The Facebook economy

The Facebook economy has grown from nothing to spawning entire venture capital funds devoted to it. How quickly things change:

Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded — horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.

The servers — those digital canaries in the mine shaft — crashed, and crashed again. "It was crazy," Shen says. "We were down 17 of the first 30 days." Then it got worse. With traffic peaking at 1.5 million users, server costs topped $20,000 a month. And there was no way to monetize their creation.

Still, they soldiered on for more than a year, keeping afloat with tens of thousands of dollars in loans while hoping to figure out a way to turn their enormous fan base into a brilliant business. It never happened — at least not on MySpace.

This spring, however, Shen and Tokuda spent a few days porting their MySpace hit over to Facebook. The upstart social network began as a hangout for high school and college students and last September allowed anyone to join.

Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications. Which is exactly what Shen and Tokuda did when they rewrote their app and let it loose on Facebook.

Two months later, the duo had generated more than $200,000 in ad revenue. By late July they had 14 other apps up and running, with more than 22 million users. "When we started, we had no idea what we were doing," Shen says. "Now we have a whole suite of applications, and that's where our power is."

It's an increasingly common tale as the Facebook economy picks up steam. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. While a possible Facebook IPO or acquisition could change things overnight, for the moment it's a free-for-all.

Irish Slave Trade

Today, slavery is strongly associated with racism, not religious intolerance, and most people aren't even aware of the Irish slave trade that provided the Indies with cheap labor:

Although the Africans and Irish were housed together and were the property of the planter owners, the Africans received much better treatment, food and housing. In the British West Indies the planters routinely tortured white slaves for any infraction. Owners would hang Irish slaves by their hands and set their hands or feet afire as a means of punishment. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of Negro slaves on the grounds that, "as the planters would have to pay much more for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (Irish)...." many of whom, he charged, were killed by overwork and cruel treatment. African Negroes cost generally about 20 to 50 pounds Sterling, compared to 900 pounds of cotton (about 5 pounds Sterling) for an Irish. They were also more durable in the hot climate, and caused fewer problems. The biggest bonus with the Africans though, was they were NOT Catholic, and any heathen pagan was better than an Irish Papist. Irish prisoners were commonly sentenced to a term of service, so theoretically they would eventually be free. In practice, many of the slavers sold the Irish on the same terms as prisoners for servitude of 7 to 10 years.

Job interview brainteasers

From job interview brainteasers:

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Think about that for a minute or two before reading on.

No peaking.

OK, my first thought goes to the square-cube law beloved by sci-fi geeks. My inch-high counterpart should be dramatically stronger for his weight, like an insect, so he should be able simply to jump out of the blender.

Anyway, here are some quasi-official responses mentioned in the article:

1. Use the measurement marks to climb out
2. Try to unscrew the glass
3. Risk riding out the air current

One-Month-Old Leopard Cub

Today's dose of cute comes from this one-month-old leopard cub at Jordan Zoo, near Amman.

The World in 1900: Poverty

Brad DeLong shares a tremendous amount of fascinating economic history in The World in 1900: Poverty:

A quarter of American households in 1900 had boarders or lodgers (compared to two percent today). Half of American households in 1900 had fewer rooms than persons (compared to five percent today). A quarter of American households in 1900 had running water (compared to ninety-nine percent today). An eighth of American households in 1900 had flush toilets (compared to ninety-eight percent today). Less than a fifth had refrigerators, less than one-twelfth had gas or electric lights, less than one-twentieth had telephones or washing machines, and of course there were no radios or televisions or vacuum cleaners or central heating, to list just those major appliances that have greater than ninety percent coverage today.

And even if you did have a four room house, could you afford to heat more than one room of it? Many Homestead four-room houses became two-room houses — the kitchen and the bedroom — in the depths of the western Pennsylvania winter.
[...]
Almost always the first luxury that a working-class family moving up would purchase would be the services of a laundress: since laundry was expensive and difficult, few working-class families could maintain upper-middle-class standards of cleanliness. How often would you take baths if the water had to brought in from an outside pump, and then heated on the stove? How often would you wash your clothes if everything had to be washed out in the sink, if the fabrics were three times as heavy and the detergents one-third as powerful as the ones available today, and if as a result the laundry was a full day’s chore? Hand laundry was not a two hour a week task. Those who could afford the resources to maintain bourgeois styles of cleanliness flaunted it. White shirts, white dresses, white gloves are all powerful indications of wealth in turn of the century America. They said "I don't have to do my own laundry and ," and they said it loudly.

I've been saying this an awful lot lately, but read the whole thing.

Return of the "Elephant Gun"

In Return of the "Elephant Gun", Eric Daniel notes that many modern militaries are fielding big-bore rifles again — but first he looks back at the good old days:

I was introduced to big bore anti-tank (anti-material) rifles back in the 80’s when I became an ardent follower of the board game Advanced Squad Leader (ASL was originally produced by the Avalon Hill Game Company, which was purchased by Hasbro, who discontinued production of the game. ASL is now published by MLB pitcher Curt Schilling and his Multi-Man Publishing company.) For those of you unfamiliar with the game, ASL was arguably the most accurate and detailed squad level tactical board game ever developed, with counters representing individual squads, leaders, tanks and support weapons.

