Critical Chain 6

The folks of the Theory of Constraints Center have a little project game to demonstrate how task and resource dependencies combine with a bit of unpredictability to create a cascade effect.

Imagine you have a simple project with five tasks, each of which is expected to take seven days. Since Tasks A and B can be done in parallel, and Tasks C and D can be done in parallel, we should expect the whole project to be done in 21 days.



But those five tasks don't take exactly seven days each — they take roughly seven days each — and for our little game we roll a pair of dice for each task to represent that uncertainty.

Let's say our random task durations come out as follows:

Task A — 5 days
Task B — 9
Task C — 3
Task D — 8
Task E — 6

Then our whole project is done in 23 days, not 21.




Hey, that's not so bad, right? You roll high sometimes; you roll low sometimes. We expected 21, but it came out 23.

But let's take another look. Our average roll was just 6.2 — less than 7. We rolled better than average, yet our total was worse than average. In fact, if we look at each color — I'm assuming each color represents a different resource dependency — then each color scores better than average too.

Delays accumulate, while advances do not.

Beaufort Scale

Howtoons explains the Beaufort Scale in pictures:

Over thousands of years sailors have learnt to estimate the speed of the wind just by looking about. This technique matured into what we now call the Beaufort scale. The universe tells you everything you need to know about it as long as you are prepared to watch, to listen, to smell, in short to observe.

The Physics of Medieval Archery

This article on The Physics of Medieval Archery simplifies away one of the most interesting elements — but the diagram hints at it:

The bow — any bow — is basically a spring. The archer does work on this spring as he draws the bow, storing potential energy in the elastically deformed bowstave. When he releases the string, some of this potential energy is converted into kinetic energy of the arrow, through the action of the tension in the bowstring accelerating the arrow, the arrow leaves the bow at high speed and wings its way towards its target. Its orientation is stabilised by three fletchings at the rear of the arrow.

If we draw a graph of the force F needed to draw the arrow back through a distance x, the area under the graph represents the work done on the system and hence the potential energy stored in the bow. If the graph is a straight line through the origin (i.e. the bow behaves like a spring that obeys Hooke's law), this energy will be equal to Fx/2 (see diagram).

In fact, the graph of F against x is usually a curve, because of the complicated shape of the bowstave (it is thicker in the middle and thinner at the ends) and the fact that the tension in the bowstring does not always pull in the same direction relative to the ends of the bow. We deal with this by introducing an efficiency term e, and writing the total energy stored as eFx/2. While a modern bow made of composite materials can have an efficiency greater than 1, a medieval longbow would have had an efficiency of about 0.9.

So the goal is to maximize the potential energy stored in the bow, which is represented by the area under the curve, but the bow, since it behaves like a simple spring, offers next to no resistance at the beginning of the pull. A hefty longbow with a 100-pound draw does not have a constant 100-pound draw; it culminates with 100 pounds of resistance near the end of the pull.

What we want is something closer to constant resistance, so that with the same peak resistance we can store twice as much energy — because the area under the curve is now a rectangle, not a triangle.

This is what composite, recurve bows do — or almost do. By mixing materials — traditional compound bows are made of wood, horn, and sinew, not just wood — and adding additional curves, these bows provide more resistance earlier in the pull.

Modern bows take all this a step further, by using pulleys with specialized cams to not only even out the resistance but to drop it off dramatically at the very end of the pull, so they can easily be held "loaded" and ready to shoot — which is not practical with a historic longbow.

Divorced From Reality

Divorced From Reality reports on some truly awful statistical work:

The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

Why were so many analysts led astray by the recent data? Understanding this puzzle requires digging deeper into some rather complex statistics.

The Census Bureau reported that slightly more than half of all marriages occurring between 1975 and 1979 had not made it to their 25th anniversary. This breakup rate is not only alarmingly high, but also represents a rise of about 8 percent when compared with those marriages occurring in the preceding five-year period.

But here’s the rub: The census data come from a survey conducted in mid-2004, and at that time, it had not yet been 25 years since the wedding day of around 1 in 10 of those whose marriages they surveyed. And if your wedding was in late 1979, it was simply impossible to have celebrated a 25th anniversary when asked about your marriage in mid-2004.

The social scientists running the numbers should have read up on survival/failure time analysis:

Imagine that you are a researcher in a hospital who is studying the effectiveness of a new treatment for a generally terminal disease. The major variable of interest is the number of days that the respective patients survive. In principle, one could use the standard parametric and nonparametric statistics for describing the average survival, and for comparing the new treatment with traditional methods (see Basic Statistics and Nonparametrics and Distribution Fitting). However, at the end of the study there will be patients who survived over the entire study period, in particular among those patients who entered the hospital (and the research project) late in the study; there will be other patients with whom we will have lost contact. Surely, one would not want to exclude all of those patients from the study by declaring them to be missing data (since most of them are "survivors" and, therefore, they reflect on the success of the new treatment method). Those observations, which contain only partial information are called censored observations (e.g., "patient A survived at least 4 months before he moved away and we lost contact;" the term censoring was first used by Hald, 1949).

In general, censored observations arise whenever the dependent variable of interest represents the time to a terminal event, and the duration of the study is limited in time. Censored observations may occur in a number of different areas of research. For example, in the social sciences we may study the "survival" of marriages, high school drop-out rates (time to drop-out), turnover in organizations, etc. In each case, by the end of the study period, some subjects will still be married, will not have dropped out, or are still working at the same company; thus, those subjects represent censored observations.

In economics we may study the "survival" of new businesses or the "survival" times of products such as automobiles. In quality control research, it is common practice to study the "survival" of parts under stress (failure time analysis).

Critical Chain 5

It has been a while since I last discussed Eli Goldratt's Critical Chain and project management, but there is one more element to Critical Chain Project Management that I haven't touched on.

Critical-path analysis assumes that a task is either dependent on another, or it's not.



But what if two tasks require the same limited resource? What if they require the same expert's time, or the same expensive piece of machinery? The two tasks aren't dependent on one another, but they can't be performed in parallel.



Suddenly our wonderful critical-path analysis goes out the window, and we have to tinker with the schedule until our resource isn't in two places at once.



With a toy problem, this is easy enough to do by inspection. With a larger program, let a computer do the work.

