A Lifesaving Checklist

Atul Gawunde once again writes about A Lifesaving Checklist, but this time he writes about how the government shut down the lifesaving program:

A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

The results were stunning. Within three months, the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds. The average I.C.U. cut its infection rate from 4 percent to zero. Over 18 months, the program saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million.

Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down. The agency issued notice to the researchers and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association that, by introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations. Johns Hopkins had to halt not only the program in Michigan but also its plans to extend it to hospitals in New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Scents & Sensibility

In Scents & Sensibility, Sarah Chayes explains the difficulties she faced getting any kind of aid to start her exotic fragrance business in Afghanistan:

Andres suggested I turn instead to the Alternative Livelihoods Program (ALP). Funded by USAID, the project is, according to the agency’s Web site, a “major component of the U.S. and Government of Afghanistan’s comprehensive Counter-Narcotics Strategy.” The idea behind ALP is to compete with the ubiquitous opium poppy by promoting other ways for rural folk to make a living. The match seemed perfect. Our cooperative’s main objective was to find new, profitable uses for more of southern Afghanistan’s traditional agricultural and botanical products. The more reliably farmers could earn money from legal crops—especially ones with a higher market value than wheat or watermelons—the less likely they were to have recourse to risky and religiously taboo opium. Full of hope, I approached ALP.

As I was to learn over the next two bewildering years, the Alternative Livelihoods Program exemplifies the disturbing evolution of the international development industry. With neither the staff nor the mobility to carry out or even fully monitor the projects it supports, USAID acts strictly as a moneybag. Though it does fund nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations dedicated to humanitarian action, many American development dollars go to huge for-profit companies that have adapted over recent decades to capture the manna. Chemonics, which landed the contract for ALP in the southern region of Afghanistan—known, inevitably, by the clumsy ALP/S— is one of these.

Chemonics’ initial contract provided for $119 million, for use in three Afghan provinces over a four-year period. Roughly one year after the contract became official in early 2005, Chemonics had spent only a tiny percentage of its authorization, and a large part of that on its own start-up costs. Earlier this year, at its well-equipped building in Kandahar, guarded around the clock by a private security detail, I counted 10 brand-new SUVs. And yet, until this year, ALP/S was hardly visible in Kandahar, and only rarely had an international presence here. According to a former worker on the project, international employees can earn up to about $180,000 a year—plus 35 percent hazard pay, 35 percent “post differential,” and 20 percent for working Saturdays. But USAID, the former worker said, pays the company some $500,000 to $600,000 for each of them. Little surprise that Afghans wonder where the development dollars are going.

My initial contacts with ALP/S in May 2005 were warm, if a trifle confusing. The members of the agribusiness team were enthusiastic but unsure of how they could help. They kept inviting me to lunch at the German restaurant around the corner from their office, as though such charity could replace substantive help. What I needed was money—something they had plenty of. A year’s start-up funding would have been perfect, $50,000 or $70,000, until sales kicked in. The ALP/S workers said they couldn’t give grants and told me to write up a business plan.

Estimate is the word, a euphemism for “shot in the dark.” I was, like many business-plan authors, making it up. But by the end of June, I had submitted my 15-page document, and it included soap formulas, a list of raw materials and products, a description of likely markets and marketing strategies, and a schedule of production activities, both daily and seasonal. Its projections have proved quite accurate, at least in terms of raw-materials costs and margins. Even the monthly operating costs have checked out.

However, at my next meeting with the ALP/S team in Kabul, applause did not break out. “It needs more numbers,” commented one team member. I asked what kind of numbers; he could not specify. A Chemonics bigwig, in Afghanistan on a different project, volunteered to build me a spreadsheet. “It would be good if you could show yourself breaking even within six months,” he advised. A few days later, he e-mailed me an opus. Fourteen screens long on my laptop, in a rainbow of colors, it began with “Production Coefficients,” then scrolled through equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master’s degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements.

