Inner City Pressure

I got quite a kick out of the first episode of the Flight of the Conchords — binary solo! — and the first music video of the second episode, Inner City Pressure, made me laugh:

I had already seen one version of She's So Hot, BOOM!, so a bit of the shock was lost, but it's still great fun:

And, in case you missed it, you really should check out The Humans Are Dead:

Hamas TV kills off Mickey Mouse double

Hamas TV kills off Mickey Mouse double — and guess who they blame:

A Mickey Mouse lookalike who preached Islamic domination on a Hamas-affiliated children's television program was beaten to death in the show's final episode Friday.

In the final skit, "Farfour" was killed by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land. At one point, the mouse called the Israeli a "terrorist."

"Farfour was martyred while defending his land," said Sara, the teen presenter. He was killed "by the killers of children," she added.

The weekly show, featuring a giant black-and-white rodent with a high-pitched voice, had attracted worldwide attention because the character urged Palestinian children to fight Israel. It was broadcast on Hamas-affiliated Al Aqsa TV.

Station officials said Friday that Farfour was taken off the air to make room for new programs. Station manager Mohammed Bilal said he did not know what would be shown instead.

Israeli officials have denounced the program, "Tomorrow's Pioneers," as incendiary and outrageous. The program was also opposed by the state-run Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., which is controlled by Fatah, Hamas' rival.

Oh, oh, it's magic

The Economist blog gets a bit snarky — accurate, but snarky — with Oh, oh, it's magic:

Advocates of a single-payer health care system for America often seem to be saying that their system will make everything better and nothing worse.
[...]
Medical innovation, it seems obvious, currently proceeds at its rapid pace because there are, in the American market, vast profits for doing so. This is why drugs and medical equipment tend to be introduced there, rather than, say, Sweden, despite the latter's much-praised socialised system. But single-payer advocates angrily deny this. Pharmaceutical companies are blood-sucking leeches who spend all our money advertising viagra, so killing their profits won't make us any worse off.

Isn't it marvelous that single payer healthcare solves every single problem while having no drawbacks?

Horse-Zebra Hybrid

I don't think I would have expected a Horse-Zebra Hybrid to look quite like Eclypse:

A photo provided by the Zoo Safari and Hollywoodpark Stukenbrock shows the zebra and horse crossbreed 'Eclyse' during its presentation to the public in Schloss Holte, Germany, on Wednesday, June 27, 2007. The father of 'Eclyse' is a horse from Italy, where the crossbreed filly was born in 2006, her mother is a zebra from the Safari park.

Cradle of civilization also cats' cradle

Cradle of civilization also cats' cradle:

The near Eastern wildcat, known scientifically as Felis silvestris lybica, is the likely ancestor of all the cats whose genes were sampled by the team, they report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"Domestic cats throughout the entire world had a common ancestor and that common ancestor lived in the Near East. There was no separate domestication in Europe or South Africa or China," said Carlos Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and the University of Oxford in Britain.

"The domestication of wild species to complement human civilization stands as one of the more successful 'biological experiments' ever undertaken," wrote the researchers, led by Dr. Stephen O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute, in their report.

"For cats, the process began over 9,000 years ago as the earliest farmers of the Fertile Crescent domesticated grains and cereals as well as livestock animals." The Fertile Crescent stretches from modern-day Egypt to Iran.

Preserved remains show that cats were valued by Egyptians, and one skeleton unearthed in Cyprus in 2004 showed that people were keeping cats as pets more than 9,000 years ago.

Driscoll, who admits he is a cat person, adds: "You are not civilized without a cat."

Potential cure for HIV discovered

Potential cure for HIV discovered:

In a breakthrough that could potentially lead to a cure for HIV infection, scientists have discovered a way to remove the virus from infected cells, a study released Thursday said.

The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine.

The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide.

The Ultimate Fighter 5 Finale

I didn't get around to watching The Ultimate Fighter 5 Finale until last night. Wow. That's some good TV.

I had never even heard of Roger Huerta, despite his Sports Illustrated cover — it's odd that they didn't choose Liddell or a similar star, isn't it? — so I wasn't sure what to expect. I am familiar with referee Steve Mazzagatti though, so I shouldn't have been surprised when he let Huerta rain down a whole lot of unanswered blows:

Huerta tried to secure a rear-naked choke but Evans' defense prevented it so Huerta instead unloaded a series of strikes to the head. Finally, after what seemed like 20 or so unanswered punches, referee Steve Mazzagatti stepped in and pulled Huerta away. The official time of the TKO was 3:30 of the second round.

"I finally got position, got a good angle, started going for a rear-naked choke," Huerta said after the fight. "I couldn't finish it. You could tell he's a real good ground guy, real good wrestler. He didn't want to get choked out. But I just kept going, wanting the ref to finish it."

I've seen Thales Leites before, and I've been impressed, so I was not surprised that he won, but I was impressed with his smooth transition to the arm-triangle — and I was surprised to hear the Japanese term kata-gatame used to describe it.

On Sunday, at a friend's grill-out, another friend mentioned seeing some kind of UFC contraversy on ESPN. It's still somewhat shocking to have MMA news on ESPN, but it's particularly upsetting to be the UFC expert and not know what happened. What happened was too odd to make up:

Once the fighters crashed on the mat, Emerson tapped out because his ribs were badly injured. Referee Steve Mazzagatti quickly waved off the fight because of the tap from Emerson but he failed to realize that Maynard had knocked himself out in the process.

After several minutes of mass confusion, the Nevada State Athletic Commission overruled Mazzagatti's call and deemed the fight a no contest.

That was wild, but watching Joe Rogan interview Maynard was a riot. Maynard denied ever being out, and Rogan could only say, "Bro, bro, watch the replay. You were out." Maynard doesn't make a much better showing in his post-fight interview.

