Bees Overseas

In Bees Overseas, Michael Tsai notes that "Spelling bees are a particularly British and American phenomenon":

The orthography of some Romance languages, like Spanish, is so regular that one can easily figure out the spelling of a word just by hearing the way it sounds. English, on the other hand, contains Latin, Greek, Germanic, and other roots, not to mention whole words borrowed from other languages. That's why an American schoolchild might get stuck with tricky words like ursprache and appoggiatura.

In French-speaking nations, they test grammar. In China, they have dictionary contests:

Chinese kids join dictionary contests, where they look up words as fast as they can. Unlike English, you can't completely decipher a Chinese character's pronunciation just by looking at it, and characters can have many components. Thus there are several ways to find words in dictionaries. Students can look for the character's radical, or semantic, root and search by the number of strokes in the character. If they know what the word sounds like, they can choose instead to look up the pinyin, or Romanized version, of the character. A third way involves a sort of Dewey Decimal System of words: By examining the strokes in the four "corners" of the character, expressing each corner as a number (a square is a six, for example), they can then use the resulting four-digit code to find a word in a special dictionary.

The Rush To Test Drugs In China

The Rush To Test Drugs In China is in full swing — a peculiar form of labor arbitrage, n'est-ce pas?:

China's immense patient populations suffering from cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses, and a whole range of infectious diseases have captured the attention of drug and medical device companies across Europe and America. They are expanding research and testing facilities in China, not only because costs are low and it is relatively easy to recruit patients, but also because Beijing insists new drugs be tested locally before going on sale.

Many Western drug companies have had research bases in China since the 1990s. But the past 12 months have seen a flurry of new activity. In May of last year, AstraZeneca PLC committed $100 million in new research spending, much of it earmarked for cancer. In November, Novartis announced plans for a $100 million research and development center in Shanghai. And Eli Lilly & Co. has 35 trials under way involving thousands of patients. The company will enroll twice as many patients this year as in 2006—some in trials that would be hard to fill in the U.S., says Dr. Steven M. Paul, Lilly's executive vice-president for science and technology. "We can do these very safely and quickly in China."

Trials run by western companies bring big benefits to China. Patients gain access to "cutting-edge medical products," says Beat Widler, head of clinical quality at Swiss pharma giant Roche, which invested more than $50 million on its Chinese operations last year. At the same time, he adds, Chinese doctors, nurses, and research staff "improve their understanding of trial methodology."

Yet working inside China's sprawling, often under-supervised health-care system may raise complex ethical questions. In the past, Chinese medical authorities have greenlighted risky experiments, including stem cell injections and treatments that involve altering the patient's genes. Moreover, people recruited into trials don't always understand what they have signed up for, but they rush to join because it may be their only chance to see a doctor.

Spain: Immigrants Welcome

Spains says, Immigrants Welcome:

Over the past decade, the traditionally homogeneous country has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11% of the country's 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. With hundreds of thousands more arriving each year, Spain could soon reach the U.S. rate of 12.9%.

And it doesn't seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe's best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years. Since 2002, the country has created half the new jobs in the euro zone. Unemployment has plummeted from more than 20% in the 1990s to 8.6%, within shooting distance of the 7.2% euro zone average. The government attributes more than half this stellar performance to immigration. "We are very thankful for all these people who have come here to work with us," says Javier Vallés, economic policy chief for Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero.
[...]
For now, Spain is keeping the welcome mat out. Besides providing muscle for construction, immigrants care for children and the elderly, allowing more Spanish women to take jobs outside the home. They do backbreaking agricultural labor and take minimum-wage positions in restaurants and hotels. "Spanish workers don't want these jobs," says Marta Martín, who has recruited immigrant employees for the Madrid-based hotel chain NH Hoteles. And the government says immigrants' tax and social security contributions exceed by more than 20% the cost of public services they use.
[...]
To fill jobs, Spain looked abroad. Immigration rose from 57,000 in 1998 to more than 600,000 for each of the past two years. The biggest influx, about 800,000 since the mid-1990s, came from Ecuador, followed by Morocco and Romania. Spain, unlike France and Germany, places no restrictions on immigration from the EU's new members in the old Soviet Bloc. Many from other countries arrived under the radar: An estimated 25% to 35% of the current immigrant population is illegal. But Spain has been generous with amnesty, granting legal status since 2000 to more than 1 million who could prove that they were employed.

[Insert your own Mexican immigration joke here.]

At Hyundai, Branding Is Job 2

At Hyundai, Branding Is Job 2 — because they've already got the quality, but nobody knows or cares:

The South Korean auto maker is desperate to convince consumers that its cars and SUVs are worth premium prices. Its impatience to see results is understandable. Hyundai's quality is actually ahead of Toyota's in J.D. Power's Initial Quality Study, and behind only Lexus and Porsche. Consumer Reports just tapped two of Hyundai's new vehicles as "Most Impressive" among five 2007 models it recently singled out. But only 23% of all new-car buyers last year even bothered to consider a Hyundai. That compares with 65% for Toyota Motor Co. and more than 50% for Honda Motor Co.

