Rejoice with the Van Gods

Rejoice with the Van Gods — to the tune of Heart's "Barracuda":



Addendum: I learned a few things about the ad from Duncan's TV Ad Land:

“We wanted to create an ode to an era when the van was a symbol of cool and marry it to the apex product in the field, the Honda Minivan,” says RPA Art Director Tatum Cardillo. “The spot straddles the fine line of between homage and hilarious as we enter the world of ultimate van art: the airbrushed Nordic Viking God against the thumping track of Heart’s hit song Barracuda.”
[...]
“The concept is truly inspiring,” said creative director Jason Cook, “and we embraced the challenge of developing the look and execution of the airbrush come to life working hand-in-hand with the animation team at Titmouse. This effect runs counter to typical direction because most van art is created by non-trained artists and, thus, it had to look rough hewn and great all at the same time.”

Does the current generation of soccer moms look fondly back at 1970s rock and airbrushed van art?

The best movies of 2006

Roger Ebert shares his list of the best movies of 2006 — yes, 2006:

Yes, I know it's a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn't get out again until spring of 2007. For a long while, I just didn't feel like watching movies. Then something revolved within me, and I was engaged in life again.

I came to the terrible realization that I saw none of them in 2006, and I've only seen one, The Departed, since then. I've been a bad cinephile.

Six Months of Intellectual Anthropology

Bryan Caplan thinks Tyler Cowen makes a spot-on plea when he asks for six months of intellectual anthropology:

I'd like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration.

Caplan, who wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter, has some recent experience with this notion:

Since the publication of my book, I've been meeting a much wider range of people. I've talked to an elite Republican book club, a room full of vaguely Marxist academics at the New School, retirees, Cato, Heritage, a conference of largely leftist philosophers, the State Department (!), the Yale law school, DC economists, and UVA social scientists. I've also spoken on a wide range of radio shows and podcasts, left and right.

What have I learned? Primarily, I'm more convinced than ever that virtually everyone is sincere. The legions of people who imagine that their opponents secretly agree with them are utterly deluded. Even when you've got undeniable facts on your side, your opponents probably think that those facts don't matter; you're missing the deeper picture.

The lesson I draw: Sincerity is greatly overrated. It's an easy and widely distributed virtue. So what is in short supply? Common-sense. Literalism. Staying calm. Listening. Sticking to the point. Accepting and working through hypotheticals.

If you've got these, I'd like to meet your tribe.

Lessons from India in gender politics

Ray Fisman of Slate shares some lessons from India in gender politics:

Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods" — like schools, roads, and water pumps — Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

Of course, any time you bring new people in from the outside, you should expect them to act differently from the insiders who are beholden to entrenched special interest groups.

Overweight? Standing May Be Solution

Overweight? Standing May Be Solution:

Hamilton recruited a few laboratory rats and pigs, as well as about a dozen human volunteers, including himself, to learn more about the physiological effect of sitting. The lab animals laid the foundation for the research in two different experiments. The animals were injected with a small amount of fat that contained a radioactive tracer so the researchers could determine what happened to the fat.

"What's the fate of that fat?" Hamilton asked during a telephone interview. "Is it burned up by the muscle?"

The radioactive tracer revealed that when the animals were sitting down, the fat did not remain in the blood vessels that pass through the muscles, where it could be burned. Instead, it was captured by the adipose tissue, a type of connective tissue where globules of fat are stored. That tissue is found around organs such as the kidneys, so it's not really where you want to see the fat end up.

The researchers also took a close look at a fat-splitting enzyme, called lipase, that is critical to the body's ability to break down fat.

After the animals remained seated for several hours, "the enzyme was suppressed down to 10 percent of normal," Hamilton said. "It's just virtually shut off."

The results from the animal studies were very convincing, he said, and human experiments were just as compelling. The researchers injected a small needle into the muscles of the human volunteers and extracted a small sample for biopsy. Once again, the enzyme was suppressed while the humans remained seated. That resulted in retention of fat, and it also resulted in lower HDL, the "good cholesterol," and an overall reduction in the metabolic rate.

Charles Munger on Increasing Price to Increase Sales

Berkshire Hathaway's Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits, like this:

My fifth criticism is there is too little synthesis in economics. Not only with matter outside traditional economics, but also within economics. I have posed at two different business schools the following problem. I say, “You have studied supply and demand curves. You have learned that when you raise the price, ordinarily the volume you can sell goes down, and when you reduce the price, the volume you can sell goes up. Is that right? That’s what you’ve learned?” They all nod yes. And I say, “Now tell me several instances when, if you want the physical volume to go up, the correct answer is to increase the price?” And there’s this long and ghastly pause. And finally, in each of the two business schools in which I’ve tried this, maybe one person in fifty could name one instance. They come up with the idea that occasionally a higher price acts as a rough indicator of quality and thereby increases sales volumes.

This happened in the case of my friend Bill Ballhaus. When he was head of Beckman Instruments it produced some complicated product where if it failed it caused enormous damage to the purchaser. It wasn’t a pump at the bottom of an oil well, but that’s a good mental example. And he realized that the reason this thing was selling so poorly, even though it was better than anybody else’s product, was because it was priced lower. It made people think it was a low quality gizmo. So he raised the price by 20% or so and the volume went way up.