Anyway, if that freak ending wasn't freaky enough, there was also the freak ending to the Manvel Gamburyan–Nathan Diaz fight:

In the co-main event, Nate Diaz became The Ultimate Fighter 5 champion basically by accident, as opponent Manvel Gamburyan injured his right shoulder 20 seconds into the second round.

"When I [went] for his left leg, I popped it out," a disappointed Gamburyan said about his shoulder. "He sprawled really good, and I popped it out. I thought I broke my shoulder and neck [at the] same time. I was hurt really bad. I know I can fight hard, but it was really bad pain. I can't continue."

There was nothing freaky or unexpected about the B.J. Penn–Jens Pulver fight — except that Penn seemed to be taking his time, almost toying with Pulver:

There were a few times during the skirmish when it appeared as though Penn (11-4-1) could have ended the fight early and gone for either an armbar or rear-naked choke, but he seemed content to keep a slower pace in an effort to administer a more potent beating.

"He didn't go for the easy submission," said Pulver after the disappointing loss. "He tried to beat the hell out of me. I respect him more and more every minute. B.J.'s a savage; he's very good."

I guess BJ's post-fight interview was a bit of a surprise:

Penn was unavailable for comments moments after the triumph over Pulver, his rival-turned-future training partner. Instead, Penn shouted into the microphone for everybody to visit his personal Web site — bjpenn.com — which ironically crashed due to a likely surge in traffic.

Every TUF finale so far has kept me interested.

Ex-Marine teaches pickpocket a lesson

I must admit, I love stories like this. Ex-Marine teaches pickpocket a lesson:

Bill Barnes says he was scratching off a losing $2 lottery ticket inside a gas station when he felt a hand slip into his front-left pants pocket, where he had $300 in cash.

He immediately grabbed the person's wrist with his left hand and started throwing punches with his right, landing six or seven blows before a store manager intervened.

"I guess he thought I was an easy mark," Barnes, 72, told The Grand Rapids Press for a story Tuesday.

He's anything but an easy mark: Barnes served in the Marines, was an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer and retired after 20 years as an iron worker.

Jesse Daniel Rae, the 27-year-old Newaygo County man accused of trying to pick Barnes' pocket, was arraigned Monday in Rockford District Court on one count of unarmed robbery, a 15-year felony.

Iraq, The Guaranteed Solution

In Iraq, The Guaranteed Solution, James Dunnigan looks at the Iraqi and American solutions to Sunni terrorism:

The Iraqi solution is the traditional one; punish the entire Sunni Arab community. Since the Kurds and Shia now have far more men under arms than do the Sunni Arabs, this approach would result in a series of battles against Sunni Arab neighborhoods (in large cities) and towns (out in the countryside). These areas would be cut off from the outside world. Food, water and electricity would cut off as well. Surrender or die. Those who surrendered would be disarmed, taken to a border area, and forced out of the country. In some areas, there might be massacres as well. It's an Iraqi tradition that's hard to shake.

The other approach is less popular among most Iraqis, and it is the American one. This involves getting Sunni Arab leaders to tame the terrorists in their midst, and become law-abiding Iraqis. Few Kurds or Shia Arabs feel they can trust the Sunni Arabs, but if they want to keep American troops in the country (which keeps the Iraqi casualty rate down, and unfriendly neighbors out), they have to go along with the current "surge" campaign.

Female tennis players and wages

Tyler Cowen cites the "politically incorrect paper of the day" on female tennis players and wages:

Female tennis players play more conservatively and commit more unforced errors when playing critical points. Does this explain the upper-echelons wage gap?
[...]
Women are significantly more likely to hit unforced errors at the most crucial stages of the match, while men exhibit no significant variation in performance. Specifically, about 30% of men’s points end in unforced errors, regardless of their placement in the distribution of the importance variable. For women, about 36% of points in the bottom quartile of the importance distribution end in unforced errors, but unforced errors rise to nearly 40% for points in the top quartile of the importance distribution. What is remarkable is not the difference in the levels (men are more powerful and therefore more likely to hit winners at any stage). The interest lies in the differences in the way men and women respond to increases in competitive pressure.

Like Wi-Fi on Steroids

Business 2.0 says that Wi-Max, which Sprint will be offering soon, is Like Wi-Fi on Steroids:

Sprint says its new service will go live in three markets — Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington — by the end of 2007. It will be the first U.S. carrier to launch the next-generation network, which already exists in South Korea and is five times faster than current 3G cellular data services. Sprint hopes to have coverage available to 100 million Americans in about 35 regions nationwide by 2009.

Learning from History

Orson Scott Card has much to say about Learning from History. Here are a few points:

1. When the press has decided to report only one side of the story, the public is ill served.


2. If you do not believe the threats of an insane enemy and destroy their war capacity early, when it can be cheaply done, you will pay for it in blood and horror.


3. Only fools believe that an enemy cannot do what he threatens to do.


4. Only fools allow their best allies to be neutralized before the war begins.


5. Remember the big picture. However much you might want to achieve a short-term goal, you cannot let yourself be distracted from the primary objectives of the primary struggle.


6. Everybody makes horrible mistakes; the side that learns from its mistakes and relentlessly moves forward is the one that will win.


7. Without leadership, the cause of democracy cannot be won.

Naturally you'll have to read the whole article to make sense of those points.

Blade Runner at 25

Mythbuster Adam Savage explains Why the Sci-Fi F/X Are Still Unsurpassed:

Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott's cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love.
[...]
I worked on Star Wars Episodes I and II, on the Matrix films, on AI and Terminator 3; yet 25 years later there are ways in which Blade Runner surpasses anything that's been done since. Watching the theatrical release DVD at home with PM reminded me of Scott's genius for creating stunning effects with simple technology.
[...]
You have to remember, Blade Runner was made years before digital effects became common. Today, CGI [computer-generated imagery] is becoming a mature art form, but even now there are times you just can't beat doing some effects like these "in camera." Most of these cityscapes are a combination of models and traditional matte paintings. For the aerial shots they used a set about 12 ft. wide, and those towers you see belching fire are about 12 in. high. They're made of etched brass and model parts and use thousands of tiny, grain-of-wheat light bulbs like you'd find in a dollhouse. They filmed some of the fireballs in the parking lot behind the studio, and for others they used stock footage from the 1970 Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point.