Sometimes my numbers puzzled Chemonics personnel. Why had I altered the working hours per person for October? Answer: October that year was when Ramadan fell. No one is going to make an Afghan work more than four hours a day during Ramadan. Similar questions arose when purchases of pomegranates were entered only for October and November. Pomegranates are fruit, I explained. They have a growing season. It’s not like supermarkets in the West, stocked all year long.

The expectation that a start-up business, located in one of the most volatile and dangerous cities on Earth, should break even within six months seemed excessive. In any case, the ALP/S agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. “We don’t need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets,” they remarked of their colleague. I was stunned, but not ungrateful for the thought process this task had imposed. And I started over on a different type of business plan.

Costco Starts a Barroom Brawl

Costco Starts a Barroom Brawl — by looking to bypass the alcohol distribution system, which exists for largely political reasons:

One of the perceived social ills inspiring Prohibition was the owning of bars by brewers. To the Anti-Saloon League and like-minded groups, this arrangement promoted alcoholism. They made the case so effectively that, even after Prohibition was lifted in 1933, most states insisted on keeping alcohol makers far away from alcohol sellers. The favored solution: a three-tier distribution system requiring manufacturers to sell to wholesalers, and wholesalers to sell to retailers.

That structure is still in place in most states today. But a closely watched federal court case filed in Seattle is now challenging the three-tier regime as outdated and anticompetitive. In 2006 Issaquah (Wash.)-based club store Costco Wholesale (COST) won an antitrust lawsuit challenging its home state's three-level arrangement. The state then appealed, arguing that the 21st Amendment ending Prohibition gave states the authority over alcohol regulation.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule on the case soon — a decision that could have widespread ramifications for every group with a stake in the beer and wine industry. Brewers and wineries nationwide could eventually gain the power to sell their products directly to retailers. Distributors and state tax collectors, meanwhile, could lose substantial revenues. The Costco case could "radically change the rules of the game," says George Hancock, chairman of Pyramid Breweries, a craft beer brewer in Seattle.

A Tale of Two Town Houses

In A Tale of Two Town Houses, Virginia Postrel explains how real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states:

In 2000, my husband and I moved out of our mid-1970s three-bedroom town house in Los Angeles and into a brand-new three-bedroom town house in Uptown Dallas. At the time, the two were worth about the same, but the Dallas place was 1,000 square feet bigger. We’ve moved back to L.A., and we’re glad we kept our old house. Over the past seven years, its value has roughly doubled. By contrast, we sold our Dallas place for $6,500 less than we paid for it.

It’s not that we bought into a declining Dallas neighborhood: Uptown is one of the hottest in the city, with block upon block of new construction. But the supply of housing in Dallas is elastic. When demand increases, because of growing population or rising incomes, so does the amount of housing; prices stay roughly the same. That’s true not only in the outlying suburbs, but also in old neighborhoods like ours, where dense clusters of town houses and multistory apartment buildings are replacing two-story fourplexes and single-family homes. It’s easy to build new housing in Dallas.

Not so in Los Angeles. There, increased demand generates little new supply. Even within zoning rules, it’s hard to get permission to build. When a local developer bought three small 1920s duplexes on our block, planning to replace them with a big condo building, neighbors campaigned to stop the proj­ect. The city declared the charming but architecturally undistinguished buildings historic landmarks, blocking demolition for a year. The developer gave up, leaving the neighborhood’s landscape — and its housing supply — unchanged. In Los Angeles, when demand for housing increases, prices rise.

Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle — the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values — different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach — because people forget silly details like which points are true and which are false:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

People, of course, believe all kinds of crazy things — that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks, that it was an inside job, etc. — and that has been a big concern for years:

As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they were to believe them.

The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true.

You have to wonder how humanity got this far:

Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The experiments by Weaver, Schwarz and others illustrate another basic property of the mind -- it is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz.

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.

"If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all.

The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options.

So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the answer to that question also seems to be no.

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Myth-busters, in other words, have the odds against them.

The rumor research I was already aware of was the basic law of rumor going back to WWII:

Allport and Postman called their most far-reaching assertion "the basic law of rumor." It declared that rumor strength (R) will vary with the importance of the subject to the individual concerned (i) times the ambiguity of the evidence pertaining to the topic at hand (a), or R ≈ i × a.