But only one in fifty can come up with this sole instance in a modern business school — one of the business schools being Stanford, which is hard to get into. And nobody has yet come up with the main answer that I like. Suppose you raise that price, and use the extra money to bribe the other guy’s purchasing agent? (Laughter). Is that going to work? And are there functional equivalents in economics — microeconomics — of raising the price and using the extra sales proceeds to drive sales higher? And of course there are zillion, once you’ve made that mental jump. It’s so simple.

One of the most extreme examples is in the investment management field. Suppose you’re the manager of a mutual fund, and you want to sell more. People commonly come to the following answer: You raise the commissions, which of course reduces the number of units of real investments delivered to the ultimate buyer, so you’re increasing the price per unit of real investment that you’re selling the ultimate customer. And you’re using that extra commission to bribe the customer’s purchasing agent. You’re bribing the broker to betray his client and put the client’s money into the high-commission product. This has worked to produce at least a trillion dollars of mutual fund sales.

This tactic is not an attractive part of human nature, and I want to tell you that I pretty completely avoided it in my life. I don’t think it’s necessary to spend your life selling what you would never buy. Even though it’s legal, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

(Hat tip to the Photon Courier.)

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

I've discussed before the power and peril of praising your kids. Now Carol Dweck writes about her work in Scientific American and explains the secret to raising smart kids — which is not praising their talent but their effort:

I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change—a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students’ mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t really change.” We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.

Gray Water Package Units from Brac Systems

I was just discussing a "gray water" solution for guilt-free flushing. Now Lloyd Alter, over at Treehugger, is wondering how long until we're all using Gray Water Package Units from Brac Systems — or something similar:

The Brac system includes "state-of-the-art components that filter used water from your shower, bath and laundry(*1), and then reuses it for your toilet’s evacuation system. The recycled water, which we will refer to as grey water, is strictly used for your toilet or for irrigation, and cannot get in your drinking-water system.

Foreign particles are filtered, so it is like using normal water, but without having to pay again, while also doing something effective for the environment. Furthermore, once integrated into your existing plumbing, the system operates seamlessly, so the only difference you will notice is on your water bill."

I asked Chris why they did not include the washing machine as a recommended connection; he said that the sinks and showers generally produce enough water to run the toilets and any excess will just go to the overflow.

I mentioned that in Atlanta there was a big need for landscaping water; he said that if that was the case it would make sense to have the biggest tank and connect the washer to it. He noted that you can also connect your downspouts to it and collect rainwater.

I'm not sure the mass market is going to run out to spend $2,000 to save a little water — especially if water prices don't go up to reflect low supply and high demand.

How to Create "House Rules"

Scott Meyer, in his Basic Instructions comic, explains How to Create "House Rules" for games.

Reading the 2nd Amendment

Shannon Loves notes that when Reading the 2nd Amendment we should at least be aware of what the language used meant at the time:

The 2nd Amendment in its original form reads:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Today, “regulated” most commonly means, “placed under government oversight.” Militia implies the civilian reserve of the national military. “security of a free state” means protecting the national government from external attack. “The people” means all citizens considered in concert. Given these modern definitions and shadings, a naive reader might interpret the 2nd Amendment as stating:

A military reserve, supervised by the national government, being necessary to protect the State from external attack, the right of the people collectively to maintain and use weapons shall not be infringed.

[...]
In 1792, “regulated” as applied to military matters contained no connotation of political oversight or control. Instead, it meant trained and organized. In a time when soldiers fought by moving in large, coordinated formations, order meant everything to military effectiveness. They used “regular” in the sense we use when we speak of of a regular angle or polygon. “Regulated” military units were organized into consistent, interchangeable units that made battlefield information management more efficient. “Unregulated” military units were just unorganized groups of men that could not fight as effectively as did “regulated” units. The use of “regulated” versus “unregulated” held no connotations of political control at all but merely described the units’ state of military organization.

With the passage of time, armies raised by centralized governments proved more organized than those raised by citizens. The phrase “regular army” evolved to mean one controlled by a centralized authority and “irregular army” evolved to mean an ad hoc one. The original use of the words to describe the organizational state of the army at any given time disappeared.

In 1792, “militia” held no connotations of a military reserve. Instead, the term applied entirely to self-organized groups of citizens operating out of their own shared authority. A “militia” differed from an “army” in that a central executive such as a monarch raised armies, but when citizens acted themselves they raised “militias”. Nothing in the use of the word “militia” prior to the 20th Century implied any degree of state sanction. In both colonial and frontier times, groups of citizens raised “militias” on their own authority at any time of their choosing and organized them as they saw fit. Prior to the Civil War, most campaigns against Native Americans were carried out by militias organized in frontier communities. Indeed, for people of the founders’ generation, no current American military organization would qualify as a “militia”. State executives were given the authority to call out the militia but the inherent moral and legal authority to form a “militia” rested with the civilian population.

In 1792, “free state” did not mean a country free from external attack but rather a non-despotic government.

In 1792, “right” meant an inherent ability instead of the modern sense of “granted privilege” or “entitlement.”

In 1792, “the people” definitely meant “each individual citizen.”

In 1792, “keep and bear” meant “possess and use.”

In 1792, “arms” meant “weapons.”

So, if we update the language of the 2nd amendment into its modern equivalents we get something like:

Well trained and coordinated groups [of] citizens organized for military action being necessary to prevent the devolution of governments into despotism, the inalienable ability of individual citizens to possess and use weapons shall not be abridged.