Why Running a Franchise Is Easier Than Ever

Gwendolyn Bounds and Raymund Flandez explain Why Running a Franchise Is Easier Than Ever:

The franchising world is letting loose. Gone are the days of one owner being chained behind the counter of a single store day in, day out. Today, there are absentee owners who oversee their operations from laptops and Treos, and owners who maintain dual careers or run multiple franchises. At Hollywood Tanning Systems Inc., more than half of the 330 franchise owners have another job. The chief executive of Sport Clips Inc. hair salons estimates that 10 hours a week is a "generous allowance" for owners to physically be in stores. And franchisees for the Decor&You Inc. interior-design business can receive decorating and product training at home whenever they like via online video seminars.

Even costs are more flexible, with investments ranging from as low as $10,000 to more than $1 million, according to the International Franchise Association. That frees up owners to spread their talents around by opening multiple franchises, either of the same brand or even in different industries — a departure from the days when the rule of thumb for franchising was "one person, one store," says Ann Dugan, author of "Franchising 101" and assistant dean at the University of Pittsburgh business school.

The Baby-Name Business

The Baby-Name Business is taking off as parents move away from a small selection of hyper-popular names to a broader menu of options:

Academics say there's been a demonstrable shift in the way people name children. In 1880, Social Security Administration data show that the 10 most popular baby names were given to 41% of boys and 23% of girls. But in 2006, just 9.5% of boys and roughly 8% of girls were given one of the year's 10 most popular names -- a combined decline of about 33% from the averages in the 1990s, says Cleveland Kent Evans, an associate psychology professor at Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb. and a past president of the American Name Society. So while a once-ubiquitous name like Mary has fallen from No. 1 during most of the 1950s to No. 84 last year, many new names are taking off. Nevaeh (heaven spelled backward) ranked No. 43 among the 1,000 most popular names in the U.S. in 2006 and Zayden, another recent creation, was given to 224 boys.

Tales of a Ninth-Grade Fund Manager

Tales of a Ninth-Grade Fund Manager:

Brandon got the idea to start the fund in November when he took a financial-literacy course. As part of the program, he and other students had to develop their own business plans. One student wanted to open a skateboard shop. Brandon, who became interested in markets with a virtual-reality game called Neopets and was setting up mock stock portfolios by the age of 12, wanted to start his own investment fund. "It blew me away," says Jay Ellis, a regional manager of Washington Mutual in Manhattan and the course instructor.

In six months, Brandon says he has increased the value of his fund -- which consists of money he earned fixing neighbors' computers and contributions from his uncles -- by some 30%, to about $5,000.

Because he is being home schooled, Brandon can adjust his schedule to attend investor meetings, as he did recently, hopping on a subway with his father to hear London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, chief executive of Mittal Steel, at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. Mr. Mittal was meeting with some analysts and about 100 investors.
[...]
Brandon recently decided to put the fund on hold for a few months while he is in math camp in Colorado. (He moved the fund's assets into a money-market account.) At the end of the summer, he plans to relaunch the Mariner fund with the $5,000 plus another $30,000 he is trying to raise with help from a lawyer. Because he is only 14, his mother and father are custodians of the brokerage account where he does his trading.

His mother, Judith, a computer programmer who home schools Brandon, doesn't mind his running an investment company out of their home. But she worries about him investing so much money, and about his frustration at things that don't normally frustrate a teenager, such as his inability to take a six-hour Series 7 exam for would-be securities traders. (You have to be working at an NASD member firm to take the test.) After finding him following Asian markets on financial TV networks at 4 a.m., she told him to get some sleep.

"I'm terrified, I have to say, as a mom," says Ms. Conley.

Part of Brandon's home-school curriculum involves finding unusual classes and learning opportunities on the Internet and in New York City, including volunteering and training at the Brooklyn Public Library, online math classes through Ivy League schools, chess clubs and Lord of the Rings reading societies. The unorthodox schedule allows Brandon to spend as much as eight hours a day researching companies and investments and making trades.

He often wears a tie, suit or dress shirt in the middle-class neighborhood where he lives, partly so people will take him seriously but also to avoid being suspected of violating truancy laws because he is not at a traditional school.

Brandon's father, Terence, a jazz pianist who has played with the Count Basie and the Duke Ellington orchestras, says he and his wife try not to restrict Brandon's moves, but to monitor them, and make sure he has good advisers, which include his uncles.

My lawn-mowing money went into a savings account, where it more-or-less kept up with inflation.

How to Win a Marathon

Reed Albergotti explains How to Win a Marathon using online research:

As competitive amateur athletics explode, a new form of gamesmanship is emerging. Millions of people can now say they've run a marathon or a triathlon, but how many people can say they've won one? In the past, that hasn't been easy for weekend warriors who work long hours at the office and lack six-pack abs. Now, some are trying to gain an edge by finding where the fast racers aren't. Instead of training harder, they're spending hours online to scout out the field, and they're driving hundreds of miles to race against thin competition in out-of-the-way places.
[...]
New Web sites closely track results of thousands of races, down to local 5-kilometer charity runs. Athletes are using this information to find out how tough the competition is likely to be in a race based on previous years. The sites also keep tabs on amateur athletes in ever-greater detail, from the names of racers and their past performances to the fastest people of a certain age in a particular ZIP Code. This makes it easier than ever to find out how you stack up against your neighbors.