It sounds like Samsung vs. Sony a few years back.

Bigger than Hogzilla

I recently noted that an 11-year-old boy, Jamison Stone, killed a half-ton feral pig, with a pistol. (The boy had the pistol. The pig was unarmed.)

My advice then was simple:

If you have to shoot the beast eight times and chase it for three hours, might I suggest using the high-power hunting rifles you brought along? For the pig's sake.

I don't know if you'd call that a negative comment, but Jamison and his father now have a website up, called Bigger than Hogzilla, and they're posting all kinds of wild-eyed negative comments they've been sent. For example:

Just a quick question, You attend a Christian college and yet kill so freely. Does not the Old Testament say ‘do unto others’ I have To ask the question, if said boar ran for 3 hours, Would it be ‘do unto others BEFORE ‘or ‘AS they would unto you?’ To experience the kill is exhilarating ( I know from hunting boars in Australia myself ) But, is it worth the moment to take a life as it is to spend an eternityin damnation for breaking one of the original commandments “thou shall not kill”. I have accepted my eternity, have you?

I think the Old Testament voices more concern about eating a pig than killing one.

Anyway, I was shocked that anyone would hunt a half-ton beast with a pistol, even a powerful .50 caliber one, like the Smith & Wesson Model 500 Revolver. I'm still shocked.

If you want to know more, you can try reading Jamison's Dad's letter. Somehow Jesus is intimately involved in hog hunting. He works in mysterious ways...

Jaquet-Droz Automata

In the 18th century, famed watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz built three automata, life-size clockwork dolls, to demonstrate his amazing technical skills.

Most amazing of the three is The Writer, a little boy capable not only of writing a note with pen and ink, but of writing any text up to 40 characters long:

The text is coded on a wheel where characters are selected one by one. He uses a goose feather to write, which he inks from time to time, including a shake of the wrist to prevent ink from spilling. His eyes follow the text being written, and the head moves when he takes some ink.

In some sense, such an automaton is an early computer.

(Hat tip to Fogonazos.)

Why Apple TV is a dud

Brent Schlender explains Why Apple TV is a dud:

• Apple TV's most highly touted feature is its weakest one: It requires an HDTV, but the video you download is so low-res that it looks as fuzzy as plain old broadcast TV.


• Apple TV's coolest feature is one that wasn't even intended: the screensaver, which plays an ethereal slide show of your digital photos.


• There's no way to order a movie directly from the iTunes store via your TV, even though Apple TV has its own connection to the Internet. Instead, you have to download it to your computer first.


• Apple TV lets you show photos only from a single computer, even though photos are the one source of HD content everyone has, and are easy and legal to share over a network. That is especially odd, because Apple TV does allow you to share digital music from multiple PCs.

As he notes, "You get the feeling that Apple didn't create this thing because it was insanely great but in order to freeze competitors out of downloadable video."

Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington?

I haven't seen Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds, but I did just watch the 1936 classic, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, starring Gary Cooper, and I can see why it's considered a classic.

I particularly enjoyed this bit of trivia:

This film introduced the words "pixelated" and "doodling" to the world, both of which feature prominently in the court hearing scene.

The quotes, in context:

John Cedar: Suppose you just answer, Miss Jane. Now, will you tell the court what everybody at home thinks of Longfellow Deeds?
[pause; then Jane whispers to Amy; Amy whispers back]
Jane Faulkner: They think he's pixilated.
Amy Faulkner: Oh, yes, pixilated.
Judge May: He's what?
John Cedar: What was that you said he was?
Jane Faulkner: Pixilated.
Amy Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
John Cedar: Now that's rather a strange word to us, Miss Jane. Can you tell the court exactly what it means?
Board member: Perhaps I can explain, Your Honor. The word "pixilated" is an early American expression derived from the word "pixies," meaning elves. They would say the pixies had got him. As we nowadays would say, a man is "barmy."
Judge May: Oh. Is that correct?
Jane Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
Amy Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
[...]
Longfellow Deeds: That may make you look a little crazy, Your Honor, just, just sitting around filling in O's, but I don't see anything wrong, 'cause that helps you think. Other people are doodlers.
Judge May: "Doodlers"?
Longfellow Deeds: Uh, that's a word we made up back home for people who make foolish designs on paper when they're thinking: it's called doodling. Almost everybody's a doodler; did you ever see a scratchpad in a telephone booth? People draw the most idiotic pictures when they're thinking. Uh, Dr. von Hallor here could probably think up a long name for it, because he doodles all the time.

I also recorded and watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — which I did not realize was originally meant to be a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:

Columbia and Capra intended to make a sequel to this movie, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, entitled "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington" , based on the story "The Gentleman from Wyoming" (alternately called "The Gentleman from Montana" by both contemporary and modern sources) by Lewis Foster. This story was instead turned into the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra and starring Arthur and James Stewart.

The parallels are obvious, especially if you watch the movies one after another.