James Bennett follows up with a comment on the times:

We should also remember that the Founders were referencing relatively recent historical experiences — ones that had overshadowed political discourse throughout their lives. If any American state were t attempt secession tday, we would view that event through the lens of the American Civil War even though that event was almost 160 years ago. So the founders viewed these issues through the lens of the Glorious Revolution, which was only a century previous — they had known witnesses to those events in heir childhoods. And the English Civil War was no more distant to them than the American one is to us today. To them, the threat to the “security of a free state” was exemplified by the Stuarts trying to disarm citizens’ militias in the years before 1688, or the professional New Model Army marching into Parliament to dismiss the members they disliked by force of arms. The Second Amendment is a real reaction to real-world events — and it specifically endorses the fundamental concept of an armed citizenry.

A Thirst for Change

A few years ago, Kara and Theo Goldin quit their jobs — she was a VP at AOL, and he was an IP lawyer at Netscape — to renovate their house and raise their young children. Then they realized they had A Thirst for Change:

In May, 2005, the Goldins launched Hint, a naturally flavored bottled water made without sweeteners or preservatives. Kara is the chief executive; Theo the chief operating officer. This year they expect revenues of $3 million to $4 million, and next year three times as much. The water is sold in several grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market, Stop & Shop, and Ralphs, as well as small stores. And, because Cherise McVicar, Walt Disney's senior vice-president for national promotions, happened to try (and like) a sample of Hint, the Goldins now have an arrangement to put Disney' characters on their bottles.

For the Goldins, the years between leaving their familiar world and entering unknown terrain were filled with questioning, sussing out possibilities, then a moment of recognition followed by months of experimenting, gathering info, listening, cold-calling, and being called naive. Then they just plunged in.
[...]
Kara began paying more attention to the concerns of health-conscious mothers. "I was looking for the low-hanging fruit," she says. Then there it was: the sugared-up juice box. "I always wondered why there wasn't another option." There is, of course. It's called water. But Kara figured kids (and everyone else) wanted a drink with flavor. At spas, she had been served water with fruit in it, and realized there was something to that: "I thought someone should put it in a bottle."

Kara began testing fruit combinations on her family and friends while trying to squeeze information from any people in the beverage business who would talk to her. They were pretty skeptical that someone without any experience could succeed with the most difficult of drinks to produce and sell: one that was unsweetened and made without preservatives.

When she put together a business plan in 2004, she started to see what the skeptics were getting at. "I had no resources for labels, bottles, bottlers," she says. "I had only halfway listened to their point about how hard it is to get shelf space [in stores]." The only thing that wasn't a problem was money: She and Theo financed the company themselves initially. Now, after additional investments from friends and family, they own more than 90%.

Theo began devoting more time to Hint about six months before the May, 2005, launch — in two stores, one in Marin County, Calif., and the other in Manhattan. They hadn't signed up any distributors yet, so they drove the first delivery to the local gourmet market (one case of each flavor — apple, cucumber, lime, and tangerine).

A few months later, they got their first big break. At the Fancy Food Show in New York, the San Francisco buyer for Whole Foods expressed interest in carrying Hint. He asked if the Goldins were with United Natural Foods (UNFI ). They had no idea what that was. Turns out it is the largest natural food distributor in the U.S. With the promise of Whole Foods as a customer, they worked out an agreement.

Getting distributors is what it's all about in the beverage business. And for those who work on other things besides health foods, an unsweetened drink retailing for $1.69-$3.00 is a hard sell. The Goldins did, though, just manage to get in with an important network of independent distributors. "They have surprised a lot of people," says Gerry Khermouch, the editor of Beverage Business Insights. "They're selling overpriced, unsweetened water with a slight hint of fruit. They're the niche of the niche."

Now the Goldins have begun to grapple with some of the compromises they made early on. They've improved the production process so that Hint has a shelf life of 12 months instead of four. They've changed their 16-ounce bottle, which was originally an inch shorter than others on the shelves and looked puny by comparison. Their new one is a standard eight inches tall.

They've also figured out a few things about the flavors. Apple and pear are too difficult to work with, so they're on hiatus. To develop mango grapefruit took 15 tries with three different consultants over an entire year. Peppermint, though, took only two attempts.

Next year they hope to raise $3 million from an investor who might help expand their distribution and sales. "We learned over and over again in the tech world that it's not really about the idea. It's about how well and how fast you execute the idea," says Theo.

It's not really about the idea. It's about how well and how fast you execute the idea. I guess that's why I should have executed this idea a few years back.

Robert Full Explains How To Design A Foot

Robert Full explains how to design a foot that is inspired by nature:

Biologist Robert Full shares his fascination with spiny cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. His talk, complete with wonderful slow-mo video of cockroach, crab and gecko gaits, explains his goal of creating the perfect robotic "distributed foot."

Bringing zeppelins down to Earth

In Bringing zeppelins down to Earth, Michael R. of Witigonen holds a Q&A session with airship engineer Ron Hochstetler, who makes the following points:

• Weather has always been a huge operational challenge for airships, which can't simply fly above bad weather, the way heavier-than-air airplanes can; they have to fly around it.
  
  Traditionally, the airship pilot and flight crew had to study weather maps and carefully plot out their best-guess route for avoiding head winds. Now, computers can plot intricate weather-optimized routes that take into account both unwanted head winds and helpful tail winds.