The View From Ecotopia

Joseph White shares The View From Ecotopia, or Portland, Oregon:

Portland is a green place, surrounded by temperate, Douglas fir rainforests and dotted with lush gardens. Portland is also Green in the political sense, at least, more so than Detroit. Years ago, Portland's political leaders blocked construction of a freeway through the heart of downtown, and took other measures designed to limit suburban sprawl and put the automobile in its place as a servant rather than a master. In 1993, Portland was the first American city to craft a global-warming action plan, Mayor Tom Potter recently told a congressional committee. Mayor Potter said that per capita greenhouse gas emissions have dropped, and that since 1990, Portland's local greenhouse gas emissions are down 1%.

Portland isn't the Garden of Eden. I spent a half hour or so stuck in rush hour traffic, negotiating my way through a maze of intersecting highways where the freeways that ring Portland's downtown interconnect. Portland's streets have plenty of cars, and despite the complex land-use rules the region adopted to limit sprawl, there seemed to be no shortage of big-box stores and shopping centers along Highway 26 west of town. From the local press, it's clear there's tension between Portlanders who fit the city's Green image and those who want more freedom to do what they want with their property, including develop parking lots or office complexes.

Still, Portlanders who so choose can spend more of their time outside the confines of a car than I can as a resident of Metro Detroit. The city has a light-rail system that connects various neighborhoods to downtown offices and to the airport. At quitting time on a weekday, the MAX light rail connecting downtown to the neighborhoods west of town was full. The system has reported rising ridership. That said, the main highways are still jammed during rush hours. Portland has a long way to go to get the bulk of commuters to give up that "alone-time" in the car.

Portland's efforts to limit sprawl have helped to sustain the value of properties in the city's old neighborhoods, which in turn has encouraged people to renovate older homes and apartments within walking or biking distance of downtown businesses. To a tourist from Detroit, Portland feels like a super-sized college town, not a city as I know it. But guess what? Even Detroit is trying to revive the "walk to work" lifestyle, encouraging conversion of abandoned downtown buildings into loft apartments. Just last week, General Motors entered a partnership to develop residences along the city's riverfront, within walking distance of GM's headquarters.

In Suburbia, the nation where so many Americans live, homes and businesses are usually segregated. That segregation is viewed as desirable, even though it can turn a routine shopping trip into a 20-minute drive. The Ecotopian urbanite, by contrast, accepts that within walking distance of home there could be: A world-class bookstore, three coffee shops, a liquor mart, a grocery store, an art gallery, a service station, a chummy neighborhood restaurant, a concert hall, a designer furniture outlet and a sex-toy shop. That's a sample of what I found walking around my downtown hotel. The answer to your next question is: Because the shop had clever, PG-rated window displays facing the street, just like an old fashioned department store.

In this Ecotopian lifestyle, the car becomes an occasional means of escape to adventure, not a daily commuting appliance. I found my way, by rented Subaru Legacy sedan, to a walk on the beach, a roadside record store housed in a barn packed floor to ceiling with vinyl LPs and Elvis memorabilia, and a stand that sold elk jerky for $10 a package. I probably burned $20 or so of gas on this semi-authorized fact-finding mission for a new travel column for the Blackberry set, "Out of Office Assistant," that I intend to pitch to my editors some day.

American kids shaping up with trainers

I've been predicting this for some time. American kids shaping up with trainers:

The Boston-based group's latest figures, from 2005, show that 824,000 children between the ages of 6 and 17 use trainers — a figure that accounts for about 13 percent of trainers' clients.

Man Retrofits Freezer to Make an Ultra-Efficient Fridge

I read about this a few weeks back, but I stumbled across it again while reading up on disaster preparedness. Man Retrofits Freezer to Make an Ultra-Efficient Fridge:

An off-grid experimenter in Australia, Tom Chalko, has retrofitted a chest freezer to create a fridge that uses only 100 watt-hours (0.1 kWh) per day! Why a chest freezer? Tom points out that vertical door refrigerators are inherently inefficient. As soon as you open a vertical fridge door the cold air escapes, simply because it is heavier than the warmer air in the room. When you open a chest freezer, the cool air stays inside, just because it’s heavy. Any leak or wear in a vertical door seal causes significant loss of efficiency.

Tom took a standard chest freezer (a Vestfrost SE255), added a $40 external thermostat, then wired the freezer to turn off when the desired temperature was reached. The thermostat runs on 2 AAA batteries which last for months. The freezer runs for about 90 seconds per hour and then shuts down completely, making it not only very efficient but very quiet.

As one commenter noted, this efficiency boost is much, much more important if you're trying to live off the grid. On the grid, it saves you about $3 per month — at the expense of having to bend over and dig things out of your fridge.

Zombie Squad

For years I've been referring to "when the zombies rise" as an amusing metaphor for any disaster or emergency where The System breaks down — hurricane, earthquake, blackout, terrorist attack, etc.

What I did not realize was that there was an entire online community, the Zombie Squad, built on that concept:

Our goal is to educate the public about the importance of personal preparedness and self reliance, to increase its readiness to respond to disasters such as Earthquakes, Floods, Terrorism or Zombie Outbreaks. We want to make sure you are prepared for any crisis situation that might come along in your daily life which may include having your face eaten by the formerly deceased.

The amusing tongue-in-cheek zombie element makes the whole subject more palatable — and it strips the right-wing crazy element out of hardcore survivalism, while borrowing some its useful ideas, like the bug-out bag, or survival kit:

A “Bug Out Bag” or BOB is a pack you can carry that contains various items you will need to survive for a short period of time. It should be designed to grab and take with you if you have to leave modern your conveniences behind in the event of an crisis.

Some suggested items:

1) Food and Water for 3 days
2) First aid kit
3) Weather protection
4) Flashlight and extra batteries
5) Radio to know what’s going on around you
6) Knife or Multi-tool
7) Source of fire

The folks at Equipped To Survive have a really long list of recommended items. The folks at Wired have a few suggestions too. You can also find an Amazon List or two of things to buy. You might not have immediately thought of plastic sheeting and work gloves, but I suspect the people who went through Katrina did.