Anyway, the one support weapon that caught my eye was the L-39 Lahti 20mm AT rifle. In game terms the Lahti was heavy (5 portage points) and it fired off of the AVF kill table under the “20L” column (the only squad portable weapon capable of doing so.) In real life terms the L-39 was heavy, (109 pounds, necessatating its transport by reindeer) and possessed such savage recoil (its cartridge, the 20 mm x 138 mm Solothurn Long, was the largest ever fired by a shoulder fired weapon in the war) that the Finns dubbed it the "Norsupyssy" ("Elephant Gun"), but it was also capable of reaching out 1,000m and penetrating 10mm of armor plate. Rendered obsolete by advanced Soviet tank designs by 1941, the incrediable accuracy of the L-39 enabled it to remain in service as a long range sniper rifle.

Funding the X-Prize

Alex Tabarrok discusses Funding the X-Prize:

Yesterday, Tyler and I met with Tom Vander Ark, the president of the X-Prize Foundation, to discuss and debate the future of prizes. One interesting bit of trivia that Tom mentioned was that the X-Prize was funded with an insurance contract. The funders paid the premium and the insurance company agreed to pay if the prize conditions were met.

To figure out how to price the contract the insurance company called 'the experts' at Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. According to the experts the conditions for the X-Prize to be won (carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth's surface, twice within two weeks) were so unrealistic as to be basically impossible within any reasonable time frame. Thus, the funders got lucky. The insurance company offered the contract at a very low premium and the rest is history!

Insurance companies don't seem to understand risk all that well.

Thomas Sowell

Michael Blowhard looks at black economist Thomas Sowell and cites some interesting points from his Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality:

• How to account for the many ways in which blacks were making more progress before passage of the Civil Rights Act than they were after? An impressive example: College-educated black women were out-earning college-educated white women by 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act.


• If the U.S. is so racist, how have Asians been able to do so well? Despite being mistreated during WWII, Japanese Americans by 1959 were earning the same money whites were, and by 1969 were earning considerably more.


• If America's racism has only to do with black-skinned people, how to account for the way that West Indian immigrants have done so well in this country? By 1980, despite having been in this country in any kind of numbers for a relatively short period, black West Indians were making 94% of what whites were. (Here's a brief Time magazine article about the successes of black West Indians in the U.S.)


• If political action is such a terrific way to help a group advance, why is it that the groups that have been most prone to embrace politics -- the Irish are a prominent example here -- took so much longer to advance than did similar groups (Italians, say) who avoided politics?

In Nature’s Casino

Michael Lewis (Moneyball and The Blind Side) explains that Americans are making a lot of bad bets In Nature’s Casino:

From Miami to San Francisco, the nation’s priciest real estate now faced beaches and straddled fault lines; its most vibrant cities occupied its most hazardous land. If, after World War II, you had set out to redistribute wealth to maximize the sums that might be lost to nature, you couldn’t have done much better than Americans had done. And virtually no one — not even the weather bookies — fully understood the true odds.

Slowly the finance world has caught on, and hedge funds have sprung up to buy and sell cat bonds:

The buyer of a catastrophe bond is effectively selling catastrophe insurance. He puts down his money and will lose it all if some specified bad thing happens within a predetermined number of years: a big hurricane hitting Miami, say, or some insurance company losing more than $1 billion on any single natural disaster. In exchange, the cat-bond seller — an insurance company looking to insure itself against extreme losses — pays the buyer a high rate of interest.

I naively assumed that insurance companies understood their own line of business:

An insurance company could function only if it was able to control its exposure to loss. Geico sells auto insurance to more than seven million Americans. No individual car accident can be foreseen, obviously, but the total number of accidents over a large population is amazingly predictable. The company knows from past experience what percentage of the drivers it insures will file claims and how much those claims will cost. The logic of catastrophe is very different: either no one is affected or vast numbers of people are. After an earthquake flattens Tokyo, a Japanese earthquake insurer is in deep trouble: millions of customers file claims. If there were a great number of rich cities scattered across the planet that might plausibly be destroyed by an earthquake, the insurer could spread its exposure to the losses by selling earthquake insurance to all of them. The losses it suffered in Tokyo would be offset by the gains it made from the cities not destroyed by an earthquake. But the financial risk from earthquakes — and hurricanes — is highly concentrated in a few places.

There were insurance problems that were beyond the insurance industry’s means. Yet insurers continued to cover them, sometimes unenthusiastically, sometimes recklessly. Why didn’t insurance companies see this? Seo wondered, and then found the answer: They hadn’t listened closely enough to Karen Clark.

What Karen Clark did was obvious, yet no one else was doing it:

To better judge the potential cost of catastrophe, Clark gathered very long-term historical data on hurricanes. “There was all this data that wasn’t being used,” she says. “You could take it, and take all the science that also wasn’t being used, and you could package it in a model that could spit out numbers companies could use to make decisions. It just seemed like such an obvious thing to do.” She combined the long-term hurricane record with new data on property exposure — building-replacement costs by ZIP code, engineering reports, local building codes, etc. — and wound up with a crude but powerful tool, both for judging the probability of a catastrophe striking any one area and for predicting the losses it might inflict. Then she wrote her paper about it.