• Non-rigid airship designs — blimps — are cheaper and easier to build than rigid designs — zeppelins — but they have a size limit based on the strength of the envelope fabric. With stronger fabrics, we can now build non-rigid airships as big as the old rigid airships from back in the day.


• Fully buoyant airships, as they slow down to land, behave more and more like soap bubbles, at the mercy of the wind. One way to side-step this problem is to make the ship heavier. A "hybrid" airship obtains just 80 percent of its lift from helium and the remainder from dynamic lift, like an airplane.


• Airships, because they travel so slowly compared to jets, can have enormous payload volumes. In most transport aircraft you run out of payload volume long before you ever reach the payload weight limit of the aircraft.


• Airships require less infrastructure than jets, trains, etc. — they don't require a massive modern airport at each end — which makes them (a) flexible and (b) ideal for the less-developed world.

Taking Marriage Private

Stephanie Coontz, professor of history at Evergreen State College and author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, discusses Taking Marriage Private:

Why do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

By the 1920s, 38 states prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese, Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a “mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after divorce.

In the mid-20th century, governments began to get out of the business of deciding which couples were “fit” to marry. Courts invalidated laws against interracial marriage, struck down other barriers and even extended marriage rights to prisoners.

But governments began relying on marriage licenses for a new purpose: as a way of distributing resources to dependents. The Social Security Act provided survivors’ benefits with proof of marriage. Employers used marital status to determine whether they would provide health insurance or pension benefits to employees’ dependents. Courts and hospitals required a marriage license before granting couples the privilege of inheriting from each other or receiving medical information.

In the 1950s, using the marriage license as a shorthand way to distribute benefits and legal privileges made some sense because almost all adults were married. Cohabitation and single parenthood by choice were very rare.

Today, however, possession of a marriage license tells us little about people’s interpersonal responsibilities. Half of all Americans aged 25 to 29 are unmarried, and many of them already have incurred obligations as partners, parents or both. Almost 40 percent of America’s children are born to unmarried parents. Meanwhile, many legally married people are in remarriages where their obligations are spread among several households.

Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical. Society has already recognized this when it comes to children, who can no longer be denied inheritance rights, parental support or legal standing because their parents are not married.

As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.

Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.

It's the Tribes, Stupid!

Robert Kaplan says, It's the Tribes, Stupid!:

For more than 230 years, Americans have assumed that because we have had a happy experience with democracy, so will the rest of the world. But the American military has had a radically contrary experience in Iraq. And Iraq may be but prologue for what our troops may encounter in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.

Because Iraq was among the most backward parts of the Ottoman Empire, tribalism has always been strong there. The power of the tribes intensified during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when the state was weakened in part by economic pressures. Because the tribes in Anbar, along the desert smuggling route to Syria, were too strong to subdue, Saddam Hussein had no choice but to co-opt them and make them part of his power structure – exactly as our military has lately been doing.

It is such traditional loyalties existing below the level of the state that historically both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western democratic models, tragically underestimated. A realist like St. Augustine, in his City of God, understood that tribes, based on the narrow bonds of kinship and ethnicity rather than on any universalist longing, may not constitute the highest good; but by contributing to social cohesion, tribes nevertheless constitute a good in and of themselves. Quelling anarchy means starting with clans and tribes, and building upwards from those granular elements.

The Infinitely Geared Bike

Popular Science calls the NuVinci the infinitely geared bike:

Cyclists have been waiting a long time for this one. Based on a 1490s sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, The Ride’s rear hub mimics an infinite number of gears, rather than the mere 21 offered by the usual chain-yanking transmission. So you can always find the perfect gear ratio, whether starting from a stop or speeding down a hill. Twist a dial on the handlebar, and ball bearings in the bike’s NuVinci transmission tilt between two rotating metal discs. (Your pedaling turns one disc; the other transfers power to the rear wheel.) As the balls tilt, they touch the discs at varying angles. This changes how fast the wheel spins relative to your pedaling—slowly for low gear ratios, where pedaling is easy but the wheel doesn’t turn much, and quickly for high ratios. The balls can roll to almost any angle, giving you precise control over the bike’s torque (and your exertion). This latest take on da Vinci’s continuous transmission has potential uses beyond bikes. Within four years, expect to see the NuVinci in cars, tractors, even wind turbines — the possibilities are nearly as limitless as the gear ratios. 3,000; ellsworthbikes.com

Farmyard Stills Quench a Thirst for Local Spirits

Farmyard Stills Quench a Thirst for Local Spirits:

“I talked to banks, told them I wanted to make vodka on my farm here, and they said, ‘Yeah, right you are,’” recalled Mr. Fox, whose company went on to become the first distillery in Kansas since Prohibition. “Well, I had a million dollars in sales last year.”

“I’m the seventh generation to be in alcohol,” he said proudly. “Just the first to do it legally.”

On the heels of the microbrewing boom, new microdistilleries are thriving from coast to coast. And some of the latest and quirkiest entrants to the industry are in places like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Mr. Fox’s barn.

In trying to take advantage of generations of his family’s moonshining expertise, Mr. Fox, for instance, had no business plan, no employees and about $100 in his checking account. Only his timing was rich: the national demand for high-end spirits, especially vodka, has soared over the last several years, along with the general consumer craving for products with local flair.