Electricity Crisis Hobbles an India Eager to Ascend

Somini Sengupta, reporting from Gurgaon, a suburb south of New Delhi, notes the long-standing energy crisis that I couldn't help but notice while there a couple summers ago:

Look up at the tops of buildings, and on any given day, you are likely to find three, four or six smokestacks poking out of each, blowing gray-black plumes into the clouds. If the smokestacks are being used, it means the power is off and the building — whether bright new mall, condominium or office — is probably being powered by diesel-fed generators.

This being India, a country of more than one billion people, the scale is staggering. In just one case, Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company, maintains five giant generators, along with a nearly 5,300-gallon tank of diesel fuel underground, as if it were a gasoline station.

The reserve fuel can power the lights, computers and air-conditioners for up to 15 days to keep Tata’s six-story building humming during these hot, dry summer months, when temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees and power cuts can average eight hours a day.

The Gurgaon skyline is studded with hundreds of buildings like this. In Gurgaon alone, the state power authority estimates that the gap between demand and supply hovers around 20 percent, and that is probably a conservative estimate.

For all those who suffer from crippling power cuts in cities like this, there are others who have no connection to electricity at all. According to the Planning Commission of India, 600 million people — roughly half the population — are off the electric grid. For this reason, it is impossible to estimate accurately the total national shortfall.
[...]
What the state cannot provide efficiently, many take for themselves. The World Bank estimates that at least $4 billion in electricity is unaccounted for each year — that is to say, stolen. Transparency International estimated in 2005 that Indians paid $480 million in bribes to put in new connections or correct bills.

Shopping centers routinely run to the sound and smell of numerous diesel generators, one by each shop's front door, powering that shop's lights and air conditioning.

When a large company or a nice restaurant loses power and the lights go out, the locals will joke, "Welcome to India!"

This is what's particularly infuriating though:

With few exceptions, there is little effort to reduce power consumption, beyond the use of low-energy light bulbs. Gurgaon is dotted with buildings that are effectively curtains of glass, soaking up the searing summer heat.

“It’s good for New York, not Gurgaon,” was the verdict of Niranjan Khatri, a general manager with ITC, an Indian conglomerate whose office tower here is one of the few to comply with so-called green building codes.

Across the highway, the nearly completed Ambi Mall promises almost a mile of shopping on each floor. Next to it, a billboard for the Mall of India promises an even bigger shopping center, one that will put India on the “global retail map.”

Never mind that Gurgaon does not have a sewage treatment plant of its own, or that the city’s Metropolitan Mall burns an average of 1,600 gallons of diesel a day to run its generators during power cuts.

Farther south, in Nirvana Country, there are only generators. The 800-unit complex of row houses and apartment blocks, still under construction, is not even connected to the electric grid. It swallows 6,000 gallons of diesel each week to meet its needs — with only a fifth of its units occupied.

It was unclear how the power needs would be met once it reached full occupancy, said M. K. Pant, a retired army colonel who is now Nirvana’s estate manager. “There’s nothing in the files,” he said. “There’s nothing in the thinking also.”

No matter. Newspaper advertisements for Nirvana Country promise “air-conditioning in all rooms.”

There seems to be a blind obedience to American norms and practices, whether or not they make sense in an Indian context.

Snow Leopard Cubs

Today's dose of cute comes from these adorable Snow Leopard Cubs:

A zoo worker holds two-month-old snow leopard cubs at a zoological park in Darjeeling, about 80 km (50 miles) north from the northeastern Indian city of Siliguri June 21, 2007.

Is it wrong to want to take them home? What could possibly go wrong?

Article Roundup

Lexington Green covers a number of thought-provoking pieces in his most recent Article Roundup. For instance:

The utter incompetence of the Palestinians is highlighted by this piece from the Financial times entitled “Business as Usual”. The Israelis are building their own Silicon Valley. The Palestinians, once the wall was completed, making it harder to murder Jews, do the one thing they know how to do, and start murdering each other. Walls work. They demarcate borders and make them much easier to patrol, monitor and defend.

Read the whole roundup; it covers many topics.

Lacking Perspective

James Rummel feels we're Lacking Perspective:

Things are pretty grim. Armed gunmen are getting bolder. Agents of the duly elected government are at risk, with many of them being assassinated in front of their families. Police officers are specifically targeted, often being kidnapped so they can be tortured to death. The message is simple: Join the side of law and order and you will be killed. The favorite method of execution is to behead the victim, a tactic favored by terrorists.

Sounds like the most overwrought prose from a journalist describing the situation in Iraq, or maybe the Palestinian Territories. But I’m talking about the drug war being waged in Mexico at this very moment. The Washington Post article behind that last link states that 600 people have died this year.

I doubt very highly that either their figures or analysis of the situation is accurate. I have reason to believe that things are much worse. StrategyPage.com states that over 1,200 people have been killed this year. What is most alarming is that the drug gangs are actively recruiting regular Mexican Army deserters, men that have had training in combat, weapon use, and who are able to plan and carry out complex operations.
[...]
What puzzles me is why this story isn’t front page news. How many Palestinians died in their recent little dust up between Hamas and Fatah? I am having trouble finding an accurate count, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were less than 200. Tragic as that number happens to be, it is dwarfed by the number of lives snuffed out just a few hours drive from our southern border. Yet most of the people I talk to have no idea that anything is amiss in Mexico.

How is this happening? The well-worn routes used to smuggle illegal immigrants also work to smuggle drugs.

Of course, it's the prohibition of immigration and drugs that puts so much money in criminals' hands.