The attention Clark’s paper attracted was mostly polite. Two years later, she visited Lloyd’s — pregnant with her first child, hauling a Stone Age laptop — and gave a speech to actual risk-takers. In nature’s casino, they had set themselves up as the house, and yet they didn’t know the odds. They assumed that even the worst catastrophe could generate no more than a few billion dollars in losses, but her model was generating insured losses of more than $30 billion for a single storm — and these losses were far more likely to occur than they had been in the previous few decades. She projected catastrophic storms from the distant past onto the present-day population and storms from the more recent past onto richer and more populated areas than they had actually hit. (If you reran today the hurricane that struck Miami in 1926, for instance, it would take out not the few hundred million dollars of property it destroyed at the time but $60 billion to $100 billion.) “But,” she says, “from their point of view, all of this was just in this computer.”

She spoke for 45 minutes but had no sense that she had been heard. “The room was very quiet,” she says. “No one got up and left. But no one asked questions either. People thought they had already figured it out. They were comfortable with their own subjective judgment.” Of course they were; they had made pots of money the past 20 years insuring against catastrophic storms. But — and this was her real point — there hadn’t been any catastrophic storms! The insurers hadn’t been smart. They had been lucky.

Her big win came with Hurricane Andrew:

Hurricane Andrew made landfall at 5 on a Monday morning. By 9 she knew only the path of the storm and its intensity, but the information enabled her to estimate the losses: $13 billion, give or take. If builders in South Florida had ignored the building codes and built houses to lower standards, the losses might come in even higher. [...] The scuttlebutt from Lloyd’s already had it that losses couldn’t possibly exceed $6 billion, and some thought they were looking at a loss of just a few hundred million. “No one believed it,” she says of her estimate. “No one thought it was right. No one said, ‘Yeah, $13 billion sounds like a reasonable number.’ ” As she ate, she wondered what $13 billion in losses looked like. [...] It took months for the insurers to tote up their losses: $15.5 billion. (Building codes in South Florida had not been strictly enforced.) Fifteen and a half billion dollars exceeded all of the insurance premiums ever collected in Dade County. Eleven insurance companies went bust. And this wasn’t anything like the perfect storm. If it had gone into Miami, it could have bankrupted the whole industry. Clark had been right: the potential financial losses from various catastrophes were too great, and too complicated, to be judged by human intuition. “No one ever called to congratulate me,” Clark says, laughing. “But I had a lot of people call and ask to buy the model.”

One last quote:

Wall Street is a machine for turning information nobody cares about into information people can get rich from.

Go read the whole article.

Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society

Freeman Dyson shares his Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Read the whole article.

Growing into growth

Growing into growth notes that people are notoriously bad at judging what compounding can do:

The fact that we systematically underestimate even the medium-term effect of compounding growth I think severely hobbles our moral judgment about the importance of economic growth relative to other social desiderata. I used to puzzle a great deal over the fact that moral philosophers (as opposed to economists, who are the vanguard) have devoted so little attention to economic growth given the immense, swift improvements in well-being that high rates of growth have delivered wherever they have occurred. The now-well-documented historical record suggests that economic growth has done more for the welfare of humanity than any moral creed or non-economic initiative meant to improve the dignity and quality of human life. So why is there no treatise required of all undergraduates singing growth's praises and setting it out as a moral imperative for all decent peoples?

"Stupid" investors, rejoice!

Ben Stein says, "Stupid" investors, rejoice! in his recent efficient-markets piece:

No one is too stupid to make money in the stock market. But there are many who are too smart to make money.

To make money, at least in the postwar world, all you have to do is buy the broad indexes domestically — both in the emerging world and in the developed world--and, to throw in a little certainty about your old age, maybe buy some annuities.

To lose money, pretend you're really, really clever, and that by reading financial journalism and watching CNBC, you can outguess the market day by day. Along with that, you must have absolutely no sense of proportion about money and the world at large.

Affirmative Action Backfires

Gail Heriot, professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, notes that Affirmative Action Backfires when law schools admit less-qualified black applicants:

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: [UCLA law professor Richard] Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions — about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.
[...]
While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.
[...]
The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.

Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.

David Friedman adds his comments:

After reading the op-ed, I told my wife about it. She pointed out that the argument was not original with Sanders. Almost twenty years ago, in his very interesting Choosing a College: A Guide for Parents and Students, Thomas Sowell made precisely the same point in the context of colleges rather than law schools. Black students at MIT had math scores well above the national average but far below the average for white students at MIT; they would have gotten a better education at a less elite engineering school.

Farewell to Alms, pp.112-192

Tyler Cowen discusses Farewell to Alms, pp.112-192 and again spawns some fascinating discussion. Read the previous installment, if you haven't already.

Most successful pirate was beautiful and tough

Evidently the most successful pirate was beautiful and tough:

You can keep your Bluebeards and your Blackbeards. The most successful pirate of all time controlled a fleet of more than 1,500 ships and upwards of 80,000 sailors — and she did it all without the help of facial hair.