Incidentally, neither political party gets mentioned in Mr. Smith, and his home state is never named either.

The BIG cat who likes getting wet and wild

One could call six-year-old Odin, The BIG cat who likes getting wet and wild:

Six years old, and at the prime of his life, Odin lives at the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom Zoo in Vallejo, near San Francisco. He is about 10ft long from nose to tail, and is an excellent swimmer.

How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century opens with "a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak":

Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."

Weitz Brothers Making Elric

Apparently the Weitz brothers will be making an Elric movie:

So his adaptation of The Golden Compass is already being hyped by studio New Line as the new Lord Of The Rings (rather inaccurately if you ask us, since the books share little in common). But that’s not enough fantasy limelight for the guy who, up until now, was best known for small-scale comedies like American Pie and About A Boy. Nope, along with his brother and former co-director Paul, Chris Weitz is going to take on the biggest fantasty-literature property as yet untouched by movieland: Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga.

There must be some way out of here

I only just got around to finishing off the third season of Battlestar Galactica, and I must admit that it took me a while to pin down the music from the final episode, Crossroads.

It was Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, which, like most people, I know best as a psychedelic Jimi Hendrix song.

The version in Crossroads is by Bear McCreary, the series' composer:

The song and lyrics that Tory, Tigh, Tyrol and Anders hear is Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower", as adapted by veteran series composer Bear McCreary. The vocals for this version are performed by McCreary's brother Brendan McCreary, aka Bt4, with former Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek playing various guitars and sitars. There is no explanation given in the show as to why this particular song is heard, nor where it comes from. According to a conversation McCreary had with Ronald D. Moore, the version heard in the episode is meant to have been recorded by a Colonial artist rather than by Bob Dylan himself.

International Fight League and Jeremy Williams

This past weekend, I decided to catch up on some episodes of the International Fight League that I'd recorded.

The IFL puts second-tier MMA fighters onto teams — with names like the Southern California Condors or the Tokyo Sabres — offers them salaries and benefits, then stages regular events pitting two teams against each other, like scholastic wrestling teams.

Anyway, I was watching when they started showing a profile piece on one of the fighters, Jeremy Williams, who seemed like a remarkably nice guy who had gone through some (undefined) bad times and turned his life around by finding Jesus, getting married, etc.

He also seemed vaguely familiar.

When he quickly submitted a guy with a beautiful triangle choke, I immediately recognized his style. Wait, is that Jeremy Williams from Chris Brennan's school? He was older, and his hair was different, but it was the same guy I kinda-sorta knew from back in the day.

So I looked him up, started reading about him, then came across this:

On May 5, 2007 in Laguna Niguel, California, Williams died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Wow. I was not expecting that.

Rest in peace, Jeremy.

SmartCode

The SmartCode is an attempt to provide a zoning code compatible with New Urbanism or Traditional Neighborhood Development:

The Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) has the following physical attributes:

• The neighborhood is a comprehensive planning increment: when clustered with others, it becomes a town; when standing free in the landscape, it becomes a village. The neighborhood varies in population and density to accommodate localized conditions.


• The neighborhood is limited in size so that a majority of the population is within a 5-minute walking distance of its center (1/4 mile). The needs of daily life are theoretically available within this area. This center provides an excellent location for a transit stop, convenience work places, retail, community events and leisure activities.


• Streets are laid out in a network, so that there are alternate routes to most destinations. This permits most streets to be smaller with slower traffic as well as having parking, trees, sidewalks and buildings. They are equitable for both vehicles and pedestrians.


• Streets are spatially defined by a wall of buildings that front the sidewalk in a disciplined manner uninterrupted by parking lots.


• The buildings are diverse in function but compatible in size and in disposition on their lots. There is a mixture of houses (large and small), outbuildings, small apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, offices and warehouses.


• Civic buildings (schools, meeting halls, theaters, churches, clubs, museums, etc.) are often placed on squares or at the termination of street vistas. By being built at important locations these buildings serve as landmarks.


• Open space is provided in the form of specialized squares, playgrounds, and parks and, in the case of villages, greenbelts.

Conventional Suburban Development (CSD) has quite different physical attributes:

• Sprawl is disciplined only by isolated “pods,” which are dedicated to single uses such as “shopping centers,” “office parks,” and “residential clusters.” All of these are inaccessible from each other except by car. Housing is strictly segregated in large clusters containing units of similar cost hindering socioeconomic diversity.


• Sprawl is limited only by the range of the automobile, which easily forms cachement areas for retail, often exceeding 50 miles.


• There is a high proportion of cul-de-sacs and looping streets within each pod. Through traffic is possible only by means of a few “collector” streets that, consequently, become easily congested.


• Vehicular traffic controls the scale and form of space, with streets being wide and dedicated primarily to the automobile. Parking lots typically dominate the public space.


• Buildings are often highly articulated, rotated on their lots and greatly set back from streets. They are unable to create spatial definition or sense of place. Civic buildings do not normally receive distinguished sites.


