Colorado April 11, 2007. By 1980 it was believed that the black-footed ferret was extinct when a group of only 18 was discovered in Wyoming. With breeding taking place at the Conservation Center, the wild population is now around 500.

Crocodile Food

Look carefully at the crocodile's mouth:

A crocodile at a zoo in the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung holds the forearm of a zoo veterinarian in between its teeth, April 11, 2007. The crocodile bit off the arm of the zoo veterinarian treating it, an official reported.

'Rebuilt' immune system shakes off diabetes

'Rebuilt' immune system shakes off diabetes:

Julio Voltarelli, at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and colleagues recruited 15 people aged 14 to 31 years who had recently been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Roughly 60% to 80% of these patients' insulin-producing cells had been destroyed by the time of their diagnosis, and all needed regular insulin shots.

The researchers removed bone marrow stem cells from the patients, who were then given drugs such as cytotoxan to wipe out their immune cells. Without an immune system, the patients were vulnerable to infection and so they were given antibiotics and kept in an isolation ward. They participants did not undergo radiation treatment – as leukaemia patients often do as part of a bone marrow transplant – and so had fewer side effects and less risk of organ damage.

Two weeks later, the patients received infusions of their own stem cells into their bloodstream via the jugular vein, which re-established their immune systems.

Throughout this time and following the stem cell transplant, the research team continued taking blood samples to assess how much insulin each patient required.

Of the 15 patients, 12 no longer needed insulin shots within a few days of undergoing the procedure. One patient from the group had a relapse and needed to take insulin for one year, before becoming insulin-independent again – and has remained this way for 5 months.

Of the remaining two participants, one stopped needing insulin shots for one year after the transplant but has spent the past two months back on the shots, and the final participant's diabetes did not respond to the stem cell treatment.

Those who responded to the treatment have not needed insulin shots – so far, for an average 18 months – and had not relapsed at the time of study publication. One patient had gone as long as 35 months without needing insulin therapy. "It may be that they become insulin-free for life. We don't know," says Voltarelli.

And that's renaissance magic ...

And that's renaissance magic ... describes the first known book of magic tricks:

After lying almost untouched in the vaults of an Italian university for 500 years, a book on the magic arts written by Leonardo da Vinci's best friend and teacher has been translated into English for the first time.

The world's oldest magic text, De viribus quantitatis (On The Powers Of Numbers) was penned by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk who shared lodgings with Da Vinci and is believed to have helped the artist with The Last Supper.

It was written in Italian by Pacioli between 1496 and 1508 and contains the first ever reference to card tricks as well as guidance on how to juggle, eat fire and make coins dance. It is also the first work to note that Da Vinci was left-handed.
[...]
Pacioli was born in Tuscany in 1445 and was a travelling mathematics tutor. He is often called the father of modern accountancy because his book The Summa (1494) contains the first published description of double-entry bookkeeping, accountancy's basic technique.

He lived with Da Vinci in Milan from 1496 for several years and taught maths and geometry to the painter, scientist and inventor. They collaborated on many projects including a book, De Divina Proportione (1509), which Da Vinci also illustrated.

De viribus quantitatis is divided into three sections: mathematical problems, puzzles and tricks, and a collection of proverbs and verses.

The Creation of the Hedge Fund

The Creation of the Hedge Fund may surprise you:

Near the end of the Depression, a 38-year-old sociology graduate student trudged off to Akron, Ohio, to research his dissertation on industrial relations. Nobody could have predicted what would transpire over the next decade. Alfred Winslow Jones turned his dissertation into a book, which turned into a story for Fortune, which turned into a job at the magazine, which was his initiation into the world of business and led to the founding of the world’s first hedge fund in 1949. Yes, the low-rent precincts of sociology, the Rust Belt, and journalism all played a part in creating the financial rocket ship of our times.

The term that Jones used was “hedged fund.” It promised the Shangri-la of investment strategies: profit without risk. Using a metric he called “velocity” — a precursor to what is now called beta, the measure of how closely a stock’s movement tracks the broader market — he split his holdings into two groups: good stocks that rose faster than the market in good times and fell slower than the market in bad times, and bad stocks that did the opposite. He took long positions in the former and short positions in the latter, theoretically ensuring that he’d make money whether the market went up or down.