When a Chinese pirate captain named Cheng married a beautiful prostitute in 1801, he wasn't just getting the girl of his dreams; he was making the best financial investment of his career. His new bride, known to history as Cheng I Sao, or "Wife of Cheng," agreed to the marriage on one condition — that she would share equally in his power and would be given the opportunity to help him secure more wealth.

Sounded like a deal to Cheng, and for the next six years, the husband and wife teamed up to grow their piracy business along the coast of the South China Sea, as far south as Malaysia. But then, in 1807, Cheng passed away. Instead of stepping aside like a "proper" widow, Cheng I Sao promptly took the reins.

Although clearly ahead of her time, Cheng I Sao was shrewd enough to realize that the pirate masses weren't likely as enlightened. So, her first act as leader was to make her husband's second-in-command, Chang Pao, official captain of the fleet.

While Chang Pao led the men into battle, Cheng I Sao focused her attention on business, military strategy, and the enormous task of governing a growing body of ruffians. In the years following her husband's death, she steadily brought more and more outlaws under the banner of her Red Flag Fleet.

In fact, Cheng I Sao was eventually responsible for nearly all the piracy in the region and her fleet exceeded the size of many countries' navies. She also expanded the scope of the business, branching out from simple attack-and-pillage jobs to protection schemes, blackmail, and extortion. Cheng I Sao's reach also extended to the mainland, where she set up an extensive spy network and developed economic ties with farmers who would supply her men with food.

If Cheng I Sao's business practices were exemplary, then her system of pirate law was nothing short of revolutionary. The code of conduct she wrote for her men prescribed much harsher punishments than previous pirate laws had. A disobeyed order was cause for beheading (as was stealing from the common plunder), and deserters stood to lose their ears.

Ironically, Cheng I Sao's most famous laws applied to the taking of female prisoners. Ugly women were returned to shore, free of charge. Attractive captives were auctioned off to the crew, unless a pirate personally purchased the captive, in which case they were considered married. Of course, if that pirate cheated on his new bride, Cheng I Sao had him killed.

Murder, thievery, and intricate crime syndicates will eventually garner the full attention of the law, and Cheng I Sao certainly had the authorities on her tail. But, here again, she proved more successful than her male counterparts.

Cheng I Sao repelled attack after attack by both the Chinese navy and the many Portuguese and British bounty hunters brought in to help capture her. Then, in 1810, the Chinese government tried a different tactic — they offered her universal pirate amnesty in exchange for peace.

Cheng I Sao jumped at the opportunity and headed for the negotiating table. There, the pirate queen arranged what was, all told, a killer deal. Fewer than 400 of her men received any punishment, and a mere 126 were executed. The remaining pirates got to keep their booty and were offered military jobs.

As for Cheng I Sao, she retired with her loot and her new husband (former righthand man, Chang Pao) and opened a gambling house. She died peacefully in 1844, a 69-year-old grandmother.

A nation of outlaws

Stephen Mihm notes that a century ago it was not China but America that was a nation of outlaws:

A committee of would-be reformers who met in Boston in 1859 launched one of the first studies of American food purity, and their findings make for less-than-appetizing reading: candy was found to contain arsenic and dyed with copper chloride; conniving brewers mixed extracts of "nux vomica," a tree that yields strychnine, to simulate the bitter taste of hops. Pickles contained copper sulphate, and custard powders yielded traces of lead. Sugar was blended with plaster of Paris, as was flour. Milk had been watered down, then bulked up with chalk and sheep's brains. Hundred-pound bags of coffee labeled "Fine Old Java" turned out to consist of three-fifths dried peas, one-fifth chicory, and only one-fifth coffee.

Though there was the occasional clumsy attempt at domestic reform by midcentury — most famously in response to the practice of selling "swill milk" taken from diseased cows force-fed a diet of toxic refuse produced by liquor distilleries — little changed. And just as the worst sufferers of adulterated food in China today are the Chinese, so it was the Americans who suffered in the early 19th-century United States. But when America started exporting food more broadly after the Civil War, the practice started to catch up to us.

One of the first international scandals involved "oleo-margarine," a butter substitute originally made from an alchemical process involving beef fat, cattle stomach, and for good measure, finely diced cow, hog, and ewe udders. This "greasy counterfeit," as one critic called it, was shipped to Europe as genuine butter, leading to a precipitous decline in butter exports by the mid-1880s. (Wily entrepreneurs, recognizing an opportunity, bought up genuine butter in Boston, affixed counterfeit labels of British butter manufacturers, and shipped them to England.) The same decade saw a similar, though less unsettling problem as British authorities discovered that lard imported from the United States was often adulterated with cottonseed oil.

Even worse was the meatpacking industry, whose practices prompted a trade war with several European nations. The 20th-century malfeasance of the industry is well known today: "deviled ham" made of beef fat, tripe, and veal byproducts; sausages made from tubercular pork; and, if Upton Sinclair is to be believed, lard containing traces of the occasional human victim of workplace accidents. But the international arena was the scene of some of the first scandals, most notably in 1879, when Germany accused the United States of exporting pork contaminated with trichinae worms and cholera. That led several countries to boycott American pork. Similar scares over beef infected with a lung disease intensified these trade battles.