Aerocivic

Chuck Squatriglia calls the Aerocivic "ugly as sin":

There's no two ways about it — this car is ugly as sin and as rough as a shipping pallet. But that doesn't matter because it gets 95 mpg.

Its owner, known only as "basjoos," says he spent $400 building "Aerocivic" in his yard using things you can get at hardware and art supply stores. That pretty much invalidates auto industry arguments about it being difficult and costly to build super fuel-efficient cars. It also makes him a contender for the Automotive X-Prize, a $10 million challenge to build the first 100-mpg car.

According to a thread over at Ecomodder.com, basjoos started with a 1992 Honda Civic CX that already got about 50 mpg or so. He used aluminum, Coroplast and Lexan to improve the aerodynamics of the car, dropping the drag coefficient from 0.34 to 0.17. Although the car looks like it would be pushed all over the place, if not blow apart entirely, in a stiff breeze, basjoos claims it's smooth to 90 mph and will top 100 mph. He says it gets 95 mpg up to 65 mph before fuel economy begins to fall as speed increases.

Granted, the Civic is a lightweight car with a small engine and a lot of the improvement in basjoos' fuel economy can be attributed to his hypermiler driving style. But AeroCivic is still an impressive accomplishment, and Ron Cogan of Green Car Journal and GreenCar.com tells us automakers will be building cars a lot like it in order to meet the new 35 mpg fuel economy standard.

High-fat, high-carb meals more harmful to obese

High-fat, high-carb meals more harmful to obese:

Dr. Paresh Dandona and colleagues from Kaleida Health in Buffalo, New York looked at inflammation and oxidative stress, which occurs when levels of normal byproducts of metabolism known as free radicals exceed the body's ability to neutralize them.

In previous research they found that obese individuals have higher levels of oxidative stress and inflammation than normal-weight individuals. They also demonstrated that eating a high-fat, high-carb meal increased oxidative stress and inflammation in normal-weight people.

To test whether these increases might be greater in obese people, Dandona and his team had 10 normal-weight and 8 obese people eat a 1,800-calorie meal consisting of a large hamburger, a large serving of fries, a large cola, and a slice of apple pie.

Both groups showed increases in oxidative stress two hours after eating the meal. By three hours, oxidative stress had returned to baseline levels in the normal-weight individuals, but it continued to climb in the obese individuals. The same pattern was seen for inflammation.

"If obese people who already have oxidative and inflammatory stress take the same meal, they get far greater and more prolonged levels of oxidative and inflammatory stress," Dandona told Reuters Health. "Since oxidative and inflammatory stress predispose you to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), heart attack and stroke, this risk is far greater in obese people."

In another study, Dandona and his colleagues demonstrated that a high-fruit, high-fiber meal with the same calorie content as the fast food meal tested in the current study produced no increase in oxidative or inflammatory stress.

The findings provide yet more evidence that people should avoid high-fat, high carb fast food meals and consume as much fruit and vegetables as possible, Dandona said.

Hello Kitty turns attention to young men

It's amazing how much a nation's character can change in a few generations. Hello Kitty turns attention to young men:

The cute cuddly white cat from Japan's Sanrio Co., usually seen on toys and jewelry for girls and young women, will soon don T-shirts, bags, watches and other products targeting young men, company spokesman Kazuo Tohmatsu said Friday.
[...]
The usual bubble-headed shape of Hello Kitty was slightly changed for a more rugged, cool look to appeal to men in their teens and early 20s.

For example, a picture of the cat on a $36 black T-shirt has the words, "hello kitty," instead of the usual dots for the eyes and nose.

Hello Kitty is one of mascot-obsessed Japan's biggest "character" hits, decorating everything from a humble eraser to a $48,000 diamond necklace.

Fish oil capsules pack same omega-3 punch as fish

Fish oil capsules pack same omega-3 punch as fish:

To investigate, Harris and his team had 11 women eat two servings of tuna or salmon each week, while an additional 12 women took in the same amount of omega-3s, an estimated 485 milligrams daily, in capsule form.