Of course, if you don't have this all plotted out ahead of time, you find out the hard way that Task B is wildly behind schedule, and that your critical path has shifted from Tasks C and F to Tasks B and E.

It's no wonder why project leaders build a lot of safety into their schedules...

Kamikaze Math

In Kamikaze Math, "war nerd" Gary Brecher discusses I Was a Kamikaze, by Ryuji Nagatsuka, whose suicide mission was scrubbed on account of bad weather, just as the war was ending:

The kamikaze pilots didn't come along till so late in the war that everything was in short supply. The planes they had were junkers, the fuel was usually "A-Go" ersatz that would blow up if you didn't keep your eyes on the dials every second, and recon was a joke. Just finding the target was iffy, as Nagatsuka and his squadron found out. And the lucky suicide boy who got to his target still had a lot to worry about, like hitting a ship, a moving target that was guarded by technologically superior U.S. fighters, hidden by battlesmoke and in the middle of a hedge of AA fire. Nagatsuka says the U.S. gunners invented a new tactic for beating "wave-hopping," low-level kamikaze attacks: "The enemy...explode shells all around their own ships so as to create a screen of waterspouts...." Kamikazes had two options: high-angle dive (which meant facing the fighters) or wave-hopping (which meant AA and waterspouts).

Like most last-ditch suicide techniques, the kamikazes had their biggest successes while the element of surprise was with them. There's a nice little table at the back of the book showing the steady dive in effectiveness, from an October 1944 attack where 18 kamikazes damaged 7 carriers to the August 1945 attacks that had pitiful results: 59 kamikazes died (meaning 59 planes lost too), and only managed to damage three US ships, small-timers at that (1 destroyer, 1 transport, 1 seaplane carrier).

Nagatsuka was young enough to be in on this last stage of the war, the almost pitiful end of Imperial Japan. That's why he lived to write the book: everything went wrong, and the Empire couldn't even mount decent suicide raids.

Imperial Japan had a culture totally foreign to our own:

You could say that Imperial Japan wasn't big on excuses in general. If a mission failed, you were supposed to make your apologies with a seppuku knife, like General Saito did after the Saipan landings. My favourite ritual suicide in this book is Rear Admiral Inokuchi's. As his battleship, the Musashi, is sinking from American fire, he actually goes to the trouble of slashing his belly open, instead of just waiting to drown. So he goes down with the ship sashimi-style.

That's the thing about the Imperial military elite: they thought way too hard about arranging the perfect death for themselves and not nearly enough about arranging a quick and nasty death for the enemy. There are times, especially in irregular warfare, where Patton's line about "making the other poor SOB die for HIS country" doesn't apply, but it really does apply to WW II in the Pacific, and Tojo's boys should have had it tattoo'd on their foreheads.

They were so obsessed with making the perfect death-scene that they even expected us Americans to be "impressed" with their mass suicide. That's exactly what Nagatsuka says about the thousands of Japanese civvies who walked into the ocean or jumped off cliffs after Saipan fell: "The Americans...should have been moved by the terrifying and yet dignified spectacle of death...." Well, uh, no, Mister Nagatsuka. The Americans thought you were sick freaks. Some things don't translate as well as Top Ramen.

The key lesson of the book:

The pilots had a good net value; the infantry didn't. Nagatsuka talks about how crummy suicide was for the "foot sloggers" who died on Saipan, because with a grenade the most they could hope to do was take one or two enemy with them. Even Sgt. Nonaka died cheap, trading the enemy one for one.

But the kamikaze who took out an aircraft carrier was making a very smart bargain, and you can see the Cadets in Nagatsuka's unit thinking this through, even if they have to talk about it in the fancy (sometimes downright campy) language of Imperial Japan. Nagatsuka puts it bluntly: "One plane against one ship, that was the basic principle." It works because one fighter is always going to be much cheaper than one carrier.

As the War Nerd has pointed out before, modern carriers are even more vulnerable than WWII carriers, according to the "Millenium Challenge '02" war games:

He was given nothing but small planes and ships-fishing boats, patrol boats, that kind of thing. He kept them circling around the edges of the Persian Gulf aimlessly, driving the Navy crazy trying to keep track of them. When the Admirals finally lost patience and ordered all planes and ships to leave, van Ripen had them all attack at once. And they sank two-thirds of the US fleet.

That should scare the hell out of everybody who cares about how well the US is prepared to fight its next war. It means that a bunch of Cessnas, fishing boats and assorted private craft, crewed by good soldiers and armed with anti-ship missiles, can destroy a US aircraft carrier. That means that the hundreds of trillions (yeah, trillions) of dollars we've invested in shipbuilding is wasted, worthless.

A few years ago, a US submarine commander said, "There are two kinds of ship in the US Navy: subs and targets." The fact that big surface ships are dinosaurs is something that's gotten clearer every decade since 1921.
[...]
The signs have been there all along. In the Falklands War, the Argentine Air Force, which ain't exactly the A Team, managed to shred the British fleet, coming in low and fast to launch the Exocets. And they did all this hundreds of miles off their coast, with no land-based systems to help.

If the Argentines could do that with 1980 technology, think what the Chinese, Iranians or North Koreans could do in 2003 against a city-size floating target like a US carrier.

Brain-eating amoeba blamed for 6 deaths in U.S.

Brain-eating amoeba blamed for 6 deaths in U.S.:

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.
[...]
Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

"Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two weeks," he said.

Should I expect to see a colossal brain-eating "amoeba" on the Sci-Fi Channel in the next couple months?

Secret Origins of the Fantastic Four

The Secret Origins of the Fantastic Four can be found in the popularity of the Justice League — but also in the Doc Savage pulps:



Doc Savage's crew consisted of his Fabulous Five — Johnny, Monk, Ham, Renny, and Long Tom — and, later, his (female) cousin Pat. Combining some of these characters and adding superpowers yields the Fantastic Four:

DR. REED RICHARDS is based on DR. CLARK SAVAGE aka Doc Savage. Reed is a brilliant inventor and scientist just like Doc. Reed's habit of constantly using big words comes from Johnny Littlejohn.