• Open space is often provided in the form of “buffers,” “pedestrian ways,” “berms” and other ill-defined residual spaces.

Elephant herds found on isolated south Sudan island

Elephant herds found on isolated south Sudan island:

International wildlife experts have located hundreds of wild elephants on a treeless island in the swamps of south Sudan, where they apparently avoided unchecked hunting during more than 20 years of war.

"We flew out of a cloud, and there they were. It was like something out of Jurassic Park," said Tom Catterson, working on a U.S.-funded environment program in south Sudan.

Researchers find big batch of breast cancer genes

Researchers find big batch of breast cancer genes:

The researchers, reporting in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics, said the discoveries are the most important genes associated with breast cancer since BRCA1 and BRCA2 were identified.

Women with faulty copies of BRCA1 or BRCA2 have a 50 percent to 85 percent chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes. But they are rare genes, and only account for 5 percent to possibly 10 percent of breast cancer cases.
[...]
David Hunter of Harvard University and a team at the U.S.
National Cancer Institute looked at more than 2,200 women of European ancestry.

They found four common mutations in FGFR2 associated with the breast cancer in women after menopause who do not have known relatives with breast cancer.

The mutations raise the risk of breast cancer risk by 20 percent if they carry one copy of the gene and by 60 percent if they carry two copies. And close to 60 percent of the women they studied carried at least one copy.

Turning off gene makes mice smarter

Turning off gene makes mice smarter:

Bibb and colleagues used genetic engineering techniques to breed mice that could be manipulated to switch off Cdk5, a gene that controls production of a brain enzyme linked to diseases marked by the death of neurons in the brain, such as Alzheimer's.

"Any time we're losing neurons, Cdk5 may be contributing to that process. That has made it an area of great interest," Bibb said in a telephone interview.

"We have shown that we can turn off a gene in an adult animal. That has never been done before," he added. When they had tried to breed mice that completely lacked the gene, the pups died at birth.

Bibb said they put the mice though a series of tests and found the altered mice did better than normal mice.
[...]
Bibb said his work was inspired by the 1999 discovery of "Doogie" mice, a smarter breed of mice developed at Princeton University that were named after the TV program "Doogie Houser," a show that featured a child prodigy.

Those mice were bred by manipulating NR2B, a gene that also plays a role in associative memory.

"It turns out Cdk5 was controlling the regulation of NR2B," Bibb said.

(Hat tip to Mrs. Frisby. Just kidding.)

Climbers clear mountain of garbage from Everest

Climbers clear mountain of garbage from Everest:

Climbers from Japan and Nepal picked up 500 kg (about 1,000 lbs) of tins, old tents, food and medicines littered on Mount Everest over decades by mountaineers, the climbers said on Monday.

Hundreds of climbers carrying tons of supplies try and climb the 8,850 meter (29,035 feet) Mount Everest every year, adding to the piles of trash on its slopes.
[...]
Noguchi had led several cleaning campaigns to the mountain in the past and has so far collected 8.8 metric tons of rubbish from the Nepali as well as the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.

Jerry Muller on Schumpeter

Arnold Kling cites a number of a passages by Jerry Muller on Schumpeter:

He argued that it was precisely the dynamism injected into capitalist society by the entrepreneur that made him an object of antipathy. For the rise of a new entrepreneur...necessarily meant the relative economic decline of those ensconced in the status quo...

In attempting to account for the appeal of socialism, Schumpeter borrowed not only from Nietzsche but from the Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto...Pareto's 1901 essay "The Rise and Fall of Elites," conveys two themes to which Schumpeter would return time and time again: the inevitability of elites, and the importance of nonrational and nonlogical drives in explaining social action. Pareto suggested that the victory of socialism was "most probable and almost inevitable." Yet, he predicted...the reality of elites would not change. It was almost impossible to convince socialists of the fallacy of their doctrine, Pareto asserted, since they were enthusiasts of a substitute religion. In such circumstances, arguments are invented to justify actions that were arrived at before the facts were examined, motivated by nonrational drives.

It should come as no surprise that academics and politicians often dislike capitalism:

It was no accident, Schumpeter thought, that capitalism had been so productive...For it appeals to, and helps create, a system of motives that is both simple and forceful. It rewards success with wealth and, no less over, it attracts the brightest and most energetic into market-related activity: as capitalist values come to dominate, a large portion of those with "supernormal brains" move toward business, as opposed to military, governmental, cultural, or theological pursuits.

I'm afraid Dan Klein lost me with his comment:

Nice stuff. What I like especially: They highlight how entrepreneurship can be significantly discoordinating in the Schelling sense of mutual coordination, while significantly coordinating in the Coase/Hayek sense of concatenate or extensive coordination.

On this matter, I find Kirzner, Boettke, Sautet, and many others frustrating, because they resist the distinction between the two coordinations. Once you embrace the distinction, it all becomes clear.