Food, of course, was only the beginning. In the literary realm, for most of the 19th century the United States remained an outlaw in the world of international copyright. The nation's publishers merrily pirated books without permission, and without paying the authors or original publishers a dime. When Dickens published a scathing account of his visit, "American Notes for General Circulation," it was, appropriately enough, immediately pirated in the United States.

In one industry after another, 19th-century American producers churned out counterfeit products in remarkable quantities, slapping fake labels on locally made knockoffs of foreign ales, wines, gloves, and thread. As one expose at the time put it: "We have 'Paris hats' made in New York, 'London Gin' and 'London Porter' that never was in a ship's hold, 'Superfine French paper' made in Massachusetts."

Counterfeiters of patent medicines were especially notorious. This was a bit ironic, given that most of these remedies were pretty spurious already, but that didn't stop the practice. The most elaborate schemes involved importing empty bottles, filling them with bogus concoctions, and then affixing fake labels from well-respected European firms.

Americans also displayed a particular talent for counterfeiting currency. This was a time when individual banks, not the federal government, supplied the nation's paper money in a bewildering variety of so-called "bank notes." Counterfeiters flourished to the point that in 1862 one British writer, after counting close to 6,000 different species of counterfeit or fraudulent bills in circulation, could reasonably assure his readers that "in America, counterfeiting has long been practiced on a scale which to many will appear incredible."

What was it that made the 19th-century United States such a hotbed of bogus goods? And why is China's economic boom today, as New York Times writer Howard French clucked earlier this month, "minted in counterfeit"?

Piracy, fraud, and counterfeiting, whether of currency, commodities, or brand-name electronics, flourishes at a particular moment in a capitalist society: the regulatory interregnum that emerges in the wake of fast-paced capitalist change. This period is one in which technology has improved, often dramatically, and markets have burst their older boundaries. Yet the country still relies on obsolete ways of controlling commerce. Until there's something to replace them, counterfeiters and other flim-flam operators flourish, pushing new means of making money to their logical, if unethical, conclusion.

Figwit

In reading up on Flight of the Conchords and The Lord of the Rings, I just came across the story of Figwit:

In New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy based on the book of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien, Figwit is the fan-derived name for an unnamed Elf extra played by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords fame. "Figwit" is derived from "Frodo is great…who is that?" This is in reference to the distraction viewers may experience due to Figwit's physical appearance and demeanor.

Figwit is seen in the first movie during the council of Elrond. He sits next to Aragorn until they all stand up to argue. After Frodo shouts "I will take it!" and everyone turns and looks at him, Figwit is standing on the far right. He is standing in the background for only a fraction of a second.

Bret McKenzie is also seen in the third movie (credited as "Elf Escort") in the scene where Arwen is leaving for the Grey Havens and has the vision about her future son Eldarion. He is the one who tells her to get back with the others. He has two lines: "Lady Arwen, we cannot delay!" and then "My lady!"

Figwit's rise to fame began shortly after the first movie. Peter Jackson, who directed the trilogy, stated in the DVD commentary for The Return of the King that he was given dialogue in the third movie because Jackson became aware of the attention given to this extra. Jackson mentions the phenomenon in the commentary track on the extended version of the Return of the King DVD: "the decision to give him a speaking role was developed after the scene was scripted. Originally just a random cast extra was to give the lines, but it was decided that it would be fun if the Figwit actor was brought in to deliver them."

HBO renews cult favorite Conchords

HBO renews cult favorite Conchords. That's the good news. Now Bret and Jemaine need to put together enough songs to fill out a second season, and they don't have years to do it. That's the not-so-good news.

Frodo, Don't Wear the Ring

I just caught up on Flight of the Conchords, and naturally I loved their video for Frodo:



Of course, the best lyrics come near the end, when Bret and Jemaine start busting rhymes:

Yo Frodo, what you doin’ wearing the ring?
All powerful jewelry, is that your new thing?
I know it’s hard when you’re little more than three foot four
Your little ass so close to the floor.
Trying to lead the fellows to the gates of Mordor
The Fellowship!
(Yea the fellowship)
I don’t rap about bitches and hos,
I rap about witches and trolls,
just passing on the words of the Elven king,
Wisdom to all
Frodo! Don’t wear the ring!
Frodo don’t wear the ring,
The magical bling bling,
You’ll never be the Lord of the Rings

Fans of Tolkien and of rock music probably know that there are plenty of Tolkien-inspired rock songs. Some of the most famous include Led Zepplin's Ramble On, The Battle of Evermore, and Misty Mountain Hop. The earliest of the three, Ramble On, from 1969's Led Zeppelin II, shares the folk-and-hard-rock flavor of Frodo:

The Distant Future does not include "Frodo" — but "Robots" and the others should tide you over until the full album comes out.

Holding a Program in One's Head

Paul Graham shares some tips for Holding a Program in One's Head:

It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points by accident. Someone has an idea for a new project, but because it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do it in off hours — which turn out to be more productive because there are no distractions. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. Because it's initially just an experiment, instead of a "production" language he uses a mere "scripting" language — which is in fact far more powerful. He completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but this is a labor of love and he wants it to be perfect. And since no one is going to see it except him, he omits any comments except the note-to-self variety. He works in a small group perforce, because he either hasn't told anyone else about the idea yet, or it seems so unpromising that no one else is allowed to work on it. Even if there is a group, they couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it changes too fast for that to be possible. And the project starts small because the idea is small at first; he just has some cool hack he wants to try out.

Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do all eight things wrong. In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas.

Low Cost Cooling

David Friedman wonders why this Low Cost Cooling idea isn't in wider use:

A common hot weather strategy, especially for people living in big old houses without air conditioning, is to open windows at night when it is cool out, close them in the morning.

It should be straightforward to automate the procedure, using windows or vents that can be set to open when the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside, close when it is warmer, with fans to increase the airflow when desired. I would expect both the capital cost and the operating cost of such a system, used to replace or supplement air conditioning, to be trivial relative to the cost of air conditioning itself.

Yet I do not think I have ever seen such a system. Have I missed it? Or is there some non-obvious problem with the idea?

An anonymous commenter has this to say:

When I was in engineering school about 25 years ago, I did a project studying such systems. They were entirely possible (and in fact some had been built as demonstrations), but the cost was prohibitive. One key enabling technology has blossomed since that time: networking over power wires. You've got to run power wires to each window for the motor, so you use them for the control network also.

However, it still costs too much. The cost of networking has plummeted, and a 3-GHz PC costs much less than the TRS-80 8-bit computer I used in that project, but a motor in each window costs just as much as it ever did, and the cost of installation labor is higher.

This is the idea that seemed natural to me:

A more practical idea is to rig the central heat/air with high-volume controlled vents to the outside. You leave your windows closed, but the system detects when it is appropriate to circulate outside air rather than recirculating artificially heated or cooled inside air. A mass-produced system like this should only cost $200 more than a regular high-efficiency furnace & central air (that is, about the same as the building permits required to install a new furnace!), and I think in the climate here it would pay off in the first year. But I just don't see anything like that on the market...

Women Have Excellent Navigational Abilities To High Calorie Foods

Randall Parker (FuturePundit) cites an article explaining that Women Have Excellent Navigational Abilities To High Calorie Foods:

The team asked the men and women to show the direction of a stall where they had bought a certain food, such as strawberries or tomatoes, using a compass.

A zero degree error meant the subjects were bang on target, while 90 degrees meant they were hopeless.

“Men were making 33 degree pointing error, when women were around 25 degree, which is a 27 per cent improvement,” said Mr Krasnow.

Women also did better with a high-calorie food, such as a doughnut, compared with a stick of celery.

Rent-a-pooch

I've been expecting someone to implement the Rent-a-pooch business model for a while now:

There are more than 44 million dog owners in the United States — and untold millions more dog-loving city dwellers who would enjoy having a pooch or two but don't have the time or space to walk, groom, and clean up after them.

That's the market Marlena Cervantes decided to tap when she founded Flexpetz, a groundbreaking dog-rental service that lets you bask in the unconditional love of man's best friend without the trouble of having to care for it.

A dog owner and former behavioral therapist, Cervantes has experienced firsthand the positive effect that interacting with a dog can have on people with health problems, especially children. Many families, however, are unable to take on the added responsibility of dog owner-ship. Renting a well-behaved dog to those families seemed like an opportunity to spread joy - and make some money. So in March, Cervantes quit her job and launched Flexpetz in San Diego and Los Angeles. She has plans to expand her operation by opening branches in New York and San Francisco as well.

Rental and registration fees come to $120 per month. You book time with Flexpetz online or by phone. Each dog comes with its own bed, bowls, leash, chew toys, doggy waste bags, and prepackaged and premeasured dog food.

To ensure some continuity in the dog's emotional life, Flexpetz members are required to rent the dogs at least twice a month. They also must take an hour-long training session. Each dog carries an embedded chip with GPS and temperature sensors so Flexpetz can find it if it strays and make sure it's not too hot or too cold. The dogs are screened to determine how many humans they can handle, and when they aren't out on assignment, they spend their time in cage-free day-care centers.

Hot Air Balloon in Flames

This Hot Air Balloon in Flames is a terrifying image:

A hot air balloon's basket bursts into flames shortly after takeoff when it was about 25 feet off the ground in Surrey British Colombia Canada Friday evening Aug. 24, 2007. Witnesses said passengers screamed and jumped to the ground. The balloon reportedly took off from a grassy field with 12 passengers. The balloon crashed in a trailer park and campground, injuring as many as 11 people, police and local reports said. Two additional people were unaccounted for.

Again, terrifying.

On a lighter note, I recall an interview with a Hindenburg survivor who jumped from the burning dirigible. He was a circus acrobat, and dropping down to a grassy field didn't daunt him at all.

AT&T Ditches 'Fewest Dropped Calls' Ad Campaign

If you've had a friend or family member call you on a new iPhone only to have the call dropped a half-dozen times in a half-hour, then you might be skeptical of AT&T's claim to have the fewest dropped calls.

Your skepticism would be warranted. Now AT&T Ditches 'Fewest Dropped Calls' Ad Campaign:

Following a Better Business Bureau investigation into Cingular's (now AT&T's) "fewest dropped calls" ad campaign and a protracted legal fight with Sprint over the issue, AT&T is reportedly dropping its claim, according to an employee.