After 16 weeks, the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the red blood cells of women in both groups had risen by 40 percent to 50 percent, while omega-3s in the plasma (the cell-free, liquid portion of the blood) had risen by 60 percent to 80 percent.

"We went into the project assuming that fish would be better, based on some previous literature from other people," Harris noted in an interview. Based on the current findings, he added, "it doesn't make any difference whether you get your omega 3 fatty acids from a concentrate in a capsule or in fish -- they have the same effect on enriching the tissues with omega 3."

Nevertheless, Harris said, he would encourage people to eat fish rather than relying on fish oil capsules. "Fish of course brings with it proteins and minerals and other factors that are good for our health that the capsules don't bring, but we weren't able to measure any of those things," he said.

Top 10 Color Classical Reproductions

This list of the Top 10 Color Classical Reproductions shows what some of those beautiful white marble works really looked like:

When we think of statues and buildings of the classical period, we tend to imagine white marble; scientists in recent years have discovered that it is in fact most likely that many of the buildings and statues were painted and probably adorned with jewelry. The Vatican Museum has recently put on an exhibition of some of the most famous antiquities from the era with reproductions painted as close to the originals as they can - this is possible because many statues contain trace amounts of pigment from their original coats of paint.

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep:

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests.

I'd like to perform like a well-rested monkey. Here's more:

The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans.

Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is "specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness" without other impacts on the brain.

Such a product could be widely desired by the more than 70 percent of Americans who the National Sleep Foundation estimates get less than the generally recommended eight hours of sleep per night (.pdf).

The research follows the discovery by Siegel that the absence of orexin A appears to cause narcolepsy. That finding pointed to a major role for the peptide's absence in causing sleepiness. It stood to reason that if the deficit of orexin A makes people sleepy, adding it back into the brain would reduce the effects, said Siegel.

Lovin' It All Over

George Will talks about the amazing economic engine that is McDonald's, in Lovin' It All Over:

McDonald's exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans' upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants — average annual sales, $2.2 million — are owned by franchisees. McDonald's has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.

McDonald's has 14,000 restaurants in America and an additional 17,000 in 117 other countries. The company will add 1,000 others in 2008, more than 90 percent of them abroad. Such is the power of the McDonald's brand, 48 percent of the people of India were aware of McDonald's before it opened its first restaurant on the subcontinent.

Airport Security Study

Bruce Schneier notes that a new study concludes that airport security isn't helping:

A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.

They also found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.
[...]
The researchers said it would be interesting to apply medical standards to airport security. Screening programs for illnesses like cancer are usually not broadly instituted unless they have been shown to work.

Of course, the TSA has things completely backwards and doesn't seem to realize that confiscating millions of lighters from innocent people is a security failure:

"Even without clear evidence of the accuracy of testing, the Transportation Security Administration defended its measures by reporting that more than 13 million prohibited items were intercepted in one year," the researchers added. "Most of these illegal items were lighters."

Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007

Aaron Rowe of Wired lists the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007:

10. Transistors Get Way Smaller

In the race to make computers faster, chipmakers rely on exotic new materials. In January, Intel announced that the element hafnium and some new metal alloys will allow them to make the millions of switches on their microprocessors far smaller. Gordon Moore, co-founder of the company and father of the law that bears his name, called it the biggest change in transistor technology since the 1960s. The tremendous accomplishment allows Intel to squeeze features on each chip down to 45 nanometers from the current standard of 65 nanometers. But the greatest benefit may be an increase in energy efficiency. That improvement comes along with the hafnium alloys that will prevent electricity from leaking across the tiny switches.

Intel started using the technology, codenamed Penryn, in November in high-end servers. Home users can expect the chips in early 2008.

9. Scientists Clone Rhesus Monkey to Produce Stem Cells

At Oregon Health and Science University, Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team cloned a Rhesus Monkey and used the resulting embryo to create stem cells. Until then, the impressive feat had been performed only with mice.

In November, the team reported in Nature a surprising key to their success: avoiding ultraviolet light and dyes -- tools that are almost always used in cloning experiments -- because they can damage delicate cells.