Clueless

In Clueless, in the New York Times, Gary J. Bass, associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, reviews Bryan Caplan's new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies:

Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Caplan’s own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a 1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration. In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

Python

I didn't know this about the Python programming language:

An important goal of the Python developers is making Python fun to use. This is reflected in the origin of the name (after the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus), in the common practice of using Monty Python references in example code, and in an occasionally playful approach to tutorials and reference materials. For example, the metasyntactic variables often used in Python literature are spam and eggs, instead of the traditional foo and bar.

(Hat tip to Todd, who didn't know it either.)

Incidentally, I hadn't heard foo referred to as a metasyntactic variable either:

Foo is the canonical metasyntactic variable, commonly used to represent an as-yet-unspecified term, value, process, function, destination or event but seldom a person (see Ned Baker). It is sometimes combined with bar to make foobar. This suggests that foo may have originated with the World War II slang term fubar, as an acronym for fucked/fouled/fixed up beyond all recognition/repair, although the Jargon File makes a reasonably good case that foo predates fubar. Foo was also used as a nonsense word in the surrealistic comic strip Smokey Stover that was popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

The popularity of foo and its derivatives with computer programmers and hackers was likely increased by its appearance in the classic 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, found on almost every mainframe and mini-computer through the 1970s and 80's, where the graffiti "fee fie foe foo [sic]" is seen in the Giants' Cave.

Another usage of foo is as an abbreviation of the phrase "forward observation officer" (or observer). Apparently FOOs used to go places well forward of normal troops in battle and leave a stylised chalk graffiti of a person looking over a wall with the words "foo was here".

Unwanted books go up in flames

Unwanted books go up in flames as a used-book store owner gets desperate:

Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply — estimated at 20,000 books — is exhausted.

I always thought it was the job of the firemen to burn books.

(Ooh, years ago I missed this allusion: Guy Montag, a flamethrower-wielding hero in the real-time strategy game StarCraft, is named after the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451.)

100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know

The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know — as "a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves":

abjure abrogate abstemious acumen antebellum auspicious belie bellicose bowdlerize chicanery chromosome churlish circumlocution circumnavigate deciduous deleterious diffident enervate enfranchise epiphany equinox euro evanescent expurgate facetious fatuous feckless fiduciary filibuster gamete gauche gerrymander hegemony hemoglobin homogeneous hubris hypotenuse impeach incognito incontrovertible inculcate infrastructure interpolate irony jejune kinetic kowtow laissez faire lexicon loquacious

lugubrious metamorphosis mitosis moiety nanotechnology nihilism nomenclature nonsectarian notarize obsequious oligarchy omnipotent orthography oxidize parabola paradigm parameter pecuniary photosynthesis plagiarize plasma polymer precipitous quasar quotidian recapitulate reciprocal reparation respiration sanguine soliloquy subjugate suffragist supercilious tautology taxonomy tectonic tempestuous thermodynamics totalitarian unctuous usurp vacuous vehement vortex winnow wrought xenophobe yeoman ziggurat

(I have provided links to definitions — via the Merriam-Webster dictionary.)

Rampage ices Liddell to capture UFC title

Rampage ices Liddell to capture UFC title:

"I was doing my thing," said Jackson, who with the technical knockout at 1:53 of the first round raised his record to 27-6-0. "The right hand landed right on the jaw, right where I planned for it to go, and it was destiny."
[...]
"Ya know, I got caught," said the 37-year-old Liddell, who absorbed a handful of strikes while he remained dazed on the canvas. "What are you gonna say man? I made a mistake, got caught. Nothing else you can say."

Of course, from my perspective, the big story is that this article is from ESPN.

NPR : DNA Analysis Illuminates the History of Man

NPR recently replayed an erudite interview with Nicholas Wade, the New York Times science reporter who wrote Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. I recommend it.

Axe Emergency Exit Sticker Ad

When you first see this Axe Emergency Exit Sticker Ad, you might not see why it's so clever. Then you see it in place, and you see how it might be (mis)used.

Why should we curtail immigration?

Why should we curtail immigration? the Economist asks:

How many is too many? Well, the foreign-born population of America peaked around 1890 at about 15%. Looking around me, I see that almost no one seems to be speaking Czech, Italian, Polish or Yiddish, or even English with a crusty Irish brogue, so I presume they were all assimilated adequately.

Currently, America's foreign-born population is about 10%. This suggests that America could increase its immigration by 50% without destroying its prosperity machine. It's harder to gauge in European countries, which have no established tradition of absorbing massive immigration flows. But it seems likely that most countries could take more than they have. Not endless numbers. But enough to make a lot of lives better. Including all of us who love ethnic food.

NPR : Dick Dale and the Birth of Surf Rock

Four of Dick Dale's classic albums have been re-released, and NPR decided to replay its 1993 interview with "the King of the Surf Guitar":

He launched surf rock in 1960 with his band, the Deltones. Four of Dale's early albums are being re-released by Sundazed Music: King of the Surf Guitar, Checkered Flag, Mr. Eliminator and Summer Surf.