Watch the Platforms, Not the Winner

Bryan Caplan (The Myth of the Rational Voter) says, Watch the Platforms, Not the Winner:

Puzzle: If you look at voting behavior, education does little to make people more Democratic or more Republican. So what difference does it make if people acquire more sensible views about policy, if it doesn't change their vote?
[...]
What I question is that we should be very interested in the differences between presidential candidates in the first place. In our competitive democracy, the candidates wind up being pretty similar in any case. The real problem of democracy is bipartisan agreement on foolish policies.

So how can more reasonable beliefs about policy sway political outcomes? The answer is surprisingly simple. When public opinion gets more reasonable, both parties adjust their positions to avoid giving the competition an edge. For example, the U.S. public is markedly less protectionist than it was in the '70's, leading both parties to become markedly less protectionist than they used to be. The identity of the winning party might make a marginal difference; but this difference is muted by the fact that politicians want to get behind whatever happens to be popular.

Voucher Use in Washington Wins Praise of Parents

Voucher Use in Washington Wins Praise of Parents — but it's too early to tell if private schools will improve DC kids' test scores; they haven't after the first year.

On the other hand, it's not too early to note that private schools cost half as much as public schools and thus get their results with half the funding:

About two-thirds of the participating students attended parochial schools operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington; the rest attended other private schools. The $7,500 scholarship that families spent was about half the average public expenditure per student in the District of Columbia public schools.

Only 10 percent of big ocean fish remain

Only 10 percent of big ocean fish remain, according to a recent study published in Nature:

A new global study concludes that 90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.

What the article does not mention is that overfishing is a well-understood example of the tragedy of the commons.

How big would the movie industry be if there were more screens?

Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) asks, How big would the movie industry be if there were more screens?:

One of the examples I use in the book to illustrate the distorting effect of limited "shelf space" in traditional markets is Hollywood box office revenues. The American megaplex theater network has only has enough screens to show about 120 films per year. Meanwhile, there are about 13,000 films shown in film festivals each year. So only a tiny fraction of the movies made get enough theatrical distribution to register any sort of significant box office revenues.

How much bigger would the movie industry be if it didn't have this distribution bottleneck suppressing measured demand for niche film? I get that question all the time, for various markets, and usually I can only guess at the answer. But now Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist at Nokia Siemens Networks, has actually done the math. Building on the work in his earlier paper on this subject, he finds that for movies, the "latent demand" for films that don't get adequate distribution is 60%-70% as big as the existing industry.

In a university not far away, sci-fi heaven

In a university not far away, sci-fi heaven:

UC Berkeley has the world's premiere collection on Mark Twain — and Yale an unmatched trove of rare medieval manuscripts. But for research on Capt. Kirk, Frankenstein or Harry Potter, nothing tops the 110,000-volume Eaton collection at UC Riverside, the world's largest library of science fiction, fantasy and horror books.

"It's like going to Graceland if you're an Elvis fan," said Drew Morse, a creative writing professor who made the pilgrimage to Riverside from Ohio last summer to study rare poetry by "Fahrenheit 451" author Ray Bradbury.

As appreciation for the literary qualities of science fiction has grown in recent years, the UC Riverside collection has emerged from an academic ghetto. No institution had ever stockpiled science fiction like this, or subjected itself to such an internal clash over the worth of the genre.

Even public libraries had considered the books disposable literature, mainly because early science fiction was published almost exclusively in paperback. But a handful of professors and a librarian at UC Riverside saw something else, and started building.

IN 1969, English professor Robert Gleckner helped the school acquire 7,500 rare science fiction, fantasy and horror novels from an eccentric Bay Area physician, J. Lloyd Eaton. Among them was a first edition of Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Eaton had scribbled plot summaries and succinct criticisms of nearly every book on faded sheets of letterhead.

But Gleckner's colleagues mocked the collection, and he banished the volumes to a storeroom and never touched them again.

And for 10 years, no one paid the books any attention — until UC Riverside's head librarian, Eleanor Montague, found them and cracked open a few. She and comparative literature scholar George Slusser began cooking up an improbable scheme: Science fiction, for all its talk of wormholes and galaxies far, far away was a form of 20th-century American literature that someone ought to keep as a cultural archive.

So in 1979, Montague dubbed Slusser the Eaton collection's first curator.

When he broke the news to friends, they shook their heads and warned him it would be career suicide.

"They told me 'You'd better not touch that, you'll never get tenured,' " Slusser said. "I said 'Hell, I'm going to do it anyway.' "

Slusser went by instinct and started scooping up every new science fiction novel that came out. With less than $10,000 to work with, he handed hundred-dollar bills to foreign graduate students so they could cart back sci-fi from Russia, Brazil, China and other worldly locales.

Slusser haunted used-book stores and estate sales on his own time. His best finds came from reclusive packrats who had refused to toss their paperbacks. One collector had drained his pool and turned it into underground storage for thousands of science fiction magazines and fan newsletters, including issues of "Amazing Stories," a 1920s-era pamphlet regarded as the world's first science fiction magazine.

All the while, fellow faculty tried to torpedo Slusser's efforts.

Now, of course, science fiction is in vogue.

Study links autism with growth hormones, big heads

Study links autism with growth hormones, big heads:

Writing in the journal Clinical Endocrinology, Dr. James Mills of the NICHD and colleagues said they compared the height, weight, head circumference and levels of growth-related hormones to growth and maturation in 71 boys with autism to a group of 59 healthy boys.

The boys with autism had higher levels of two hormones that directly regulate growth -- insulin-like growth factor-1 and IGF-2. The boys also had higher levels of hormones that indirectly affect growth.

The researchers did not measure the boys' levels of human growth hormone, which for technical reasons is difficult to evaluate.

The boys with autism and those with autism spectrum disorders had a greater head circumference on average, weighed more and had a higher body mass index than the other boys, although there was no difference in height between the two groups of boys.