Stem cells could be used to repair nearly any damaged organ, but they are useless if they upset the immune system. By cloning sick patients and using cells derived from their own bodies, doctors could skirt problems similar to those experienced by people with organ transplants. But some say the No. 1 discovery on our list makes cloning unnecessary. Nonetheless, some scientists, including stem-cell researchers at Harvard, say cloning is still necessary.

Regular flu vaccine may help against H5N1

Regular flu vaccine may help against H5N1:

Ordinary seasonal flu vaccines may provide a small amount of protection against bird flu, Italian researchers reported on Wednesday.

Their study is among the first to support the idea that getting an annual flu shot may help people's bodies fight off the H5N1 virus, which has killed 210 people in 13 countries and infected 341.

Cristiana Gioia, Maria Capobianchi and colleagues at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome tested the blood of 42 volunteers who had been vaccinated against seasonal influenza.

In the laboratory, they added H5N1 virus to the blood and found that in some of the volunteers immune system proteins called antibodies acted against the bird flu virus.

They also found a few immune cells called CD4 T-cells seemed to recognize and act against H5N1 virus "and seasonal vaccine administration enhanced the frequency of such reactive CD4 T-cells," they wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

"Our findings indicate that seasonal vaccination can raise neutralizing immunity against (H5N1 avian influenza) virus," the researchers concluded.

This could help explain why H5N1, which only rarely affects people, is even rarer among the elderly, Gioia's team wrote.

"This finding may be explained by hypothesizing that older people, although not previously exposed to H5N1 subtype, may have gained protective immunity by previous infections sustained by circulating influenza virus strains," they wrote.

Aptera

I'm not sure what to make of the Aptera:

It’s the Aptera — a futuristic car that has generated a lot of buzz lately — and with good reason — the Aperta is a very, very efficient vehicle (just check out the video: you’ll see what I’m talking about). The car’s head-turning design has a purpose: the shape is highly aeodynamic (much like a jet). It ready available for pre-order, and priced at about $27,000. There will be two models of the Aptera: an all-electric version that goes 120 miles on a charge (for 2008), and a gasoline version that will get 300 mpg (for 2009). The car is also said to be very safe, see the safety FAQ here.

Watch the Popular Mechanics test drive.

Pakistan's Bhutto killed in gun, bomb attack

Pakistan's Bhutto killed in gun, bomb attack:

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack after a rally in the city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, her party said.

"She has been martyred," said party official Rehman Malik.

Bhutto, 54, died in hospital in Rawalpindi. Ary-One Television said she had been shot in the head.

Police said a suicide bomber fired shots at Bhutto as she was leaving the rally venue in a park before blowing himself up.

"The man first fired at Bhutto's vehicle. She ducked and then he blew himself up," said police officer Mohammad Shahid.

Police said 16 people had been killed in the blast.

"It is the act of those who want to disintegrate Pakistan because she was symbol of unity. They have finished the Bhutto family. They are enemies of Pakistan," senior Bhutto party official Farzana Raja told Reuters.

A Reuters witness at the scene of the attack said he had heard two shots moments before the blast. Another Reuters witness saw bodies and a mutilated human head strewn on a road outside the park where she held her rally.

A little history:

Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's first popularly elected prime mister. He was executed in 1979 after being deposed in a military coup.

Bhutto became the first female prime minister in the Muslim world when she was elected in 1988 at the age of 35. She was deposed in 1990, re-elected in 1993, and ousted again in 1996 amid charges of corruption and mismanagement.

She said the charges were politically motivated but in 1999 chose to stay in exile rather than face them.

Bhutto's family is no stranger to violence.

Both of her brothers died in mysterious circumstances and she had said al Qaeda assassins tried to kill her several times in the 1990s.

Intelligence reports have said al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistani jihadi groups have sent suicide bombers after her.