He described the surf sound in a 1963 article as "a heavy staccato sound on the lowkey guitar strings, with a heavy throbbing beat — like thunder, or waves breaking over you." It's also played loud and with plenty of reverb.

In the interview, Dale talks quite a bit about the heavy-gauge strings he uses and about the massive amps he had made for his performances.

When I saw Dick Dale in a small club in Newport Beach, California years ago, the performance was so loud I couldn't take it — and this was in my rock-concert-going prime. I assumed he was functionally deaf at that point. In fact, I was a bit surprised he didn't sound deaf in the interview.

Anyway, listen to the interview — and try not to think of the Black-Eyed Peas when you hear "Miserlou"...

Larger Than Hogzilla

Young Jamison Stone killed a wild pig even Larger Than Hogzilla:

In this photo released by Melynne Stone, Jamison Stone, 11, poses with a wild pig he killed near Delta, Ala., May 3, 2007. Stone's father says the hog weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. If claims of the animal's size are true, it would be larger than ``Hogzilla,'' the huge hog killed in Georgia in 2004.

What did he kill the half-ton hog with? A pistol:

Jamison, who killed his first deer at age 5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Monster Pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

Through it all, there was the fear that the animal would turn and charge them, as wild boars have a reputation for doing.

"I was a little bit scared, a little bit excited," said Jamison, who lives in Pickensville on the Mississippi border. He just finished the sixth grade on the honor roll at Christian Heritage Academy, a small, private school.

His father said that, just to be extra safe, he and the guides had high-powered rifles aimed and ready to fire in case the beast, with 5-inch tusks, decided to charge.

If you have to shoot the beast eight times and chase it for three hours, might I suggest using the high-power hunting rifles you brought along? For the pig's sake.

Addendum: Read more in Bigger Than Hogzilla. People get so touchy...

Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities

If you've been concerned about the overabundance of talented people coming to America, don't worry; our politicians are putting the issue to rest. Top Talent Could Lose Fast Track to U.S.:

For years, foreign-born Nobel Prize winners, corporate officers, and top talents in sports, arts and sciences have had a fast track to permanent residency, and eventually citizenship, in the United States. In the name of attracting the world's greatest and brightest, authorities have granted these luminaries priority access to green cards under a little-known provision offered to "aliens of extraordinary abilities."

It has provided a way for a host of notable foreigners — among them John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Venezuelan-born New York Yankee Bobby Abreu — to make America their home.

But the bill now being debated in Congress would do away with the special "EB-1" preferred-status category, effectively forcing foreign VIPs to take a number and get in line with everyone else. They would be subject to a complex point system to determine their eligibility — assessing education levels, English abilities, experience in the United States and other factors — just as any engineer from India or farmworker from Mexico.
[...]
Last year, 36,960 individuals and family members were granted "priority" permanent resident status under the "extraordinary abilities" category. Under the 100-point system established by the bill, "extraordinary or ordinary" ability in a specialized field would offer, at most, eight additional points to a candidate. That is less than the 10 points that would be awarded to applicants holding a two-year college degree.

Sigh.

The article presents "aliens of extraordinary abilities" as VIP celebrities, but then it goes on to note that 36,960 of them were granted priority last year. The EB-1 category is not simply for media darlings; it's for Ph.D. scientists coming to teach at our universities and work at our corporations and government institutions.

The last thing we want is to set up hurdles for "aliens of extraordinary abilities" who want to come to the US.

"Noah's Ark" of 5,000 rare animals found floating off the coast of China

"Noah's Ark" of 5,000 rare animals found floating off the coast of China — where they were going to be eaten:

Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world's rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.

The pangolins, Asian giant turtles and lizards were crushed inside crates on a rickety wooden vessel that had lost engine power off Qingzhou island in the southern province of Guangdong. Most were alive, though the cargo also contained 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper.

According to conservation groups, the haul was discovered on one of the world's most lucrative and destructive smuggling routes: from the threatened jungles of south-east Asia to the restaurant tables of southern China.
[...]
According to wildlife groups, China is the main market for illegally traded exotic species, which are eaten or used in traditional medicine. Pangolins are in great demand because their meat is consider a delicacy and their scales are thought to help mothers breastfeed their babies.

As a result of demand, the pangolin populations of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been wiped out. With traders moving further and further south, the animal is declining even in its last habitats in Java, Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula. It is a similar story for many species of turtle, tortoise, frog and snake.
[...]
Despite the ban on pangolins, many restaurants offer their meat. The Chaoxing restaurant in Shenzhen said yesterday that pangolin was available but was only suitable for large dining parties.

"The animal is very big - about 10kg," said a waitress contacted by telephone. "We serve it in hotpot. That is the tastiest way."

According to recent reports in the Chinese media, the price of 1kg of pangolin served in Guangdong or Yunnan is between 600 and 800 yuan per kilogram (between £43 and £50).

A Guangdong chef interviewed last year in the Beijing Science and Technology Daily described how to cook a pangolin.