BEN GRIMM is based on MONK MAYFAIR. Ben is a "Thing"; Monk resembles a gorilla. Ben's running feud with Johnny is based on Monk's squabble with Ham. Like Renny, who was described as "thin and GRIM," Ben also loves to slam his huge fists through doors -- or anything else.

SUSAN STORM is based on PAT SAVAGE, the unofficial sixth member of Doc's team. The beautiful and glamorous Pat is Doc's cousin; Susan is Johnny Storm's sister.

JOHNNY STORM is based on JOHNNY LITTLEJOHN. Johnny gets his name from Littlejohn. Moreover, it was said that "underneath Littlejohn's gaunt appearance burns a strength and fire unbelievable."

Ethanol, schmethanol

Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong:

Sometimes you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies.

The result burns. And when Henry Ford was experimenting with car engines a century ago, he tried ethanol out as a fuel. But he rejected it — and for good reason. The amount of heat you get from burning a litre of ethanol is a third less than that from a litre of petrol. What is more, it absorbs water from the atmosphere. Unless it is mixed with some other fuel, such as petrol, the result is corrosion that can wreck an engine's seals in a couple of years. So why is ethanol suddenly back in fashion? That is the question many biotechnologists in America have recently asked themselves.

The obvious answer is that, being derived from plants, ethanol is “green”. The carbon dioxide produced by burning it was recently in the atmosphere. Putting that CO₂ back into the air can therefore have no adverse effect on the climate. But although that is true, the real reason ethanol has become the preferred green substitute for petrol is that people know how to make it — that, and the subsidies now available to America's maize farmers to produce the necessary feedstock. Yet such things do not stop ethanol from being a lousy fuel. To solve that, the biotechnologists argue, you need to make a better fuel that is equally green. Which is what they are trying to do.

Read the article for the technical details of which molecules are under consideration.

Something in the way he moves

Depressed people move in a mathematically different way from other people:

Dr Yamamoto collected the data for his own particular power-law curves by fitting his experimental subjects—about half of whom were healthy, and half of whom had been diagnosed as having clinical (or “major”) depression—with accelerometers. These devices measure how often someone changes his rate of movement by recording each time his acceleration exceeds a certain threshold.

The basic results confirmed a known feature of depressed people. The normal daily rhythm that would lead to a high, steady number of counts during daylight hours and low counts during the night was replaced by occasional bursts of activity. The surprise came when the team started plotting their results out on graphs.

The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.

Will A Google Phone Change The Game?

BusinessWeek asks, Will A Google Phone Change The Game?

Imagine your cellphone as a mini marketing machine. As you head into your car after dinner, a text alert pops onto the screen of your handset announcing the 9 p.m. lineup at a nearby cineplex. You choose the Jodi Foster flick The Brave One and a promo video for the next Warner Bros. release, a George Clooney movie, starts running. Afterward, more text appears, prompting you to launch the phone's Web browser so that you can click through to buy the movie's ringtones and wallpaper.

That kind of 24/7 advertising engagement--on a phone, no less--may sound like a nightmare. But what if you could determine the kinds of products you get pitched? Or, when your flight gets canceled in a faraway airport, text messages pop up for the best hotel deals in town? No random insurance ads or airline deals for trips to places you never visit. Best of all: Watch or read the custom ads, and your phone minutes are free.

For big cell carriers, that's the real nightmare.

Biodiesel Boom heading toward Wall Street

With a push from government subsidies, there's a Biodiesel Boom heading toward Wall Street:

It's not hard to see why. Biodiesel is 30 percent more fuel-efficient than gasoline, which in turn is 30 percent more efficient than ethanol. And while most ethanol produced in the United States comes from a single feedstock — corn — biodiesel has many sources: the oil of seed plants, such as soy and canola, french-fry grease and animal fat. That means the market can weather a price increase in any one raw material. Solazyme, a South San Francisco biotech firm, has even started making biodiesel from genetically modified algae.

Better yet, biodiesel can be manufactured in large quantities today — unlike fuels such as hydrogen. Total production shot up from 25 million gallons in 2004 to 250 million last year. Nearly 100 new plants are now under construction; even Chevron has joined in, cutting the ribbon on a 20-million-gallon plant in Galveston, Texas, in May.

The biggest player in the biodiesel market is Renewable Energy Group, an offshoot of a 3,000-member Iowa farm cooperative. REG accounts for 27 percent of U.S. biodiesel production and, thanks to its relationship with the soy growers, says it can increase its total capacity to 340 million gallons by the end of 2008. The company sells branded SoyPower fuel through a nationwide network of stations, some operated by grocery giant Safeway. REG should be the first biodiesel company to hit Wall Street, having filed for an IPO in July. But REG won't be the last: Also mulling a stock offering is Seattle-based Imperium Renewables, founded three years ago by former commercial-jet pilot John Plaza. Imperium operates the largest U.S. biodiesel plant and plans to cut a production deal with Washington's canola farmers.

For all that production capacity, biodiesel is still an infant industry — it currently accounts for less than 0.5 percent of the total U.S. diesel-fuel market. So there will likely be plenty more REGs and Imperiums. "It's such an entrepreneurial success story," says Jenna Higgins, communications director at the National Biodiesel Board, a trade association. "Most of the companies out there are small businesses. There really aren't any traditional paths to success."

Take Philadelphia-based Fry-o-Diesel, founded by Yale business graduate Nadia Adawi. The startup has a patent pending on a process it developed to make fuel from trap grease, which restaurants currently pay to have hauled off. An estimated 495 million gallons of trap grease gets trashed every year. "We're working with something that's essentially a pollutant," Adawi says. "But it makes a great fuel." She is currently talking to investors and hopes to build a 3-million-gallon plant in 2008.

Adawi is in good company. The past few months have seen plenty of major corporations rush to hop on the biodiesel bandwagon. Oil giant ConocoPhillips has inked a deal with Tyson Foods to make diesel out of animal fats. In July, U.S. Steel announced that it will use a 10 percent mix of biodiesel at its plant in Gary, Ind. And Berkeley-based Clif Bar has started subsidizing employees who drive biodiesel cars.

Green power

You may wonder why PG&E is so supportive of California's various green power initiatives:

It also benefits from the way California regulates its utilities. Their sales are separated, or "decoupled," from revenue, so they neither earn more by selling more energy nor lose money by promoting efficiency measures that reduce those sales.