Meanwhile, some of the states, increasingly aware of the power of agri-business to generate tourism and tax dollars, have gradually begun loosening some of the temperance-era laws that have lingered for decades, restricting who can distill what, and where.

With its abundance of grain and fruit, the Midwest stands poised to capitalize on the confluence of trends unlike any other region and could, in time, come to rival California, currently the leader in small-scale distilling, experts said.

Small, private distilleries are opening at a rate of about 10 to 20 a year. There are about 100 across the country. Some are attached to wineries, restaurants and breweries, or, increasingly, are located on farms. Though there is no precise definition for what the industry refers to as artisanal or craft distilleries, experts say they are distinguished from mass distillers by their small scale, their use of local and often organic ingredients, and the experimental quality of some of their products, like seasonal pumpkin-infused vodka.

As a result of their individuality and regional differences, the distillers offer spirits that run the gamut in terms of quality and taste. Some are one- or two-person backyard operations; others are state-of-the-art laboratories built at great expense.

Guilt-Free Flushing

This tool for guilt-free flushing seems much more appealing than the usual "two-flusher" toilet:

About 40 percent of freshwater coming into the average home is used just to flush the toilet. When tucked inside the cabinet below the bathroom sink, the Aqus system cuts that number significantly. Instead of using freshwater to flush, it catches the water that goes down your sink drain, filtering and disinfecting it and then quietly pumping it to your toilet tank. (The recycled water is even safe for toilet-slurping pets.) When there’s not enough wastewater for a flush, Aqus pulls from your plumbing. The system saves up to 14 gallons a day in a two-person house. $295; watersavertech.com

The Cleanest Train Ever Built

Years ago, I assumed that Diesel locomotives were just like Diesel trucks, only larger and on rails. Then I learned that they were in fact Diesel-electrics:

In a Diesel-electric locomotive the Diesel engine prime mover drives an electric generator whose output provides power to the traction motors. There is no mechanical connection between the prime mover and the driving wheels (drivers). Conceptually, this type of locomotive is an electric locomotive that incorporates its own generating station, making it well suited for operation in areas that do not have electrified railways.

If you already have a Diesel-electric, it seems pretty straightforward to add a battery, which GE just did.

GE's new hybrid train is arguably the cleanest train ever built:

GE’s hybrid locomotive cuts both emissions and fuel consumption by up to half by capturing the 207-ton train’s braking energy and using it to supplement the diesel engines to accelerate or climb steep inclines. No modern battery can capture, store, and redeliver that much power, so GE created its own: a 1,000-pound molten-salt cell, which combines sodium with a metal chloride. That chemical recipe allows more current to flow through it than other batteries, so the 20-cell system can deploy 2,000 horsepower in less than a second. The Evolution made its cross-country debut in May and carries its first commercial load in 2010. ge.ecomagination.com

Of course, the efficiency gains are greatest when the train needs to start and stop. This makes such hybrid locomotives ideal as shunting or switching vehicles, the tug boats of the locomotive world.

GM's promised Chevy Volt, by the way, is this kind of hybrid — although it uses a gasoline engine, not a Diesel, to power its generator — which is not quite the same thing as a Prius-style hybrid. GM calls the Volt an E-REV:

Calling a car a hybrid signifies that it’s driveshaft can be turned both by an electric motor and a combustion engine. A plug-in hybrid is a car that has extended electrical capacity supplied from the grid allowing for extended driving in all-electric mode. Modified Priuses and the upcoming Plug-in Saturn VUE are examples of those.

EVs and BEVs are cars that only have an electric motor and a rechargeable battery. They usually have overall limited ranges. The Tesla and EV-1 are examples.

GM toyed with different terms to describe the Volt. They have decided on the term E-REV (with the dash, pronounced ee-rehv), which stands for extended-range electric vehicle. They like the marketing opportunities of “REV” (i.e. E-REVolution)

Millions in Sales From 3 Simple Words

Millions in Sales From 3 Simple Words: Life is good.

Mr. Jacobs is the 42-year-old co-founder of Life is good, a popular apparel brand based in Boston that is on track to break $100 million in sales this year. This is rarefied air for Mr. Jacobs, who a dozen years ago was selling T-shirts out of a battered van on the streets of Boston with his brother John, now 39.

From a single childlike drawing of a character they named Jake and their uplifting three-word slogan, the brothers have developed a fashion brand sold in 4,500 independent retail outlets in the United States and 27 other countries.

Since 1994, they have sold nearly 20 million Life is good T-shirts and now have a product line with more than 900 items, from hats to dog beds, and the company continues to grow 30 to 40 percent annually. There are now 93 independently owned Life is good retail shops selling only their merchandise, and the company plans to have a total of 200 by the end of 2009. With all that, Life is good has just 250 employees.
[...]
Though they had been reasonably content to sell enough of their wares to pay a meager rent and avoid taking real jobs, the Jacobs brothers always believed that they could make a better T-shirt and turn it into a bona fide business.

They posted their own drawings and slogans on the wall of their apartment near Boston and regularly polled friends at their frequent keg parties for feedback about their ideas. “It was truly like a focus group,” Bert Jacobs recalled.

In search of something that would resonate with a broad audience, they created Jake, a crudely drawn stick character not all that far removed from the Smiley Face, and were amazed at how he inspired an intensely positive reaction.

“This guy has life figured out,” wrote one friend next to the drawing.