"We keep them alive in cages until the customer makes an order. Then we hammer them unconscious, cut their throats and drain the blood. It is a slow death. We then boil them to remove the scales. We cut the meat into small pieces and use it to make a number of dishes, including braised meat and soup. Usually the customers take the blood home with them afterwards."

The Surprising Truth Behind the Construction of the Great Pyramids

The Surprising Truth Behind the Construction of the Great Pyramids is that they're made of concrete, not cut stone:

A year and a half later, after extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.

The stones also had a high water content—unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau—and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. “Therefore,” says Barsoum, “it’s very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block.”

More startlingly, Barsoum and another of his graduate students, Aaron Sakulich, recently discovered the presence of silicon dioxide nanoscale spheres (with diameters only billionths of a meter across) in one of the samples. This discovery further confirms that these blocks are not natural limestone.

The frayed knot

The frayed knot notes that "as the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening 'marriage gap' is breeding inequality":

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

Does this matter? Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank, says it does. In her book “Marriage and Caste in America”, she argues that the “marriage gap” is the chief source of the country's notorious and widening inequality. Middle-class kids growing up with two biological parents are “socialised for success”. They do better in school, get better jobs and go on to create intact families of their own. Children of single parents or broken families do worse in school, get worse jobs and go on to have children out of wedlock. This makes it more likely that those born near the top or the bottom will stay where they started. America, argues Ms Hymowitz, is turning into “a nation of separate and unequal families”.

No Helmet, No Pads, No Escape

The sport of mixed martial arts is definitely going mainstream. The New York Times has a recent article, No Helmet, No Pads, No Escape, about former NFL receiver Johnnie Morton entering the sport, and both ESPN and NBC Sports now have web pages devoted to the sport.

Articles on the sport have changed dramatically in tone over the years, from tales of "human cockfighting" to This guy scares you?:

"Chuck looks like an ax murderer," says UFC president Dana White. "But he's the nicest guy in the world."

Even so, being an ultimate fighter has very little to do with being nice. It's about being an incomparable athlete. You must excel at boxing, martial arts and wrestling. You must possess depths of fortitude and a willingness to stand alone. And you must be accountable for yourself in a way that few sports require. Liddell knows this, having played virtually every other sport with the exception of tennis.

The article even has a few comic bits:

A short list of largely unknown facts about Chuck Liddell:

He was in the chess club.
He has never broken his nose.
He was an A student in high school.
He has a degree in accounting.
He has a Chihuahua named Bean.
He has seen "Fight Club."
It was "fine."
He has also seen "The Sound of Music."
He loved it. So much so that he went to see the musical -- a couple of times.

Frankly, I'm shocked that I can read a good pre-event rundown of all the match-ups on the UFC 71 card on ESPN's site — and then I realize that I can watch a pre-fight video at NBC Sports' site, along with a new UFC Tapout news show.

Things have changed.

Addendum: Here are a few more links:

http://www.nbcsports.com/index.html
http://espn.go.com/
http://msn.foxsports.com/
http://cbs.sportsline.com/
http://sports.yahoo.com/
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/sports/index.html
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/default.htm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032113/
http://sports.aol.com/

Are You Looking at Me?

Are You Looking at Me?:

To track their audience, networks rely on Nielsen ratings and Web content providers tally page view numbers. But creators of digital billboards, posters, and retail store displays have a harder time counting eyeballs.

Now, Kingston (Ont.)-based Xuuk is offering a four-inch-square box that it says can do just that. The device, eyebox2, is studded with diodes that flash lights — invisibly — to induce a "red eye" effect in viewers. A camera in the box, which can be discreetly incorporated into a digital poster, tallies all the red-eyes within a 30-foot-range.

Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games

Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games looks at Niall Ferguson and Making History, a game I may have to pick up:

Ferguson was approached by Muzzy Lane, a game company that had created Making History — a game where players run World War II scenarios based on exhaustively researched economic realities of the period.

As he played it, he realized the game was good — so good, in fact, that it forced him to rethink some of his long-cherished theories. For example, he'd often argued that World War II could have been prevented if Britain had confronted Germany over its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. France would have joined with Britain, he figured, pinching Germany between their combined might and that of the Russian army. "Germany wasn't ready for war, and they would have been defeated," he figured. "War in 1938 would have been better than war in 1942."

But when he ran the simulation in Making History, everything fell to pieces. The French defected, leaving Britain's expeditionary force to fly solo — and get crushed by Germany. His theory, as it turns out, didn't hold water. He hadn't realized that a 1938 attack would not leave Britain enough time to build the diplomatic case with France.

The game, in essence, helped him think more clearly about history. "I found that my scenarios weren't as robust as I thought. And that's really exciting, because normally counterfactuals happen in my head," he says. "Now they can happen on the screen."

Ferguson discovered something that fans of war-strategy and civilization-building "god" games have realized for years: Games are a superb vehicle for thinking deeply about complex systems.