Instead, California's utilities make a guaranteed profit on all their investments — $2.8 billion this year for PG&E. The regulators have also approved big budgets for energy efficiency, something that has helped PG&E's top business clients save money, while boosting PG&E's bottom line. The $300 million PG&E set aside for energy efficiency in 2007 includes a lot of "customer education," which often doubles as public relations for the company.

It's such a fine line between forward-thinking and gaming the system.

Real Estate Equity Exchange

When you go to fund an enterprise with outside money, you have two basic options, which you can mix and match: debt, where you have to pay your lenders spelled-out payments, or equity, where you pay your shareholders their share of profits — when you have profits. Debt is inflexible. Equity is forgiving.

When you go to buy a house, you typically borrow money — you take on debt — which means you win big if your house goes up in value, and you lose big if it goes down in value. If you put 10 percent down on a $400,000 house, that means you're putting in just $40,000 of your own money and borrowing $360,000. If the house's value goes down 10 percent, you lose 100 percent of your initial investment — it's worth $360,000, and you owe $360,000. If, on the other hand, it goes up 10 percent, you double your initial investment — it's now worth $440,000, and you owe just $360,000. That's why debt is called leverage.

Leverage is great on the upside, but most people are risk-averse, which is why I was surprised that something like a Real Estate Equity Exchange agreement wasn't already popular:

Now a San Francisco firm called Rex & Co. (the name stands for "real estate equity exchange") is offering a new option, known as a Rex agreement, that can be used both to draw on a home's equity and to hedge against declining property values.

Rex gives homeowners, interest-free, a portion of their house's market price in cash — up to 15 percent of the appraised value of the home, topping out at $300,000. In exchange, Rex gets the right to share in up to half of the future increase in the home's value. The more homeowners are willing to let Rex cash in on future profit, the more money they get up front. If a home declines in value — and many homeowners nowadays are worried about just that — Rex shares in the loss. "It's a way to make the equity you've earned more liquid," says Rex CEO Thomas Sponholtz.

A homeowner and Rex agree on how much money the property owner is to receive, as well as the percentage of the future change in the value of the home he or she is willing to share. (The homeowner also pays back the cash advance when the property is sold.) The home's value is assessed by a third-party appraiser.

The fact that they pay "up to 15 percent of the appraised value of the home," but get the right to share in "up to half of the future increase in the home's value" implies that they're not just buying equity in the house though. It implies they've set up some kind of derivative that their customers won't understand.

Organic Armor

Paul Hersey creates what he calls Organic Armor:

We create handmade costume pieces, jewelry and props that look like ancient metal, bone and leather. But unlike the real thing — you'll find the pieces lightweight and comfortable. Wear them for hours through active movement — especially suited to performance. Wear it to clubs, rituals, festivals, on stage, or in the backyard!

(Hat tip to Gizmodo.)

Fire Piston

In a recent episode of Survivorman, he uses a fire piston, rather than matches or a lighter, to start a fire:

A fire piston, which in the Philippines is known as a sumpak, is a device of ancient origin which is used to kindle fire. It uses the principle of the heating of a gas (in this case air) by its rapid (adiabatic) compression to ignite a piece of tinder, which is then used to set light to kindling.

You can now buy a modern polymer fire piston with O-ring seals.

Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain

Wired talks to Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain:

The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else.

Sacks has a new book out, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Cargo Drones

A few years ago I was discussing the future of unmanned vehicles with a few colleagues, and we decided it would be a long, long time before UAVs found use in civilian passenger air travel — even if they were, by that point, much safer than airplanes with a human pilot on board. Before that, they'd likely find use in cargo transport — and before that, in military cargo transport.

It looks like the Cargo Drones are here:

The Universal Aerial Delivery Dispenser is an underwing bomb-like pod that can carry as much as will fit in its nearly five foot-long, eight inch-diameter canister. Weighing in at a bantam 40 pounds unloaded, the “U-ADD” as it’s called, can carry a load of ammo, first aid equipment or other cargo to a pre-selected GPS coordinate. After the UAV drops the canister, a parachute deploys to ease its landing.

Textron’s Richard Sterchele said the U-ADD has been tested already on the RQ-5 Hunter, MQ-9 Reaper and works on the RQ-1 Predator, which can carry about 140 pounds under each wing. He said though the Army hasn’t formally bought the system, the spec ops community has expressed an interest in the system’s ability to deliver covert materiel to remote locations with great stealth.

Tyler Cowen at Google

I'm a big fan of Marginal Revolution and of Tyler Cowen, so naturally I had to watch this video of Tyler Cowen at Google:

Tyler was ostensibly there to discuss his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist, but, inspired by the recently announced Google-funded prize for landing an unmanned vehicle on the moon, he decided to discuss prizes versus grants.

Later in his talk he discusses how best to give to charity — from an economist's point of view, of course.

Is the Warren Jeffs Case Religious Prosecution?

David Friedman asks, Is the Warren Jeffs Case Religious Prosecution?

I haven't followed the case very closely, but it seems a distinctly strange one. Jeffs is charged with being an accessory to rape. The person who, on the prosecution's theory, committed the rape isn't being charged with anything. Jeffs' crime, so far as I can tell, is using his authority as a religious leader to persuade a girl into a marriage that she now says she didn't want. That might be a good reason not to accept his religion, but treating it as a felony strikes me as a considerable stretch.

What happens if we we apply the same legal theory to a more respectable religion, say the mainline LDS? Mormons are expected to pay a substantial part of their income as tithes. One can easily imagine an ex-Mormon who grew up in a small town where everyone was a member of the church testifying that he paid his tithes because of religious and social pressure, even though he never wanted to. If true, does that make the local bishop an accessory to robbery or extortion?

Suppose Jeffs is convicted. Isn't the clear implication that preaching certain religious doctrines, such as the authority of fathers over daughters and husbands over wives, is now illegal, at least if people believe the preaching and act on it?

Am I missing something?

The age of consent in Utah is 14.