Tiger kills one at San Francisco zoo

A certain part of me thinks, if I were a tiger, I'd totally eat people. Tiger kills one at San Francisco zoo:

This undated file photo provided by the San Francisco Zoo shows Tatiana, a female Siberian tiger. Tatiana, the tiger that mauled a zookeeper last year escaped from its pen at the San Francisco Zoo on Tuesday Dec. 25, 2007, killing one man and injuring two others before police shot it dead, authorities said.

Addendum: I'm beginning to think I'd totally eat a teenager who was (allegedly) taunting me:

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police found a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the animal's 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, prompting the possibility that one of the victims dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of the moat.

Venture Brothers Holiday Gift Bonanza

Jackson Publick is offering up a Venture Brothers Holiday Gift Bonanza, including this MP3 of The Monarch & Dr. Girlfriend singing "Fairytale of New York". He also includes an important bit of news:

One sour note from the past month (aside from my car getting hit yet again) is that Mr. Stephen Colbert has decided not to reprise his role as Professor Impossible this season, for reasons which probably have something to do with him being all super-famous, super-busy, and no longer in need of a few hundred bucks here and there. We figured this would happen eventually, considering his monumental success in the years since our first season, but we held out hope that the WGA strike would leave him with enough bored free time on his hands that he'd have a go at it. But after getting shuffled around from his assistant to his assistant's assistant to his agent to his manager, one of them finally shot us an email saying: "Stephen has neither the time nor the interest in participating in your project."

Was the "nor the interest" really necessary? I would have bought the "time" part without question, but man...you gotta kick a guy when he's down like that? Well maybe I'm not interested in your ice cream, mister! Or your book. Unless someone buys it for me for Christmas.

Yule

Have a happy Yule:

Many of the symbols and motifs associated with the modern holiday of Christmas are derived from traditional pagan northern European Yule celebrations. The burning of the Yule log, the decorating of Christmas trees, the eating of ham, the hanging of boughs, holly, mistletoe, etc. are all historically practices associated with Yule. When the Christianization of the Germanic peoples began, missionaries found it convenient to provide a Christian reinterpretation of popular pagan holidays such as Yule and allow the celebrations themselves to go on largely unchanged, versus trying to confront and suppress them. The Scandinavian tradition of slaughtering a pig at Christmas (see Christmas ham) is probably salient evidence of this. The tradition is thought to be derived from the sacrifice of boars to the god Freyr at the Yule celebrations. Halloween and aspects of Easter celebrations are likewise assimilated from northern European pagan festivals.

English historian Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum contains a letter from Pope Gregory I to Saint Mellitus, who was then on his way to England to conduct missionary work among the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Pope Gregory suggested that converting heathens would go easier if they were allowed to retain the outward forms of their traditional pagan practices and traditions, while recasting those traditions spiritually towards the Christian God instead of to their pagan "devils": "to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God".

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Newtonmas

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Newtonmas:

With the profusion of Christmas-related decorations, sales, and music, I thought it would be nice to offer a different kind of holiday suggestion, either instead of (if you don't celebrate Christmas) or in addition to (if you do) the coming holiday.

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 (old style), so it seems natural to take advantage of that complete coincidence and celebrate his life and works as Newtonmas. This idea was first introduced to me by my high school Physics teacher, who said that, since we were in a public school and thus couldn't celebrate any religious holidays, we would celebrate Isaac Newton's birthday by singing physics carols (similar to these), and doing some fun experiments. It was long enough ago that I don't remember everything we did, but I recall figuring out what the effect of flushing the toilets in the bathroom above the classroom was on the water pressure in the classroom sink, figuring out how long it would take a Slinky to make it down a set of the school stairs, and—my favorite—watching a Road Runner cartoon to make note of everything that happened that defied the laws of physics.

So it's my suggestion to seize the opportunity to teach your kids some basics of physics. If you have older kids, you could try teaching them the basics of calculus, too. Of all the sciences, I've always thought that physics was the easiest one to teach in a fun way (did you ever do the monkey in a tree lesson?), mostly because you're not generally working with volatile substances or dead animals, so safety is less problematic.

The Shovel and the Epee

In The Shovel and the Epee, Sam Sheridan looks at striking in MMA versus boxing:

First, the gloves: the 4 ounce gloves used in MMA cut very easily, and they give a lot more guys “a puncher’s chance.” Almost everyone is heavy-handed with those on, flash knock-downs happen all the time.