How Obscure Law School Places Grads at Top Firms

The University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, "firmly in the cellar of U.S. News & World Report's rankings of 184 accredited law schools," has found a way to [laces its graduates at top firms:

A first-time dean and Harvard Law grad, Mr. Gordon got his school on the radar of the top-tier firms by enlisting a stable of big-time private-practice lawyers to join an advisory board that's now some 60 members strong. His pitch: Help Detroit Mercy improve its third-year curriculum by creating a required set of courses that simulate real-life practice.

Attorneys quickly suited up for the cause. When they arrived in Detroit for twice-a-year meetings, starting in 2005, Mr. Gordon made sure they not only helped remake the school's coursework but also inspected his top second-year students during private interviews, as well as others who were trotted out to give presentations on everything from trial advocacy to interpreting statutes. After last month's meeting, about 40 first-year students, handpicked by professors, were allowed to mingle with the board.

The idea of focusing the curriculum on practice resonated with the lawyers. In fact, many have long complained that law school devotes too much attention to theory and leaves students unprepared to practice, even as the market demands that firms pay new hires high salaries from day one. Many students are also no fans of the third year of school, feeling it's a repeat of the same kind of work analyzing cases that they did in the first two years.

Pedal Powered Generator

David Butcher has built a Pedal Powered Generator:

Every morning, I pedal to generate electricity. The Pedal Generator I ride charges batteries, that run an inverter, that produces 110v AC, that powers LED lights, the monitor on my computer, my cell phones, and many other small battery-powered things. It is the most inspiring workout you can imagine.

I built the first version of the Pedal Generator in 1976. Let me describe my invention to you. As an improvement over similar bicycle generator designs, I went all-out for efficiency and versatility. While a bike generator is an alternative to my design, pedaling will be uncomfortable and inefficient, and powering non-electric equipment may be difficult. A key feature in my design was a 36" particle board disk with a groove routed in the edge that served as the flywheel and crankshaft for the permanent magnet 36 volt DC motor seen at the upper right edge of the device. A small-pitch chain provided the power transfer system. The groove around the outer edge was lined with "rim strips" — thin rubber straps that prevented the chain from slipping and digging into the particle board. They are standard bicycle parts. The motor was obtained around 1985 from Northern Hydraulic, now known as Northern Tool and Equipment Company. It is a General Electric Permanent Magnet Motor, model 5BPA34NAA44, a very nice heavy-duty, ball bearing unit. I paid USD $29 for it if I remember correctly, and I still have it.
[...]
The particle board disk was a key feature of this unit. The weight of the disk served as an excellent flywheel. Human legs and pedals create an extremely "peaky" torque curve, resulting in jerky motion and lots of stress on parts. The flywheel smoothes this all out by absorbing part of the energy on the power stroke, lowering peak torque, and releasing it on the "dead" part of the stroke, creating torque where Human legs/pedals cannot generate any. Another thing to remember is that Human legs do not like extreme stress. The flywheel allows the Human to avoid having to generate extreme pressure during the power stroke just to make it past the "dead" spots. Many "bicycle converters" lack the flywheel characteristic because tires/rims are designed to be so light.

Practical? Not really. A fit cyclist might maintain a 150-Watt pace over a half-hour, generating 75 Watt-hours — or 0.075 kilowatt-hours.

It's most useful if you're both off the grid and overfed, which is a rare combo.

Flight of the Conchords

Flight of the Conchords "follows the trials and tribulations of a two-man, New Zealand digi-folk band as they make their way in New York City."

That may not strike you as immensely funny, but you haven't seen the three-and-a-half music videos in the first episode, available now, at HBO's site. Binary solo!

New York Cities Yellow Cabs to Go Green

New York Cities Yellow Cabs to Go Green — hybrid, that is:

Every yellow cab in New York City will be a fuel-efficient hybrid by 2012, and by next year, the city will begin phasing in stricter emissions and mileage standards for all new taxis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday.

Today, there are just 375 fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles among the 13,000 taxis rolling on city streets. That number will increase to 1,000 by October 2008 and will grow by about 20 percent each year until 2012, when every yellow cab will be a hybrid.

Hybrid vehicles run on a combination of gasoline and electricity, emitting less exhaust and achieving higher gas mileage per gallon. Changing over the fleet is part of Bloomberg's wider sustainability plan for the city, which includes the goal of a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.

If all this is true, why does the mayor have to mandate the switch?

Automakers said hybrids are uniquely well-suited to be taxis. Many of them, like the Ford Escape, run solely on battery power while stopped or at low speeds, so they don't cough exhaust while navigating through typical city traffic.
[...]
Hybrid vehicles are typically more expensive, but the city estimated that the better fuel efficiency will save taxi operators more than $10,000 per year.

The standard yellow cab vehicle today is the Ford Crown Victoria, which gets 14 miles per gallon. Turning over the fleet by 2012 is not an impractical goal; the life of a New York City taxi is typically about three to five years because the city's TLC requires all vehicles to be retired within a certain period.

A Brave Heart for Atlas Shrugged

In A Brave Heart for Atl