Secret Origins of the Bat-Man

Researching the Secret Origins of Mr. A led me to research the Secret Origins of the Bat-Man. I knew that Batman was inspired by Zorro and The Shadow, but I didn't realize that the first Batman story, “The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate,” was "borrowed" from a Shadow novel, "Partners of Peril" — which has been recently republished:



I also knew that Batman was created by Bob Kane, but I didn't realize he had a partner, Bill Finger, who did most of the work, but who was too shy and reticent to demand credit. In fact, Bill Finger lived paycheck-to-paycheck and died young — which brings us to this doctored Shadow piece:



And that brings us full circle, back to Mr. A, who is really a Randian version of The Shadow — ruthless and prone to judgmental monologues.

CarterCopter

The CarterCopter, which recently received some coverage on Modern Marvels, may be the next big thing in aviation.

As Henry Farkas and Claudius Klimt point out, large passenger jets need huge, expensive airports, because they need runways two miles long, or longer, and for many airplane trips, time spent on the ground is literally longer than time spent in the air.

The idea behind the Carter Copter is to build a hybrid aircraft with the takeoff and landing characteristics of an autogyro, but the flight characteristics of a fixed-wing airplane.

The fixed wings are designed like jet wings, just a quarter of the size of conventional wings and designed for low drag, in order to be efficient at high speeds and high altitudes. These wings, naturally, don't provide enough lift for takeoffs and landings — unless you plan on taking off and landing at 150 miles per hour.

It's the rotor, which is powered during takeoff, that provides enough lift for takeoff — with an interesting design twist:

What's new is that Jay added depleted uranium weights to the outer ends of the rotors to give them enough stored angular momentum so that even when the engine power is switched from the rotors to the pusher prop, the stored angular momentum in the rotors allows vertical takeoff using the helicopter-like collective and acceleration using the combined cyclic/control stick. The control stick acts like a cyclic while the CC is in rotorcraft mode and like a normal airplane control stick once the CC is in fixed wing mode. The transition is transparent to the pilot.

Evidently the weighted rotor rotates slowly in fixed-wing mode, and this dramatically reduces its drag.

The CarterCopter FAQ provides more detailed information.

Quarry Men

Never heard of the Quarry Men? Well, here they are at George's brother Harry's wedding reception in 1958:

Secret Origins of Mr. A

After watching Jonathan Ross 'In Search of Steve Ditko', I couldn't help but research the Secret Origins of Mr. A, the Objectivist hero Ditko created after he left Spider-Man and Dr. Strange behind.



Dial B for Blog has the entire five-page first Mr. A story scanned in and online — and, yes, it's black and white.

He's Still Beating The House

He's Still Beating The House:

Ed Thorp's moment is coming — again. Thorp is an investor, mathematician, and crack blackjack player whose winning system got him expelled from Reno casinos in the 1960s. Now his 1967 work, Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System, has been named one of the most sought-after out-of-print books of the past year by BookFinder.com.

Beat the Market, which sells for up to $750 on Amazon.com, describes his investing system, a precursor of the Black-Scholes formula. Why is the book so hot now? Perhaps it's rising interest in the relation between gambling and investing. Thorp also gets mentions in recent books, including Nassim Nicholas Taleb's best-seller on probability, The Black Swan. Another attention-getter: publicity about a cigarette-pack-size computer co-invented by Thorp in the '60s, to be exhibited next spring at Germany's Heinz Nixdorf computer museum. "It could predict where a roulette ball would land," he says.

The Not-So Quixotic Quest

Evidently "the cancer cell’s pursuit of an individual career may not be as quixotic a pursuit as once thought":

Scientists studying Sticker’s Sarcoma, a cancer of dogs, recently discovered two rather surprising facts about the disease: (1) a transmittable agent causes the cancer, (2) the cells in the tumors caused by Sticker’s are definitely dog cells, (3) the cells in the tumors bear no genetic relation to each individual animal with the disease but (4) all the tumor cells in every case of Sticker’s have the same exact genes.

The only possible conclusion: Stickers Sarcoma is not a true cancer but rather a communicable pathogen that originated from one mutated cell in one dog that somehow managed to escape its original body and infect new hosts!

Bryan Caplan's Critique of A Farewell to Alms

In A Farewell to Alms: Overview of My Critique, Bryan Caplan starts by criticizing Gregory Clark's understanding of Malthusianim:

Even worse, Clark repeatedly misstates the implications of his own model. He delights in counterintuitive claims like "[I]n 1776, when the Malthusian economy still governed human welfare in England, the calls of Adam Smith for restraint in government taxation and unproductive expenditure were largely pointless." To the contrary, even in a Malthusian model, more production and less waste is unambiguously good for living standards. Population growth eventually returns living standards to their original level, but that may take generations.

I don't see that contradicting Clark's Malthusian point at all. He clearly recognizes that population growth only eventually reduces living standards. As he says in How to Save Africa:

Before the Industrial Revolution all societies were caught in the same Malthusian Trap that imprisons Africa today. Living standards stagnated because any improvement caused births to exceed deaths. The resulting population growth, pressing on fixed land resources, inevitably pushed incomes back down to subsistence.

But living conditions did vary across pre-industrial societies. Perversely, rich societies were those where nature or man created high death rates. In such settings living conditions could be good as long as the population did not grow. In the Malthusian era, what is now vice in economic policy — violence, poor public health, war, inequality — was virtue in terms of living standards. And what is now virtue, vice.

(Emphasis added.)

Caplan's second point is that Clark ignores the power of institutions and policies:

He also ignores massive, long-lasting policy disasters like Communism; comparisons between West and East Germany, and North and South Korea.

A commentor, Jason Malloy, notes that Clark doesn't ignore those policy disasters; he just takes a much longer view of history:

You may disagree with his conclusions, but he doesn't 'ignore' Communism, which he argues dissolved in an eye-blink of history, consistent with a view that destructive institutions are in an unstable balance with the evolved dispositions of the population.

The complaint is the one I'd like to focus on though:

In the face of all this evidence, Clark throws up his hands and says that economists don't know how to create growth. Give me a break. If voters and politicians around the world since 1800 had just done what Adam Smith told them to do in The Wealth of Nations, poverty would already be a thing of the past. Economists have known how to create growth for centuries. The problem is that, all too often, non-economists choose not to listen.

(Again, emphasis mine.)