Hefty Fees In Store for Misbehaving Virginia Drivers

Hefty Fees In Store for Misbehaving Virginia Drivers:

Say you are driving 78 mph on the Capital Beltway and a state trooper tickets you for "reckless driving — speeding 20 mph over." You will probably be fined $200 by the judge. But then you will receive a new, additional $1,050 fine from the Old Dominion, payable in three convenient installments. So convenient that you must pay the first one immediately, at the courthouse.

First-time drunk driver? A $300 fine from the judge and a $2,250 fee from the commonwealth.

Driving without a license? Maybe a $75 fine. Definitely a $900 fee from Virginia.

As part of the plan to fund the annual $1 billion transportation package approved this year, state legislators endorsed a new set of "civil remedial fees" for all misdemeanor and felony traffic violations, such as speeding 20 mph above the limit, reckless driving and, in some cases, driving with faulty brakes. Drivers with points on their licenses — a speeding ticket usually earns four points — will be hit for $75 for every point above eight and $100 for having that many points in the first place.

The new fees will go into effect July 1, and defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges expect chaos. Court clerks fear having to deal with angry hordes learning about the fees for the first time at the payment window.

Naturally, my first thought was, Note to self: Do not drive through Virginia, but non-residents have an out:

The fees will be imposed only on Virginia residents. All defendants must pay the fines, but the "abuser fees," as Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax) calls them, are part of the state licensing fees and cannot be imposed on out-of-state drivers.

The money has to come from somewhere, and it doesn't look like a gas tax was on the table:

Albo and Del. Thomas D. Rust (R-Fairfax), who co-sponsored the fee legislation, project that $65 million to $120 million will be raised annually to cover costs of snow removal, pothole repair and grass-mowing. Money for Northern Virginia's congested roads had to come from somewhere, they reasoned, and new taxes were not going to fly in the GOP-controlled House of Delegates.

'Project Runway' for the t-shirt crowd

Business 2.0 describes Threadless as 'Project Runway' for the t-shirt crowd:

Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart were fresh out of high school seven years ago when they had the idea that would make them millionaires. After entering an Internet T-shirt design competition, the two Chicagoans thought maybe that was the way all T-shirts should be made.

Most stores print a bunch of shirts and lose money on the ones people don't like. Instead, they figured, why not let customers rank designs ahead of time and then print only the winners?

The idea grew into an online store called Threadless that struck a chord with Web-savvy designers in Chicago and beyond; last year Nickell and DeHart sold $16 million worth of T-shirts.

The key to their success? High profit margins -- the shirts cost as little as $4 each to make and sell for $15 and up -- and a business model built on the care and feeding of an online community.

To keep the enterprise humming, Nickell, DeHart, and creative director Jeffrey Kalmikoff lead a team of 28 employees who are focused on getting customers to come back again and again -- and to bring their friends.

Threadless does it by working a simple formula. Every week, contestants upload T-shirt designs to the site, where about 700 compete to be among the six that get printed. Threadless visitors score designs on a scale of 0 to 5, and the staff selects winners from the most popular entrants.

The six lucky artists each get $2,000 in cash and merchandise, and the company gets a battle-tested design. Threadless sells out of every shirt it offers.

Adaptation and the Economy

Arnold Kling cites economist Douglass North on Adaptation and the Economy to emphasize that economics isn't just about allocation:

[Textbook] economics applied to economic development or economic history may account well for the performance of an economy at a moment of time or ... contrasts in the performance of an economy over time; but it does not and cannot explain the dynamics of change. The major source of changes in an economy over time is structural change in the parameters held constant by the economist — technology, population, property rights, and government control over resources.

"[T]he two most significant changes in economic history were the adoption of settled agriculture around 10,000 BC and the marriage of science and business starting in the 19th century":

The First Economic Revolution created agriculture and "civilization"; the Second created an elastic supply curve of new knowledge which built economic growth into the system. Both entailed substantial institutional reorganization.

What did these revolutions mean?

Both revolutions overthrew the law of diminishing returns. Hunter-gatherers encountered diminishing returns, because there was nothing to stop over-hunting over over-foraging a heavily populated area. Agriculture could feed much larger populations. Labor and capital (such as farm implements) also were subject to diminishing returns, but scientific advances broke those constraints.

Both revolutions solved problems of dealing with the physical environment but created new problems for dealing with the social environment. For agriculture to work well, property rights must be defined. To reach the stage that we call modern economic development, rules need to cover trading rather than basic sharing.

Sometimes we forget how much the rules have changed:

In short, what is required is a shift from a status-based and coercive society that relies on mutual control, respect of ranks, and strictly enforced codes of generosity, to an open society where free entry and exit, democratic governance (including acceptance of dissent), competence criteria, and socioeconomic differentiation are used as guiding principles or expressly allowed to operate.

The master of getting thing done

David Allen, the master of getting thing done, has lived an odd life:

He's been a drug-taking grad-school dropout, a Zen-inspired karate black belt, and a trainer for personal-growth seminars, all before finding his calling at age 36 as a training consultant for corporations such as Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Mills.
[...]
Allen was a 23-year-old grad student at UC Berkeley in 1968 when he met a psychic named Michael who said he owed Allen a karmic debt over a past-life transgression. Michael began teaching him karate and sharing Zen concepts such as "mind like water. " (It means that just as a pebble tossed into a still pond creates only gentle ripples, small events need not create big waves in our lives.)

Michael's teachings convinced Allen that the life he was living was phony. He quit everything — school, drugs, his first marriage, his home — and took a job driving a cab. "I was just one wired, raw thing," Allen says.

Thus began a spiritual quest that eventually led him in 1971 to John-Roger, an L.A.-based mystic who later formed a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness that has courted controversy and attracted such high-profile adherents as Arianna Huffington.

"I knew in the first 30 seconds that he didn't give a rat's ass if anybody believed him," Allen says. "He knew what he was talking about."