Elegant as it was, it’s a difficult strategy to sustain. Who likes driving with one foot on the brake? When the market is humming and every jackass is cleaning up, it takes discipline to stay hedged and make less. But except for the occasional lapse, Jones apparently had it, eking out a dependable margin that, amplified with borrowed money, produced superior returns. His system demanded humility — it meant admitting that he couldn’t outsmart the market.

The global glass ceiling

The global glass ceiling varies from country to country, with 50 percent of senior management roles occupied by women in the Philippines, down to about 6 percent in Japan.

How To Not Catch Terrorists

Bruce Schneier describes data mining as How To Not Catch Terrorists:

Used properly, data mining is a great tool. As a result of data mining, AT&T reduces the costs of cell phone fraud, Amazon.com shows me books I might want to buy, and Google shows me advertising I’m more likely to be interested in. But it only works when there’s (1) a reasonable percentage of attacks per year, (2) a well-defined profile to search for, and (3) and a low cost of false alarms.

None of those criteria are true for terrorism.

Culture Flows Through English Channels

Culture Flows Through English Channels, according to Rüdiger Wischenbart:

Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we'd be talking about the kind of world where you can't fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. "In 2005," Wischenbart reported, "a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals.... Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance.... Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between."

Just How Smart Are Ravens?

Just How Smart Are Ravens? Really, really smart:

The first experiment consisted of food hanging from a string below the bottom of the wire cage (pictured right, bigger). To get this treat, the bird had to reach down from a perch and grasp the string in its beak, pull up on the string, place the loop of string on the perch, step on this looped segment of string to prevent it from slipping down, then let go of the string and reach down again and repeat its actions until the morsel of food was within reach.

They found that some adult birds would examine the situation for several minutes and then perform this multistep procedure in as little as 30 seconds without any trial and error — as if they knew exactly what they were doing. Because there was no opportunity for the birds to be confronted with a similar problem in the wild, the simplest explanation is that they were able to imagine the possibilities and to perform the appropriate behaviors. The authors also found that successfully performing this behavior required maturity: immature birds were unable to do it while year-old birds performed a variety of trials before they were able to succeed.

They can't figure out a pulley though, where pulling down brings the food up. Read the whole article.

72-Hour Party People

72-Hour Party People argues that meth is "not just for the white-trash crowd" anymore:

It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon, with clawed feet, a mane of fire and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk. Transparent, the size of a child's fist, it looks like a tiny ice carving or a statuette of glass. It is neither. In fact, it is 25 grams (a little less than one ounce) of nearly 100 percent pure crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride, known on the streets of Asia as "Shabu." It was almost certainly manufactured in a clandestine laboratory in China, then shipped to the Philippines and on to Hawaii, and finally to Denver. Here it was purchased on the black market for $5,500 — nearly five times the street value of an equivalent amount of cocaine and ten times that of low-grade, powdered crystal meth.

It almost seems glamorous — until you read on and see what a 72-hour party really looks like.

Red River

Aside from sharing some of the same stars, Howard Hawks' Red River bears little resemblance to his later Rio Bravo — which I discussed recently — except that politics were almost an issue even in this earlier film:

There was some concern that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift would not get along since they were diametrically opposed on most political issues, and both were outspoken on their views. According to legend they agreed not to discuss politics and the shooting went smoothly.

An amusing bit of trivia:

Texas Longhorn cattle had been nearly extinct as a breed for about 50 years when this film was made. Only a few dozen animals were available. In the herd scenes most of the cattle are Hereford crosses with the precious Longhorns prominently placed in crucial scenes.

Another bit of trivia:

Filmed in 1946 but held for release for two years, in part due to legal problems with Howard Hughes, who claimed it was similar to his The Outlaw (1943).