Turns out, the assertion was never really true, and was based on only a small part of a larger Telephia report. As a whole, the report notes that AT&T Wireless did not have the most reliable network in places like New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, according to Broadband Reports. Recent studies from Consumer Reports and JD Power mirror these findings, and have placed Cingular/AT&T at or near the the bottom of their rankings for reliability and satisfaction.

Understanding the Current Financial Turmoil

In Understanding the Current Financial Turmoil, Arnold Kling explains the difference between a default premium and a risk premium and then summarizes the current situation:

With some institutional investors burned in the sub-prime mortgage market, this has caused other institutions to question their own portfolios: which of our investments might have more potential to default than we have been allowing for? What if it turns out that bond ratings are less reliable than we thought?

The net result is that risk premiums, which had been trending down in recent years to historically low levels, have bounced back up in the past several weeks. This adversely affects companies, such as Countrwide Financial, that rely on their strong credit ratings to be able to finance their portfolios using low-cost debt. A small increase in the risk premium faced by Countrywide can cause an enormous drop in its profit margin.

Sebastian Mallaby calls this "irrationality" on the part of investors. Instead, I think of it as a breakdown in trust of the financial intermediation process. This breakdown is occurring not so much at the level of the average consumer, but among large institutional investors. Money managers who a year ago were willing to accept low risk premiums for securities are no longer willing to do so. No one is really sure whose tools for evaluating default probabilities are reliable and whose tools are not. Until financial intermediaries can re-establish the reliability of their estimates of the likely performance of various credit instruments, institutional investors will be skeptical of the hide-and-seek process. This will keep the risk premium high, with adverse effects on housing and business investment.

Study reveals why common pneumonia is so deadly

Study reveals why common pneumonia is so deadly:

Many experts assumed that inflammation killed patients. As with any bacteria or virus, the body's immune system activates to repel the invader, but in some patients this reaction becomes too strong and can itself be fatal.

"Many patients die at a very early time point — 48 hours or so, but less than 72 hours. People noticed this but they didn't know why," Li said.

His team studied the bacteria, first in lab dishes and then in mice. They looked specifically at a toxin known to be produced by the bacteria, called pneumolysin.

It was known to lyse, or break open cells, but Li's team found this also caused widespread bleeding in lung tissue.

Tests on tissue taken from human patients who died confirmed this.

"When you look at the pathology of the lung, we found bleeding everywhere in the lung. That is a key point," Li said.

And antibiotics kill bacteria by cutting them open, which releases even more pneumolysin.

Stuff

Paul Graham notes that Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly:

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.

It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the only clear space.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.

That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it. Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night (beware of anything you find yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.

In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because they were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.

Joybubbles, 58, Peter Pan of Phone Hackers, Dies

If you made up a fictional character like Joybubbles, no one would find him the least bit believable. Joybubbles, 58, Peter Pan of Phone Hackers, Dies:

Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of “phone phreaks,” died on Aug. 8 in Minneapolis.
[...]
Josef Carl Engressia Jr. was born May 25, 1949, and moved often because his father was a school-picture photographer. At 4 or 5, he learned to dial by using the hookswitch like a telegraph key. Four years later, he discovered that he could disconnect a call by whistling. He found this out when he imitated a sound in the background on a long-distance call and the line cut off. It turned out that his whistle precisely replicated a crucial phone company signal, a 2,600-cycles-per-second tone.

Joybubbles’s parents had no phone for five years because of their son’s obsession. Later, his mother encouraged it by reading him technical books. His high school yearbook photo showed him in a phone booth.

By the time he was a student at the University of South Florida, Joybubbles was dialing toll-free or nonworking numbers to reach a distant switching point. Unbeknownst to telephone operators, he could use sounds to dial another number, free. He could then jump anywhere in the phone system. He was disconnected from college after being caught making calls for friends at $1 a call. In 1971, he moved to Memphis, where he was convicted of phone fraud. In Millington, Tenn., he was hired to clean phones, a job he hated. In 1975, he moved to Denver to ferret out problems in Mountain Bell’s network.

He tired of that and moved to Minneapolis on June 12, 1982, partly because that date’s numerical representation of 6-12 is the same as the city’s area code. He advertised for people yearning to discuss things telephonic and weaved a web of phone lines to accommodate them. He lived on Social Security disability payments and part-time jobs like letting university agriculture researchers use his superb sense of smell to investigate how to control the odor of hog excrement.

A Farewell to Alms, pp.1-112

Tyler Cowen discusses A Farewell to Alms, pp.1-112 and spawns some fascinating discussion. Read the whole thing.

Parallel Play

In Parallel Play, Tim Page explores how a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome explained a lifetime of restless isolation:

Oddly, the book that helped pull me into the human race was Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” which I had picked up in a moment of early-teen hippie scorn, fully intending to mock what I was sure would be an “uncool” justification of bourgeois rules and regulations. Instead, the book offered clearly stated reasons for courtesy, gentility, and scrupulousness—reasons that I could respect, understand, and implement. It suggested ways to inaugurate conversations without launching into a lecture, reminded me of the importance of listening as well as speaking, and convinced me that manners, properly understood, existed to make other people feel comfortable, rather than (as I had suspected) to demonstrate the practitioner’s social superiority. I revelled in Post’s guidance and absorbed her lessons. And, typically, I took them too far: even today, I would never dream of addressing a teen-age busboy in a small-town diner as anything other than “sir.”