While I largely agree with him, perhaps we should attempt to solve the larger problem of actually creating growth, rather than the fairly narrow problem of coming up with a "solution" that won't get implemented.

Drivers test paying by mile instead of gas tax

Drivers test paying by mile instead of gas tax:

Beginning early next year, drivers in six states will begin testing a new way to pay for roads and transit: Commuters will be charged for the miles they drive rather than paying taxes on gasoline purchased.

Researchers from the University of Iowa Public Policy Center will install computers and satellite equipment in the vehicles of 2,700 volunteers — 450 each from Austin, Baltimore, Boise, San Diego, eastern Iowa and the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.

Over the next two years, the drivers will get sample monthly bills for the number of miles they've driven. They can compare what they now pay in gasoline taxes with what they would have paid in per-mile fees.

"We want to assess the public's attitudes and acceptance toward a system like this," says Jon Kuhl, principal investigator on the $16.5 million Road User Charge Study and chairman of the University of Iowa Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The nation is reassessing the way it pays for roads and transit. Since 1956, the Highway Trust Fund, financed by the federal tax on gasoline, has been a primary source of money for highway projects. But the National Governors Association and other groups and planners involved in road building have concluded that this method, supplemented by state gasoline taxes, no longer is adequate.

Americans are driving cars that get better mileage, and more are driving vehicles that use fuels taxed at lower rates than gasoline, such as ethanol, or making their own fuel and not being taxed. That means gas tax revenue isn't growing nearly as fast as the number of miles driven.

In addition, the costs of road construction materials have skyrocketed because of heavy demand from India and China. Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase gas taxes, especially at a time of high prices at the pump. The federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon has not been increased since 1993; 24 states have not raised their gas taxes since 1997, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

That has made a mileage fee more attractive to some agencies. The University of Iowa study is funded by the Federal Highway Administration and 15 state departments of transportation.

Oregon this year finished a year-long experiment that tested a "virtual tollway" system that could eventually replace the state gas tax with a road-user fee. Volunteers drove vehicles equipped with state-installed Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and odometers that kept track of the miles they drove. When they gassed up, the drivers paid for their gas as well as 1.2 cents for each mile driven since their last fill-up; they did not pay the 24-cents-a-gallon state gas tax.

Federal, state, and local governments don't want to increase gas taxes, because they know an increase will be unpopular — so that want to institute a new tax, install GPS units in every car, and track everyone's movements? Does that seem more politically feasible?

If the government is already mandating fuel-efficiency standards and subsidizing hybrid-electric cars, why would it want to reduce gasoline taxes?

And why would you institute a static 1.2-cents-per-mile tax when the whole point of a "virtual tollway" system is dynamic pricing based on traffic? Driving down a road with no one else on it doesn't cost anyone anything — except for the pollution that comes from burning gasoline, which won't be taxed under such a system.

The Triumph of Jane Jacobs

Francis Morrone looks at The Triumph of Jane Jacobs, not just her works, but the phenomenon surrounding them:

Troll the Internet for interviews with Jacobs (you'll find several) and you can't help being struck by the subtle ways she alters her apparent message for her audience. How else to explain why such diverse people and groups have claimed her for their own? Two of her books appear on the National Review's list of the 100 most important books of the 20th century. Yet she's hailed by *Tikkun,* a Jewish magazine. James Howard Kunstler, who believes our economy shall soon implode as a result of our being on the downward slope of "peak oil," reveres Jacobs; so does Virginia Postrel of "Dynamism" fame, who believes in the extraordinary capacities of technology and human ingenuity to make the future ever a better and a brighter place. Rod Dreher, a counter-culturally cultural-conservative Christian writer who wrote the book "Crunchy Cons," about "Birkenstock-wearing Burkeans," cites Jacobs as a principal influence, along with the agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry, whom Jacobs chastised in her last and perhaps most profound book, "Dark Age Ahead." When Jacobs's book "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" came out in 1984, with its blistering critique of transfer payments from rich to poor, the writer Richard Barnett, reviewing the book on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, bizarrely hailed it as a call for full-employment legislation. He so wanted to like the book, to like Mrs. Jacobs, that he heard her say things she did not say. What kind of writer has such an odd impact on her readers? How many books such as "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" come along that so many people think they've read but haven't, have read but misunderstood, or claim they've read though they haven't? How many writers write one big book (in this case, "Death and Life") that makes a huge splash, then follow it up with several books that brilliantly refine its central points, books that not even the writer's putatively most faithful followers have ever even heard of, let alone read?

Here's Why Richard Branson Should Be Delta Airlines’ Biggest Fan

Here's Why Richard Branson Should Be Delta Airlines’ Biggest Fan:

Last week, Passenger X arrived at the Orlando airport with a first-class e-ticket for New York City. At the airport, the ticket machine spat out a boarding pass for a seat in the back of coach. Why?

The plane, he was told, had been “downsized” from a large jet to a smaller one. There was no first-class section on the smaller plane, so all first-class passengers had been reassigned to coach.

Passenger X asked the Delta agent why the change had been made.

“Mechanical,” he was told.

Passenger X then asked when the change had been made, and wondered why Delta hadn’t phoned or e-mailed to alert passengers to the change — which would have given them time to perhaps fly first-class on a different airline.

The Delta agent responded that she did not know when the change had been made.

Passenger X flies frequently and tries to get work done on planes, so a first-class seat is far more desirable to him than a coach seat. He was disappointed with Delta’s change, but if they’d pulled a faulty jet out of the air — well, plainly, that was a good thing.

Once past security, he asked another Delta representative about the change. This agent, too, did not know when the plane swap had been made, but agreed that Delta should have alerted its first-class passengers. “You paid for the steak but you got the hamburger,” he said. This agent couldn’t have been kinder. He even offered to give Passenger X the customer service number at Delta so that he could arrange for a refund of the difference between the first-class fare and the coach fare.

To which Passenger X said: “Thank you, and no offense, but I’d be surprised — and further disappointed — if you weren’t already doing that on your own.” In other words, should the customer who pays for the steak and gets the hamburger then have to go scrambling himself to recover the price differential?

The Delta agent, still kind, acknowledged that yes, this too was not great Delta policy, but it was the best he could do.