Formula for Panic: Crowd-motion findings may prevent stampedes

Formula for Panic: Crowd-motion findings may prevent stampedes discusses what physicists found when they studied human crowd dynamics:

In normal conditions, pedestrians tend to spontaneously fall into ordered patterns, such as lanes going in opposite directions, previous research had shown. As crowds get denser, stop-and-go patterns begin to propagate in waves, as is typical for cars on heavily trafficked highways. But in critical situations — as when cars get into gridlock — people can break out in panics that result in random patterns of motion, similar to the turbulence of water in the wake of a boat. Crowd members can get squeezed and asphyxiated or fall and be trampled.

The maverick theory that might explain life

Some call "metabolic ecology" the maverick theory that might explain life:

Big animals have relatively slower metabolic rates — this is why a shrew must eat more than its body weight each day to survive, but an elephant eats only one-50th of its bulk per day. The net result is that both species share the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime.

This remarkable phenomenon can be expressed mathematically as a scaling law, which states that the metabolic rate of a species is proportional to its mass raised to the power of three-quarters.

This formula holds true for almost every living organism. From whales to trees, the relationship is the same — but no-one understood why.

Then, in 1997, Geoffrey West, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, working with ecologists Jim Brown and Brian Enquist, published a theory. They argued that the scaling is the result of the fractal-like structure of the network of blood vessels that supply nutrients to the cells in an animal's body. A similar fractal geometry can be seen in plant veins.

West, Brown and Enquist believe that metabolic rate is the conductor of life's orchestra, setting the tempo for a host of other processes. Understand it, and we can predict many other things about a creature — how quickly it will grow and how many offspring it will have. They argue that their theory can predict the properties of large-scale ecological networks, such as forests.

Microsoft is Dead

Paul Graham notes that Microsoft is Dead, but he can't help but think about what it could do to come back:

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers — dangerously brilliant hackers — can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:

1. Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.


2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Dolphins killer sonar confirmed

Dolphins killer sonar confirmed acoustically and visually on videotape:

Marten had noticed before that dolphins close to herring would emit low bangs at the frequency the fish hear best at, and had suggested the bangs were designed to damage the fish's hearing apparatus. He has now taped a dolphin emitting a sequence of low- frequency "bangs" while chasing a fish.

In a further experiment, Marten showed that low sounds with similar acoustic properties to dolphins' clicks disorientated anchovies to the point where they swam in circles, remained still or died. "It could also mess up their schooling," he says.

Meanwhile, Herzing has found evidence of a different strategy. She recorded wild Atlantic spotted dolphins emitting a medium-frequency buzz while searching for prey in sand on the seabed. She says buried eels jumped out of the sand, and either stopped completely or moved sluggishly as if they were stunned, giving the dolphin time to catch them.

Mediterranean diet wards off allergies

Mediterranean diet wards off allergies:

Dr. Paul Cullinan of Britain's Royal Brompton Hospital and National Heart and Lung Institute, and colleagues in Greece and Spain, studied 690 children aged 7 to 18.

Children who ate the most fresh fruits and nuts were the least likely to suffer from breathing allergies, and those who ate the most margarine were the most likely to, they found.

Knut Rock Me

Douglas Kern pokes sarcastic fun at German animal rights "spokeskiller" Frank Albrecht in Knut Rock Me:

Don't take it from me. Look at the pictures. Read the story. The Germans have precision-engineered Knut to win your heart with a kind of cuteness whose intensity borders on the ruthless. Behold: Knut, playing with a ball. Knut, rasslin' with his blankie. Knut, waving to his adoring fans. He sleeps every night with a teddy bear. The zookeepers play guitar for him. Show me the man who can reject such sweetness, and I'll show you German animal rights spokeskiller Frank Albrecht, the Grim Reaper of Lovable Animals. "The zoo must kill the bear," said Captain Killjoy. "Feeding by hand is not species appropriate, blah blah blah kill the cute bear, blah blah blah goofy animal rights reasons, blah blah blah I hate everything good and pure." I paraphrase, but only a little. In fairness, Albrecht has clarified his homicidal rant, claiming that he only wanted to see the little fellow croaked when he was tiny and especially helpless. "'If a polar bear mother rejected the baby, then I believe the zoo must follow the instincts of nature,' Albrecht said. 'In the wild, it would have been left to die.'" Thanks for the explanation, Angel of Baby Polar Bear Death. Can't we just buy some dead baby polar bear offsets instead?