They later posted a list of 50 slogans they had compiled and got a similar reaction to the unremarkable phrase “life is good.” A girlfriend concluded that the slogan with three simple words “kind of says it all.”

The brothers printed 48 test T-shirts that combined the slogan with the drawing for a street fair in Cambridge, Mass., in 1994, and sold the entire lot in 45 minutes.

That night, the brothers huddled and decided that the gold they had seemingly struck was a result of their message of optimism. “The reason people bought those shirts was because they understood it instantly,” Bert Jacobs said. “It made them smile, and it was tangible. They could reach out and get a little sunshine.”

Doug Gladstone, chief executive of Brand Content, an ad agency in Boston, agreed. “They tapped into something positive yet benign,” he said. “The product makes you feel good but it’s not over the top.”

By the end of 1994, the brothers had sold $82,000 of Life is good shirts through a couple of willing retail outlets. Within four years, they broke the $1 million barrier and believed they had found the small business they had always dreamed of and that they were sitting on an emerging brand.

The outside world did not see it that way. “It was a real uphill battle to get other people to say we had a brand,” Bert Jacobs said. “At $10 million and even $20 million in sales, they were still asking us when we were going to launch something different.”

The Big Sleep

Graham Robb explains The Big Sleep that hit the pre-industrial world every winter:

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the [French] Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.

It's hard to imagine living in a Malthusian world, where the marginal benefit of extra labor doesn't justify the marginal cost in food energy.

1000% hedge fund wins subprime bet

1000% hedge fund wins subprime bet:

A Californian hedge fund has made more than 1,000 per cent return this year by betting against US subprime home loans, making it one of the world’s best-performing funds of all time.

Lahde Capital, set up in Santa Monica last year by Andrew Lahde, last week passed the 1,000 per cent mark, after fees, following the latest leg of the credit market turmoil. The fall in the value of subprime-linked securities has boosted a group of funds which spotted the problems in advance.

The decision to use derivatives to short, or bet against, low-quality US home loans taken by a select group of hedge funds last year appears to have become the most profitable single trade of all time, making well over $20bn in total so far this year. John Paulson’s New York-based Paulson & Co, the biggest of the group with $28bn under management, is said by investors to have made $12bn profit from the trade already.

However, Mr Lahde, whose fund is one of the smallest specialists shorting subprime, has now begun to return money to investors, telling them in a letter: “The risk/return characteristics are far less attractive than in the past.”

In his letter, Mr Lahde said he expected the collapse in value of subprime mortgage-linked securities to be repeated for bonds backed by commercial property loans in a deep recession – which he also predicts.

“Our entire banking system is a complete disaster,” he wrote. “In my opinion, nearly every major bank would be insolvent if they marked their assets to market.” He also said he would be putting some of his own profits into gold and other precious metals.

Mr Lahde has used the phenomenal returns to boost his business, launching a fund to bet against commercial real estate this autumn – which made 42 per cent in its first two months – and is in the process of creating a third fund to short credits with a broader mandate.

Lahde’s first fund, US Residential Real Estate Hedge V Class A, soared 712.8 per cent in the year to the end of October, before this month’s sell-off pushed it past the 1,000 per cent mark.

There is no reliable data on how many other funds have made 1,000 per cent, or ten times the investment, in a year. But RAB Capital, London hedge fund manager, shot to prominence in 2003 when it returned 1,475.5 per cent in its Special Situations fund, which now runs $2.4bn and is the biggest shareholder in troubled bank Northern Rock.

Bigger subprime top performers include Paulson’s Credit Opportunities fund, up 550.8 per cent to the end of October, and the Subprime Credit Strategies fund run jointly by Texas-based Hayman Capital and Corriente Advisors, up 526.5 per cent.

Something old is new again -- and greener

Something old is new again -- and greener:

Under pressure to reduce emissions and increase fuel-efficiency, automakers are quietly turning to turbocharging as a relatively cheap, easy-to-implement technology that could soon be a permanent staple on internal combustion engines.

That's because turbos, high-velocity fans that recirculate and compress exhaust gases back into the motor's cylinders, can increase fuel-efficiency by as much as 30% while increasing power output. Thanks to that increased power, smaller engines can be used, reducing weight and further increasing efficiency. And because it's a proven technology, the research and development costs are enticingly low.
[...]
"This is not something on the drawing board. Turbos are here," said Adriane Brown, president and chief executive of Honeywell Transportation Systems, the leading turbo manufacturer, with $2.5 billion in turbo sales last year. As turbos gain more acceptance, she expects sales to grow three times faster than the automotive segment in the next few years, or about 8%.

Turbos are hardly new. After finding a place on ships, locomotives and airplanes in the first half of the last century, they were adopted for passenger cars in the 1970s when BMW, Mercedes, Mitsubishi and even Buick bolted them on manifolds. Despite popularity among car tuners, they quickly lost acceptance among the general population, which saw them as unreliable, expensive and, with their sudden bursts of acceleration, dangerous.

Older turbos delivered great amounts of torque, yet frequently there was a short time gap between stepping on the pedal and feeling the power. That gap, called turbo lag, could cause unsuspecting drivers to crash.

New turbo technology has essentially eliminated that gap while providing variable boost depending on the engine velocity, turbo manufacturers say. And turbos add only slightly to the cost of a car, they say, between $1,000 and $3,000 -- part of which can be offset by using a smaller engine.