At the gate, a third Delta agent, perhaps even kinder than the first two, looked at Passenger X’s boarding pass and offered to put an empty seat beside him. Very thoughtful! As it turned out, this was a pretty easy task, since the plane was only about 40 percent full, which made Passenger X wonder if the first Delta agent’s story — that the original plane was pulled for “mechanical” reasons — was even true. If the smaller plane was only 40 percent full, then the larger plane was probably only 20 percent full. As such, was it possible that Delta had changed planes because of an economic reason, and not a mechanical one?

Passenger X inquired as to this possibility, and was greeted with blank stares. He did learn, however, that the flight attendants had just flown down on this same plane, from New York to Orlando. At the very least, this meant that the smaller plane had been in service for quite a few hours, certainly enough time for Delta to let its first-class passengers know that their steak was now a hamburger.

In the end, the flight was fine. Two seats in coach are just as good as one seat in first class. But if it had been a jammed-to-the-roof flight, Passenger X would have been one sad puppy.

I can confirm Passenger X’s story because Passenger X is me.

OK, that last line isn't quite a Twilight Zone ending, but he makes his point:

Stories like this one are very good news, however, if you are in the VLJ (very light jet) business, since that is where business travelers are moving. It could also be good news for Richard Branson, who is on an all-business-class binge at the moment, and is rumored to be thinking about offering all-business-class flights in the U.S., the absence of which I have wondered about before on this blog.

Jonathan Ross 'In Search of Steve Ditko'

BBC4's Jonathan Ross 'In Search of Steve Ditko' is up on YouTube — at least for now — and, if you ask me, it really gets going in part 3:



Ditko is best known for co-creating Spiderman with Stan Lee; Ditko was the artist, Lee the writer. Ditko is also known for creating Dr. Strange, the master of the mystic arts, who travels via astral projection through psychadelic tableaux — which led liberal hippy fans to embrace the politically conservative Ditko as a Leary-like guru.

Where things get particularly odd is when Ditko leaves Marvel to create independent comics featuring his own crazy brand of Rand's Objectivism. The Question is a bit odd, but Mr. A? Wow.

I've been meaning to pick up Marvel Visionaries: Steve Ditko for some time now. I suppose I should really pick up the 1088-page Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, which includes the entire Ditko run. It's a shame that the Essential Doctor Strange doesn't come in color.

The Ice Cream Ordering Sequence

Joe Sugarman, in Triggers, uses his Ice Cream Ordering Sequence to explain a sales technique:

In the late 1950s I was working in New York selling printing equipment. One day after dinner, I decided to stop by a small ice cream parlor to have a dish of ice cream. I sat down at the counter and the waitress asked me for my order.

I requested my favorite dessert, “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream.”

The waitress looked at me with a puzzled expression, “You mean a chocolate sundae?”

“No, I want a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream,” was my response.

“Well, that’s a chocolate sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress.

“Isn’t it just chocolate ice cream with whipped cream? What’s the difference?” I inquired.

“Well, a sundae is 35 cents and plain ice cream is 25 cents. What you want is a sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress, with a rather smug expression on her face.

“OK, I want chocolate ice cream with whipped cream, so if you have to charge me 10 cents more, go ahead,” was my reply. (This took place in the ’50s when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today.)
[...]
And for the next few weeks, each time I ordered my favorite dessert, regardless of the restaurant, I’d still go through the same hassle.One evening, after having worked really hard during the day, I was finishing my meal in a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan when the waitress looked at me and asked, “Would you
like dessert?”

I really wanted my favorite, but I just didn’t feel like going through the entire verbal routine that I had been experiencing for the last few weeks. “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” was my response. I didn’t ask for the whipped cream. This was a simple request — one I didn’t expect a hassle over.

As the waitress was walking away, I thought to myself, in what must have been a fraction of a second, how much I really wanted chocolate ice cream with whipped cream and that I should not let myself be intimidated by a waitress. “Hey, miss,” I called, as the waitress was still walking away, “could you put whipped cream on that ice cream?”

“Sure,” was her response. “No problem.”

When the check came, I noticed that I had been charged just 25 cents for the ice cream and whipped cream — something that I had been charged 35 cents before.

How is this used in sales?

A good example of this can be seen at car dealerships. The salesperson tallies your entire order, gets approval from the general manager, and then has you sign the purchase contract. As she is walking away to get the car prepped and ready for you to drive it away, she turns to you and says, “And you do want that undercoating, don’t you?” You instinctively nod your head. The charge is added to your invoice. “And you’ll also want our floor mats to keep your car clean as well, won’t you?”

Once a commitment is made, the tendency is to act consistently with that commitment. The customer nods his head.
[...]
One of the important points to remember is to always make that first sale simple. Once the prospect makes the commitment to purchase from you, you can then easily offer more to increase your sales. This is very true for products sold from a mail order ad or from a TV infomercial. I have learned to keep the initial offer extremely simple. Then, once the prospect calls and orders the product I am offering, and while the prospect is on the phone, I offer other items and end up with a larger total sale. An additional sale occurs over 50% of the time, depending on my added offer.

Physicist shows how steroids can fuel home runs

Physicist shows how steroids can fuel home runs — with some fairly simple math:

Calculations show that, by putting on 10 percent more muscle mass, a batter can swing about 5 percent faster, increasing the ball's speed by 4 percent as it leaves the bat.

Depending on the ball's trajectory, this added speed could take it into home run territory 50 percent more often, said Roger Tobin of Tufts University in Boston.

"A 4 percent increase in ball speed, which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, can increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent," said Tobin, whose study will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics.

You don't have to increase your average hitting distance much to double the tiny fraction of your hits that go over the wall.

Soccer beats jogging for fitness

Soccer beats jogging for fitness — which does not surprise me at all:

The researchers selected men with similar health profiles aged 31 to 33 and split them into groups of soccer players, joggers, and couch potatoes — who not surprisingly ended the three-month study in the worst shape.

Each period of exercise lasted about one hour and took place three times a week. After 12 weeks, researchers found that the body fat percentage in the soccer players dropped by 3.7 percent, compared to about 2 percent for the joggers.

The soccer players also increased their muscle mass by almost 4.5 pounds, whereas the joggers didn't have any significant change. Those who did no exercise registered little change in body fat and muscle mass.