Then he gets to his real point:

Don't think for a minute that the sheer perversion of killing a sweet cuddly baby polar bear is incidental to the goals of Frank Albrecht and those of his ilk. The sheer perversion is the point. For example: have you ever noticed how the global warming aficionados almost seem to relish the prospect of massive economic rollback and worldwide belt-tightening? Al Gore and his minions aren't interested in arguments that global warming might make people healthier and richer on balance; neither do they care about proposals to reverse global warming through relatively simple attempts at global weather engineering (e.g., lacing the world's oceans with iron to stimulate plankton production, thereby changing the atmospheric CO2 balance). To make such arguments is to misunderstand why global warming alarmism is so popular. Its adherents embrace it because they savor the doom that it portends. They want a massive shrinkage of the world's economies. They want reduced industrial development. They want a world made spiritually pure, liberated from the defilement of modern life. And in the same way, radical greens want little Knut sacrificed on the altar of a fictitious, pristine nature. They want these things because some neglected part of the human heart yearns for sacrifice; for a rejection of worldly goods and concerns in pursuit of higher goals.

Berlin Zoo stock rises 94% on appeal of polar bear cub

This is so obvious in retrospect — Berlin Zoo stock rises 94% on appeal of polar bear cub:

Shares of the operator of the Berlin Zoo climbed 94 percent this week as investors bet that "Knut," the name of a baby polar bear rejected by his mother, would become a brand name like Paddington Bear or Winnie the Pooh.
[...]
"With a professional brand management, Knut's brand value would certainly amount to €10 million," or $13 million, said Björn Sander, a partner at BBDO Consulting in Düsseldorf.

On the other hand...

Shares of Zoologischer Garten Berlin, a nonprofit entity that does not pay dividends to shareholders, added 33 percent to close at €4,660 in Berlin Tuesday. The stock, which rarely trades, has rallied 112 percent this year. Volume is not huge: Only eight shares changed hands Tuesday.

Algorithmic Trading

The latest Dr. Dobb's looks at Algorithmic Trading — but it doesn't present a very sophisticated picture of what's being done out there.

Air taxis: Changing the way we fly

Air taxis: Changing the way we fly looks at how "two aging computer geeks are setting out to reinvent business travel" via DayJet, an airline of tiny Eclipse 500 jets — which only hold five people, two pilots and three passengers — offering short flights in Florida:

Florida is an ideal testing ground for this type of service because of its good flying weather, the density and high income of its population, and the miserable commercial air routes within the state.

This can only work with some amazing Operations Research:

How much a DayJet flight costs will depend on how flexible a traveler's schedule is. The price of each flight will range from $1 to $3 per mile. A 329-mile, one-hour flight between Boca Raton and Tallahassee, for example, will cost nearly $1,000 each way if the traveler can't give DayJet more than a 75-minute window to work with.

But if the customer agrees to fly anytime between, say, 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. — a six-hour window — the flight might cost only $329 each way. The wider the window, the more options DayJet has to meet the reservation.

Behind this reservation system is really complicated mathematics. It's basically a resource-allocation problem. Given a certain number of planes, routes, and existing reservations, what is the optimal way to reconfigure DayJet's network of air taxis to accommodate each new reservation request?

"We'll have to evaluate billions of options and come back to you with a yes or no answer in five seconds," Iacobucci says. Even a supercomputer would have trouble doing that.

Instead of a supercomputer, Iacobucci has two Russian mathematicians, Eugene Taits and Alex Khmelnitsky, stashed in a windowless room down the hall working on an algorithm they believe will solve the problem. At DayJet, everyone calls them the rocket scientists. Their algorithm quickly creates a best guess as to whether DayJet can meet a request and at what cost. As long as it comes up with an acceptable answer, it can offer a quote.