Allen was inspired. He quit his job and moved to Los Angeles. For the next six years, he worked a series of odd jobs — landscaper, vitamin distributor, glass-blowing lathe operator, travel agent, gas station manager, U-Haul dealer, moped salesman, restaurant cook — until John-Roger started a personal-growth training program in 1978 called Insight Seminars.

Insight was based on a popular self-help seminar for young professionals called Lifespring, which employed potent psychological techniques to break down participants' entrenched thought patterns and replace them with ostensibly more positive states of mind. Although many graduates swore that Lifespring changed their lives for the better, the for-profit company was also slapped with dozens of lawsuits claiming psychological trauma and even wrongful death by suicide.

Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s — so far

Marc Andreessen lists his Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s — so far — and I can't say I've read any of them. I might have to fix that.

Vote for me, dimwit

In Vote for me, dimwit, the Economist reviews Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter:

The world is a complex place. Most people are inevitably ignorant about most things, which is why shows like “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” are funny. Politics is no exception. Only 15% of Americans know who Harry Reid (the Senate majority leader) is, for example. [...] Many political scientists think this does not matter because of a phenomenon called the “miracle of aggregation” or, more poetically, the “wisdom of crowds”. If ignorant voters vote randomly, the candidate who wins a majority of well-informed voters will win. The principle yields good results in other fields. On “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, another quiz show, the answer most popular with the studio audience is correct 91% of the time. Financial markets, too, show how a huge number of guesses, aggregated, can value a stock or bond more accurately than any individual expert could. But Mr Caplan says that politics is different because ignorant voters do not vote randomly.

Instead, he identifies four biases that prompt voters systematically to demand policies that make them worse off. First, people do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often yields public benefits: they have an anti-market bias. Second, they underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners: they have an anti-foreign bias. Third, they equate prosperity with employment rather than production: Mr Caplan calls this the “make-work bias”. Finally, they tend to think economic conditions are worse than they are, a bias towards pessimism.

An amusing illustration:

The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don't they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”

Forbidden Knowledge

J. Brad Hicks compares Sarah Hrdy's discoveries about infanticide to the forbidden knowledge of Arthur Machen's horror classic, The Great God Pan:

So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past.

What's more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother's social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child's birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed.

When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation.

And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren't capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.

Hrdy's work led another researcher to the conclusion that 75 percent of SIDS cases were infanticides.

Claims that intelligent left-wing bloggers couldn't possibly agree with

Tyler Cowen makes some claims that intelligent left-wing bloggers couldn't possibly agree with:

We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can.

Dumbocracy in America

In Dumbocracy in America, Nick Schulz interviews Bryan Caplan on his recent book, The Myth of the Rational Voter:

If people were merely ignorant about economics, I wouldn't be worried. After all, if you never studied a subject, we'd expect you just to be agnostic about it. The real problem is that people have strong opinions about economics even though they've never studied it — and their strong opinions tend to be the opposite of what you'd learn in an economics class.

As you indicate, I identify four main ways that people's beliefs about economics tend to go wrong. I call them anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias. But you want "striking concrete examples," not exposition, so here goes:

Example of anti-market bias: The way people react to higher gas prices in the face of natural disasters. When supply goes down in a competitive market, you should expect the price to go up. It's hardly a sign of "conspiracy" or "gouging," contrary to much of the public. More importantly, this price rise has large socially beneficial effects: In the short run, it encourages people to cut back on low-value uses of fuel; in the slightly longer-run, it encourages sellers to direct their inventories to the hardest-hit areas; and given a little more time, the price rise encourages additional production until the crisis abates.

Example of anti-foreign bias: These days, the best example has to be hysteria about immigration. In essence, trading labor is like trading anything — it's mutually beneficial for buyer and seller. But public opinion has made immigrants a scapegoat for a long — and often contradictory — list of social ills. We hear simultaneous complaints that immigrants are "taking all our jobs" and "all going on welfare" — well, which is it? Their underlying theory is that economic interaction with foreigners has to have bad consequences, so people eagerly blame foreigners for anything that comes to mind.

Furthermore, even if you take some of the complaints about immigration seriously, the subjective reaction is out of proportion to the objective magnitude. George Borjas, an economist famous for emphasizing the costs of immigration, estimates that immigrants have reduced low-skilled Americans' wages by only 8%. And if that were one's real complaint, why would you want to deport millions of immigrants, instead of e.g. proposing extra taxes on immigrants to compensate low-skilled Americans?

Example of make-work bias: Make-work bias is probably one of the main rationales behind European labor market regulation. Among other things, you have a lot of laws that make it difficult to fire workers, seemingly forgetting that the key to social prosperity is not employment, but production. These laws backfire in other ways - making it hard for employers to fire workers also makes employers reluctant to hire in the first place. But the key point is that labor is a valuable resource — and passing laws that require employers to waste valuable resources makes little sense.

Example of pessimistic bias: The example that strikes me more and more as I grow older is the refusal to recognize how much life has improved over the past twenty years. I remember life in the '80's — the Internet alone has raised my standard of living in ways I could barely have imagined. But many remain convinced that life is getting worse — and want to "do something" about it.

Schulz asks Caplan about economists underestimating the value of markets:

Actually, I say that economists underestimate the virtues of markets relative to the democratic alternative. Rational voter models have made economists too optimistic about democracy. If you think that democracy works well, then every market failure you find makes you say "Let's turn to the democratic process to fix it." If and when economists give up on rational voter models, they will be a lot more likely to say "The market's not perfect, but I'm worried that the democratic process will just make the problem worse."

Definitely read the whole thing.

The professor who put 50 worms in his own body

The professor who put 50 worms in his own body may have found a cure for allergies:

He wanted to test his theory by infecting asthmatics in a clinical trial. But the Ethics Committee refused to grant him permis