And though some carmakers are just now embracing the technology (and a very few still shun it), others have been pressing the turbo button for years. GM's Saab, for example, has long used turbocharged engines and Subaru has had them in cars for 25 years, including four current models.

In Europe, turbocharger-equipped diesel engines are far and away the most common engine type, approaching 50% market penetration. Yet in the U.S., said Honeywell's Brown, only 6% of cars and truck are "boosted."

Temperature itself has a little fever

Temperature itself has a little fever:

In 1851, Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich decided to start using a new instrument in his clinic: the thermometer. He was among very few using the device, although he wasn't the first: Thirty years earlier, a pair of French doctors had shown that inflamed body parts and exercising muscles were hotter than the rest of the body. (They showed the latter by sticking a heat-sensitive needle in a man's arm while he sawed wood.)

They had also suggested that the average human body temperature was about 98.5 degrees.

Wunderlich set out to prove it. Using a foot-long thermometer that took more than 15 minutes to give a reading, he took the underarm temperature of 25,000 patients several times over -- a total of more than a million readings.

(That's more than 250,000 hours, or 10,000 days, of temperature-taking, for those who are counting.)

In an astounding feat of patience (given that calculators were unimaginable at the time), Wunderlich then averaged the temperatures and came up with 98.6 degrees.

The number stuck -- although it's starting to give way.

Since Wunderlich's day, doctors and researchers have observed that normal body temperature varies from person to person and changes depending on the time of day. In 1992, three doctors working at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Baltimore took several daily temperature measurements of 148 men and women over three days.

In a now oft-cited paper, they published their results: The average temperature was 98.2.

But the doctors, led by Dr. Philip Mackowiak, now a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, were hesitant to put too much stock in this average. Like Wunderlich more than a century before, they found that body temperature rose and fell during the day, from a low at 6 a.m. to a peak at around 6 p.m.

Mackowiak's team found other influences on temperature variation. Women in the study were slightly hotter than men (98.4 versus 98.1), and blacks were slightly warmer than whites (98.2 versus 98.1).

Other researchers have shown that age also matters: Children are warmer than adults, thanks to their rapid metabolism, and that cooling trend appears to continue throughout life. A 2005 study showed that in 150 seniors, the average temperature was 97.3 degrees early in the morning and 97.8 just before bed.

Sunday School for Atheists

Church is about much more than Christian doctrine. Now there's even Sunday School for Atheists:

"When you have kids," says Julie Willey, a design engineer, "you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on." So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.

An estimated 14% of Americans profess to have no religion, and among 18-to-25-year-olds, the proportion rises to 20%, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies. The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the U.S. "It's important for kids not to look weird," says Peter Bishop, who leads the preteen class at the Humanist center in Palo Alto. Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it's O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.

The pioneering Palo Alto program began three years ago, and like-minded communities in Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., and Portland, Ore., plan to start similar classes next spring. The growing movement of institutions for kids in atheist families also includes Camp Quest, a group of sleep-away summer camps in five states plus Ontario, and the Carl Sagan Academy in Tampa, Fla., the country's first Humanism-influenced public charter school, which opened with 55 kids in the fall of 2005. Bri Kneisley, who sent her son Damian, 10, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer, welcomes the sense of community these new choices offer him: "He's a child of atheist parents, and he's not the only one in the world."

Kneisley, 26, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, says she realized Damian needed to learn about secularism after a neighbor showed him the Bible. "Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," says Kneisley. In most ways a traditional sleep-away camp — her son loved canoeing — Camp Quest also taught Damian critical thinking, world religions and tales of famous freethinkers (an umbrella term for atheists, agnostics and other rationalists) like the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Spielberg-grade gear on an indie budget

Popular Science's "Best of What's New 2007" list includes a piece of Spielberg-grade gear on an indie budget:

Red One captures digital video that matches the top-end quality of 35-millimeter movie film — at less than a tenth the price of other professional digital rigs. The secret to the Red’s quality is its 12-megapixel “Mysterium” image sensor. Its physically larger pixels soak up more light to capture rich color and deep contrast that makes even shadowy nighttime scenes pop off the screen the way they do on film. And the Red’s compression software lets you edit the huge video files on a regular laptop. How did Red get the price so low? Since the company is hoping to sell to a wider audience than just movie studios, it’s counting on economies of scale to keep manufacturing costs low. $17,500 for body only; $35,000 with accessories, including lens, hard drive and battery; red.com

Retro-Future: To The Stars!

If you enjoy retro-future art, you should enjoy these rare pieces from unlikely sources, including Soviet science magazines.

Norman Saunders

If you enjoy pulp art, you should enjoy the work of Norman Saunders.

(Hat tip to Michael Blowhard.)

Human links may be seen in gorillas' tools

Gorillas are using weapons to attack humans:

The scientists noticed the unusual behaviour during a three-year study. They believe the animals might have learned to throw objects from humans who were seen throwing stones at the gorillas.

Jacqueline Sunderland Groves, from the University of Sussex in Brighton, a member of the Wildlife Conservation Society team, said: "The area is largely isolated from other gorilla groups, but there are herdsmen on the mountain.

"In one encounter a group of gorillas threw clumps of grass and soil at the researchers while acting aggressively. Another gorilla threw a branch. A third encounter saw the gorillas throwing soil at a local man who was throwing stones at the apes."

A gorilla was seen to use tools once before in the Congo, using sticks to test the depth of water and to cross swampy areas.