From the time a quote is given until just before the flight plans need to be filed, DayJet's system can keep trying to come up with an even better answer that lowers the total cost of the air-taxi network. On rare occasions, that might mean three different planes taking three passengers to the same place, if that's more efficient for the overall network.

To test this algorithm, Iacobucci is working with some operations research scientists at Georgia Tech who do have access to a supercomputer. It takes them 24 hours to come up with the same answers DayJet's optimization algorithm comes up with in a few seconds.

In another office farther down the hall (these have windows), Iacobucci keeps his ant farmers. They are complexity scientists, originally from the Santa Fe Institute, who have created a massive simulation of the entire U.S. transportation system. They've mapped travel patterns into 10-square-mile blocks, complete with income levels, demographics, historical driving patterns, airport drive times, and airline schedules and fares.

"It's like Sim City on steroids," Iacobucci says. After calibrating the simulation to match current travel behavior, the ant farmers introduce DayJet service in different cities and see how the simulated people react. That's how the DayPorts are selected.

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

Paul Graham explains Why to Not Not Start a Startup:

We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can't talk about yet. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to.

So about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least by their standards. (One thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many degrees of it.)

I'm not ready to predict our success rate will stay as high as 50%. That first batch could have been an anomaly. But we should be able to do better than the oft-quoted (and probably made up) standard figure of 10%. I'd feel safe aiming at 25%.

Even the founders who fail don't seem to have such a bad time. Of those first eight startups, three are now probably dead. In two cases the founders just went on to do other things at the end of the summer. I don't think they were traumatized by the experience. The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept working on their startup for a whole year before being squashed by Google Calendar. But they ended up happy. They sold their software on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars. After they paid back their angel investors, they had about a year's salary each. [1] Then they immediately went on to start a new and much more exciting startup, Justin.TV.

A History of Violence

Steven Pinker opens A History of Violence with an evocative example of how things have changed over the years:

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

(Emphasis mine.) For example:

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts — such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men — suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

He notes two important books on violence:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). "And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This pithy description of life in a state of nature is just one example of the lively prose in this seventeenth-century masterpiece. Hobbes's analysis of the roots and varieties of violence is uncannily modern, and anticipated many insights from game theory and evolutionary psychology. He also was the first cognitive scientist, outlining a computational theory of memory, imagination, and reasoning.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (1988). This is the book that sold me on evolutionary psychology. Daly and Wilson use homicide statistics as an assay for human conflict, together with vivid accounts from history, journalism, and anthropology. They select each of the pairings of killer and victim — fratricide, filicide, parricide, infanticide, uxoricide, stepparent-stepchild, acquaintances, feuds & duels, amok killers, and so on — and test predictions from evolutionary theory on their rates and patterns. The book is endlessly insightful and beautifully written.

The Upside of Color Blindness

Discover magazine notes The Upside of Color Blindness:

Observations of capuchins foraging for surface-dwelling insects showed that color-blind capuchins made nearly 20 insect-capture attempts per hour, compared with only about 16 for those with normal color vision.

One possible explanation for the color-blind advantage is that a reduction in color signals makes the differences in texture and brightness more apparent, so it’s easier to see past color camouflage, says Melin.

The image is of earth, with red-green color-blindness and without.

Defeating Malaria with both High- and Low-Tech

Defeating Malaria with both High- and Low-Tech opens with a high-tech solution:

The worst mosquito-borne disease, malaria, infects about 400 million people worldwide each year (90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa) and kills about 1.3 million of them.

So it's great that scientists at the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have genetically built a better mosquito, which is to say that it still bites and leaves an itchy welt but cannot spread malaria. The idea is that large numbers of engineered mosquitoes would be released in malaria-ridden areas so they could interbreed with wild ones. Over time more and more of the mosquito population would carry the new trait.

This is not a new concept. Various types of harmful male insects are irradiated to make them sterile, and then released to interbreed with fertile bugs and thereby reduce the overall population. The problem with sterilization, though, is that it often weakens the insect and gives fertile wild competitors the advantage in breeding.