Arm-wrestling game recalled after players break arms

Arm-wrestling game recalled after players break arms:

Distributor Atlus Co. said Tuesday it will remove all 150 "Arm Spirit" arm wrestling machines from Japanese arcades after three players broke their arms grappling with the machine's mechanized appendage.

"The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it," said Atlus spokeswoman Ayano Sakiyama, calling the recall "a precaution."

"We think that maybe some players get overexcited and twist their arms in an unnatural way," she said. The company was investigating the incidents and checking the machines for any signs of malfunction.

Players of "Arm Spirit" advance through 10 levels, battling a French maid, drunken martial arts master and a Chihuahua before reaching the final showdown with a professional wrestler.

The arcade machine is not distributed overseas.

Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions

In Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions, John Tierney looks at Roy Baumeister's address to the American Psychological Association:

The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

“It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences,” he said, and continued:

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities.

Read the whole address.

Fungi Make Biodiesel Efficiently at Room Temperature

Fungi Make Biodiesel Efficiently at Room Temperature:

Typically, biodiesel is made by mixing methanol with lye and vegetable oil and then heating the brew for several hours. This links the methanol to the oils to produce energetic called esters. Unfortunately, heating the mixture is a huge waste of energy, and a major selling point of alternative fuels is efficiency. An enzyme called lipase can link oil to methanol without any extra heating, but the pure protein is expensive.

Potumarthi [of the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology] has a simple solution. Why bother purifying the lipase? It would be easier to just find an organism that produces plenty of the enzyme and squish it into pellets. In this case, the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae does the trick.

What Would You Pay To Stay Cool?

What Would You Pay To Stay Cool?:

Tucked in the massive energy bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives Aug. 4 is a provision that uses $2.25 billion in matching grants to promote an energy-saving idea that appeals to both free marketers and environmentalists.

The idea: smart grid technology. In its simplest form, it lets your "smart" electric meter talk back to the utility and record your usage by hour, so you can adjust your habits to take advantage of lower, off-peak rates.

Maybe, for example, you 'd be ready to put off running your dishwasher until 3 a.m. if you could do it with electricity that costs 5 cents a kilowatt hour, instead of 25 cents. (Today, most residential consumers pay a flat rate — a national average of 9 cents a kilowatt hour, though local rates vary widely.)
[...]
Will customer behavior really change? And how expensive must electricity be to spark a change? In a California test that ran from 2003 through 2005, the average customer reduced his usage by 13% during the hottest summer hours when rates were five times higher. Customers with smart thermostats reduced their usage by 27%, and customers with gateway systems, which adjust the electricity use of multiple appliances, reduced their usage by 43% during the peak hours.

Virus Spreading Alarm and Pig Disease in China

Virus Spreading Alarm and Pig Disease in China:

A highly infectious swine virus is sweeping China’s pig population, driving up pork prices and creating fears of a global pandemic among domesticated pigs.

Animal virus experts say Chinese authorities are playing down the gravity and spread of the disease.

So far, the mysterious virus — believed to cause an unusually deadly form of an infection known as blue-ear pig disease — has spread to 25 of this country’s 33 provinces and regions, prompting a pork shortage and the strongest inflation in China in a decade.

More than that, China’s past lack of transparency — particularly over what became the SARS epidemic — has created global concern.

“They haven’t really explained what this virus is,” says Federico A. Zuckermann, a professor of immunology at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. “This is like SARS. They haven’t sent samples to any international body. This is really irresponsible of China. This thing could get out and affect everyone.”

There are no clear indications that blue-ear disease — if that is what this disease is — poses a threat to human health.

Why Study War?

Why Study War?, Victor Davis Hanson asks:

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument — let alone an assent — but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.
[...]
This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war — and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
[...]
Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans — over 3.2 million — lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them — which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars — or threats of wars — put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces — but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking — as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil — and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary — problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo — and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation — or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.

His conclusion:

We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.

Definitely read the whole article — and continue on to read Where to Start, his recommended reading list.

Gamers' world reveals secrets of the next epidemic

I recently cited some of game-designer Ryan Dancey's examples of online games gone awry. Now it appears that real epidemiologists are studying the World of Warcraft outbreak to improve their models of how diseases spread. Gamers' world reveals secrets of the next epidemic:

But Lofgren, who played the game, alerted Fefferman, and they studied what they could.

Fefferman, a medical epidemiologist, immediately recognized human behaviors she had not ever factored in when creating computer models of disease outbreaks. For instance, what she calls the "stupid factor."

"Someone thinks, 'I'll just get close and get a quick look and it won't affect me,"' she said.

"Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public health measures. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone -- will they stay?" Fefferman added.

"No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave."

She will now incorporate such behavior into her scenarios, and Fefferman is working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other popular games.