The findings suggest that the use of tools may predate the evolutionary split between apes and humans six million years ago.

Religious believers and strong atheists may both be less depressed than existentially-uncertain people

Religious believers and strong atheists may both be less depressed than existentially-uncertain people:

Although controversial, it is often argued that religious belief is a cause of greater happiness. However, we have found in two separate studies that both theism and atheism are correlated with fewer reported depressive symptoms than the in-between state of ‘existential uncertainty’.

In our first study, on the effect of religious conviction on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), there was an unanticipated ‘inverted-U’ relationship, where the most and least religious groups had fewest depressive symptoms. In the second, we devised an 11-item existential conviction scale (ECS) as a measure of the degree of certainty with which an individual feels they understand the basis of human life. Fifty-two subjects (24 male, 28 female; age 18–76 years) completed the ECS and BDI. All 10 of those who rated as depressed (‘mild’ depression, BDI score 10+) were roughly halfway between atheist and theist. There was a significant negative relationship between ECS and the BDI (Spearman rank correlation –0.44, p<0.2).

South Had 42% Chance

Robin Hanson reminds us that hindsight bias can make familiar outcomes seem inevitable, even if those outcomes were not at all certain before the fact. For instance, the South had a 42% chance of winning the war:

Historians have long wondered whether the Southern Confederacy had a realistic chance at winning the American Civil War. We provide some quantitative evidence on this question by introducing a new methodology for estimating the probability of winning a civil war or revolution based on decisions in financial markets. Using a unique dataset of Confederate gold bonds in Amsterdam, we apply this methodology to estimate the probability of a Southern victory from the summer of 1863 until the end of the war. Our results suggest that European investors gave the Confederacy approximately a 42 percent chance of victory prior to the battle of Gettysburg/Vicksburg. News of the severity of the two rebel defeats led to a sell-off in Confederate bonds. By the end of 1863, the probability of a Southern victory fell to about 15 percent. Confederate victory prospects generally decreased for the remainder of the war.

Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You

In Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You, Eliezer Yudkowsky compares using selective breeding or genetic algorithms to summoning a demon — an alien god, really — with its own intentions.

Commenter J. Thomas shares some examples:

There are lots of examples of unexpected selective outcomes.

A story — a long time agon a swedish researcher tried to increase wheat yields by picking the biggest wheat kernels to plant. In only 5 generations he had a strain of wheat that produced 6 giant wheat kernels per stalk.

When scale insects were damaging citrus fruits, farmers tried to poison them with cyanide. They'd put a giant tent over the whole tree and pump in the cyanide and kill the scale insects. Plants can be immune to cyanide but no animal that depends on respiration can be. And yet in only 5 years or so they got resistant scale insects. The resistant insects would — when anything startling happen — sit very still and hold their breath for half an hour or so.

A history of electroshock therapy

Sherwin Nuland, surgeon and author, offers up a fascinating history of electroshock therapy. Definitely watch it past the half-way point, when it gets unusually interesting:



Of course, this is what people really think of when they think of electroshock therapy:

Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game

Michael Fitzgerald explains Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game:

Work is not play. But maybe it should be.

In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management. Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. Unfortunately, most of the software is the business equivalent of calorie counting. No one does it gladly. Worse, the software has a Big Brother aspect to it.

“C.R.M. software is designed to let your manager peek at you,” Mr. Johnston says. He notes that even at Entellium, based in Seattle, he has had trouble getting his sales staff to update their data consistently. Reasoning that sales people are wildly competitive, he thought that they would respond to a program that showed where they stood against their goals — or their peers’. Hence, Rave, which Entellium introduced in April.

Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new they are — common in C.R.M. programs — but by how likely they are to buy something. All prospects are also tracked on a timeline, another gamelike feature.

Rave isn’t exactly the business version of Madden N.F.L., at least not yet. But Craig K. Hall, president of Logos Marketing Inc., a graphics company in Albany, said it reminded him of video games he has played, like the Legend of Zelda. Mr. Hall, 31, says he likes the way Rave pops up information, including news that will matter to clients. He also said its use of sales stages and checklists, also borrowed from the way games progress through levels, had helped him rethink the way his company operates. “They’ve done a good job of it,” he said.

The making of a UPS driver

Nadira Hira of Fortune looks at the making of a UPS driver — that is, the arduous process of getting a Generation-Y twentysomething to work an arduous job:

But such is the Gen Y reaction to what one academic described as a "plum blue-collar job." (UPS drivers make an average of $75,000 a year, plus an average of $20,000 in health-care benefits and pension, well above the norm for comparable positions at other freight carriers.) Much derided as a group of upstart technophiles of little work ethic and even less loyalty, Gen Yers aren't exactly a perfect fit for Big Brown. In fact, it's hard to imagine a worse match.

For decades this company, which last year had $47.5 billion in revenue, has relied on "human engineering" — strictly timed routines, rote memorization, even uniform appearance, going so far as to mandate short hair and outlaw beards — to distinguish itself. (And just in case you thought they weren't hip to the times, there's even a policy on piercings and tattoos: one stud in each ear at most for both men and women, and a ban on tattoos visible during deliveries.)

Though UPS has adapted over time, it's that human aspect that has continued to make the business successful. Here, you don't just pick up a package any old way. You take 15.5 seconds to carry out "selection," the prescribed 12-step process that starts with parking the vehicle and ends whe