But these biotech mosquitoes actually have a breeding advantage. Mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, don't die from it but are weakened. The engineered ones, being immune, can drink their natural cousins under the table. "When fed on Plasmodium-infected blood, the transgenic malaria-resistant mosquitoes had a significant fitness advantage over wild-type," the researchers remarked in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alanis Morissette "My Humps"

It turns out that the best way to mock Fergie's — actually Black-Eyed Peas' — vapid-yet-popular My Humps is to sing it oh-so-earnestly.

Please enjoy Alanis Morissette's take on "My Humps"...

Lost in translation

When I returned from Tokyo, I described it as "New York, but clean, with more neon, and full of polite people." Evidently I'm not alone in that assessment. From Lost in translation:

Ask the average Westerner to tell you what they know about Tokyo, and it's a pretty safe bet you will get a sentence or two about the "New York of Asia"; streets full of neon signs but no graffiti or litter; the trains running on time and a crime rate so low as to be almost invisible. And that most men go out most nights and get drunk.

I guess I'm a fairly average Westerner.

This sounds very ... 1980s to me:

To understand the duality of Japanese society — the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment — it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.

Steven Pressfield Recommends

Steven Pressfield recommends a number of fine books — on Sparta, on Alexander the Great, and on a number of other classical topics — and points out a piece of movie trivia I should have known:

Hollywood's The Warriors, about a street gang from Brooklyn, was cleverly knocked off from [Xenophon's The Persian Expedition or Anabasis].

Brad Bird Podcast Interview

I love this snippet from a Brad Bird Podcast Interview on the future of animation, both traditional hand-drawn 2D and modern CGI 3D:

Do you think 2D has to change in order to be successful again?

Yeah, I think they have to tell good stories. I think that’s a radical change.

Ten of the best April Fool's Day hoaxes

Ten of the best April Fool's Day hoaxes:

• In 1957, a BBC television show announced that thanks to a mild winter and the virtual elimination of the spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Footage of Swiss farmers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees prompted a barrage of calls from people wanting to know how to grow their own spaghetti at home.


• In 1985, Sports Illustrated magazine published a story that a rookie baseball pitcher who could reportedly throw a ball at 270 kilometers per hour (168 miles per hour) was set to join the New York Mets. Finch was said to have mastered his skill — pitching significantly faster than anyone else has ever managed — in a Tibetan monastery. Mets fans' celebrations were short-lived.


• Sweden in 1962 had only one television channel, which broadcast in black and white. The station's technical expert appeared on the news to announce that thanks to a newly developed technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to receive color pictures by pulling a nylon stocking over the screen. In fact, they had to wait until 1970.


• In 1996, American fast-food chain Taco Bell announced that it had bought Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, a historic symbol of American independence, from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.
  
  Outraged citizens called to express their anger before Taco Bell revealed the hoax. Then-White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale and said the Lincoln Memorial in Washington had also been sold and was to be renamed the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial after the automotive giant.


• In 1977, British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement for the 10th anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semicolon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of the two main islands, named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse.


• In 1992, US National Public Radio announced that Richard Nixon was running for president again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." They even had clips of Nixon announcing his candidacy. Listeners flooded the show with calls expressing their outrage. Nixon's voice actually turned out to be that of impersonator Rich Little.


• In 1998, a newsletter titled New Mexicans for Science and Reason carried an article that the state of Alabama had voted to change the value of pi from 3.14159 to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.


• Burger King, another American fast-food chain, published a full-page advertisement in USA Today in 1998 announcing the introduction of the "Left-Handed Whopper," specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new burger included the same ingredients as the original, but the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. The chain said it received thousands of requests for the new burger, as well as orders for the original "right-handed" version.


• Discover Magazine announced in 1995 that a highly respected biologist, Aprile Pazzo (Italian for April Fool), had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. The creatures were described as having bony plates on their heads that became burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speed — a technique they used to hunt penguins.


• Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth's gravity. Moore told listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment of the planetary alignment, they would experience a floating sensation. Hundreds of people called in to report feeling the sensation.