"Even though the football (soccer) players were untrained, there were periods in the game that were so intense that their cardiovascular was maximally taxed, just like professional football (soccer) players," said Dr. Peter Krustrup, head of Copenhagen University's department of exercise and sport sciences, who led the study.

The soccer players and the joggers had the same average heart rate, but the soccer players got a better workout because of intense bursts of activity. Krustrup and his colleagues found there were periods during soccer matches when the players' hearts were pumping at 90 percent their full capacity. But the joggers' hearts were never pushed as hard.

Unlike the soccer players, the joggers consistently thought their runs were exhausting.

"The soccer players were having more fun, so they were more focused on scoring goals and helping the team, rather than the feeling of strain and muscle pain," Krustrup said.

"Happy Feet" director shooting "Justice League"

"Happy Feet" director shooting "Justice League":

"Happy Feet" director George Miller is in talks to bring the superheroes of the "Justice League of America" comic books to the big screen.

I prefer to think of it as "Mad Max" director shooting "Justice League":

Miller wrote and directed the Mad Max movies starring Mel Gibson (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome); co-wrote Babe and wrote and directed its sequel; and Lorenzo's Oil. He also directed The Witches of Eastwick, starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer and he directed the fourth segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, which was hailed as the best in most critical reviews.

There some challenges to overcome:

One thorny issue the production needs to deal with is casting. Warner Bros. is in production on "The Dark Knight," a sequel to "Batman Begins," starring Christian Bale, and is in development on another Superman movie with Brandon Routh as Clark Kent/Superman. Those two actors will not reprise their roles for the "League" movie as the studio is intent on keeping all of its superhero movies as separate franchises. "League" also is looked at as a launchpad for other comic book movies.

As such, the studio is hoping to cast the movie with lesser-known actors, and an international search is under way.

The smaller names in the movie will help with the second issue facing the production: budget. A "League" movie was long thought impossible simply because the thinking was that any undertaking would break the bank on big-name actors and special effects. On the effects front, media like animation were considered before deciding to stick with live action. Miller's "League" will be effects-intensive. Some motion capture likely will be used as well.

As you might imagine, anyone who directs both Mad Max and Babe is an interesting fellow — he was a medical doctor before becoming a filmmaker.

Airport chocolate, ReBooks, and Dune

Orson Scott Card reviews Airport chocolate, ReBooks, and Dune — but I'll skip to the part where he takes another look at Dune and its uncanny prescience:

There was considerable irony in Dune's use of Arabic culture and language as the explicit basis of the "Fremen," the desert dwellers who become the source of Paul Atreides power and, when he unleashes them, the scourge of the universe.

Herbert traces the roots of Fremen culture from world to world, and makes it clear that, while the specifics of Islamic belief are never laid out, the customs and culture of these people have been Muslim all along. (One of the great sources of their seething anger against the empire is that they have been denied the right to the Haj — the pilgrimage that Muslims make to Mecca.)

The emotional core of the novel, then, comes from a T.E. Lawrence-like character, Paul Atreides, coming to dwell with and learning to live as an Arab Muslim, until he is able to lead them to victorious battle.

Paul, being a non-Muslim, treats the idea of jihad as an abhorrent one; he long tries to resist the blood and horror of such a thing, though by the end of the book he has given up and realizes that the jihad will happen and cannot be prevented or even controlled.

So here's the thought that occurred to me during such passages of Dune: What if Osama bin Laden somehow read Dune during his formative years? Or, if he did not read it himself, certainly there were Arab Muslim students in America who did read it, and the book might well have been part of the reason they became receptive to Osama's ideas.

Because a Muslim would not read this book the same way I did. To an Arab Muslim, the Arabic words and names would leap off the page; the Fremen characters would be the ones an Arab reader would most identify with.

Such a reader would not feel any of Paul Atreides' reluctance for jihad — on the contrary, he would be hoping Paul would fail to stop the jihad.

And when, at the end of the book, the Arab jihad is triumphant, this reader — Osama or another of his ideology — would not only feel great emotional satisfaction, he would have the blueprint for his own future.

Because the Fremen in Dune triumph, not just because of the force of their arms or their courage in battle, but because they control the only source of the "Spice," a substance only created in the complex desert ecology of Arrakis, the planet they control. Without Spice the starships cannot navigate, and interstellar trade would grind to a halt.

The whole economy of the interstellar empire is dependent on and therefore under the ultimate control of the Fremen. Anything the offworlders do to them will hurt the offworlders far more than it hurts the Fremen. The parallel with oil is obvious.

I can just see such a reader thinking, This isn't fiction. This is the future. This is why jihad not only can work but must work; we lack only a leader to show us the way. The novel made it a European (in culture) who comes to the poor Fremen and leads them, but this is nonsense.

To such a reader, the true founder of the victory of the Fremen is Liet Kynes, the native-born Fremen who studied offworld science and then came home and, under the noses of their colonial rulers, prepared the Fremen for jihad and victory.

Remember that Herbert wrote Dune in the 1960s, before the first oil embargo, before any Islamist government was ever formed.

Whether Dune had any causal influence on the rise of Al Qaeda, Herbert certainly did a superb job of predicting the rise and the power of such an ideology. I would be surprised if there were not, among the followers of Osama bin Laden, at least a few readers of Dune for whom this book feels like their future, their identity, their dream.

In other words, Herbert got it horribly right.

Meanwhile, it's one of the seminal novels of science fiction, and one of the most important novels in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century. It's a shame that it is only taught and discussed in classes on science fiction instead of taking its rightful place in literary studies.

It is laughable to think of some of the trivial books from the same period that are taught -- by professors who sneer at all science fiction. They still celebrate literature about the adolescent "counterculture" of the 1960s, while the fiction that was capturing the imagination of the best and brightest of that generation, and which still bears a significant relationship to the real world, is ignored.

I guess that's what the ivory tower is all about.

Velociraptor was a feathered fiend

Velociraptor was a feathered fiend:

Scientists have suspected for several years that velociraptors were feathered beasts, but only now have they been able to identify what they believe is conclusive proof. Close analysis of a velociraptor forelimb unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 reveals that quill knobs were present on