Just ask George St. Pierre—I doubt anyone had warned him about the devastatingly heavy-hands of Matt Serra before Serra upset St. Pierre by TKO last Saturday to win the UFC welterweight title. In boxing, a guy is a “puncher” or he’s not—but in MMA, almost everybody’s a “puncher.”

In boxing, defensive stylists like Winky Wright can catch punches on their gloves, but that won’t fly in MMA, not with the little gloves. Likewise James Toney’s defensive masterpieces, the shoulder roll and catching shots on the top of his head, won’t work.

Another friend, a boxer, had said that “boxers learn to roll with punches” which is true, and can mitigate a lot of the power when you get caught clean—but with the little gloves, I think rolling with punches is minimally effective. There’s not much to roll with.

The more important difference between MMA and boxing is range, and the biggest modifier to range is the take-down. The biggest, most decisive single attack in MMA, the take-down and defending it are HUGELY important. You can’t stand in the pocket and shoulder-roll and bob and weave, because your opponent will drop (“change levels”) and take you down; and he’ll end up on top, a hugely advantageous position.

To avoid being taken down, you have to keep your distance and be ready to “sprawl” out, to keep your legs away from an opponent’s grasping hands. Beautiful, flowing, fluid combination punching leaves you in range to be taken down.

You can’t take a wide stance, or plant your feet without increasing the danger of your legs getting snatched out from under you. In fact, without boxing’s strict rules about the clinch, combination punching might never have evolved to the point it is at today.

Of course, kicking and kneeing also changes the range, and punching in MMA becomes a little more like jousting—you’ve got to come in with straight punches and get out. Chuck Liddell’s striking is pretty much unquestionably the best in MMA at 205 pounds, and boxers look at him and think he looks terrible. Floyd Mayweather recently commented during a media teleconference that “UFC ain't nothing but a f_king fad. Anybody can go out there and street fight. If they think (UFC light heavyweight champion) Chuck Liddell is so good, we should take Chuck Liddell and take a good heavyweight under Mayweather promotions….” And he even offered a million dollars of his own money. All the diatribe does is reveal Mayweather’s ignorance, because Chuck is emphatically not boxing.

Chinese police dog may teach pandas to fight

Your Chinese panda style is no match for my German dog-fu! Chinese police dog may teach pandas to fight:

Scientists in China may use a police dog to teach pandas to fight after the first artificially bred panda released into the wild was apparently killed after a battle with other animals, local media reported on Saturday.

That sounds hardcore, until you get to this part:

The pandas would learn how to protect themselves by observing the dog, increasing their chances of survival when they were eventually released into the mountainous wilds of the far western province of Sichuan.

You can't learn to fight just by watching...

Heal thyself: One doctor's experiment

In Heal thyself: One doctor's experiment, Anna Masellis — who survived Wilms' tumor, a rare pediatric kidney cancer, as a child and went on to get her Ph.D. in oncology — describes how she fought pancreatic cancer as a 41-year-old:

A week later, I went in for a Whipple, the routine surgery to remove part of the pancreas. It was supposed to take seven hours but lasted less than one; the doctors discovered a 3.5-centimeter mass on my pancreas and rice-kernel-sized patches of cancer all over my abdominal cavity. The surgeon gently explained to my waiting family that the cancer had already spread too far to do the Whipple (and further tests would show tumors in my liver). Then he informed them that I might have only two months to live.

My mom took the news hard, which broke my heart, but from what I knew of the disease, I wasn't surprised by the prognosis. Because of my advanced stage, the oncologist prescribed pain relief and gemcitabine, the most effective drug for pancreatic cancer, which temporarily staves off the disease in roughly 10 percent of patients. But that wasn't going to be enough. From my research, I knew my approach had to be more aggressive — and that it was up to me to find the right experimental treatment plan.

I believed the best thing to do was attack the cancer from multiple angles at once, using a range of drugs. But in order to do that, I needed to find an oncologist who was willing to push the envelope with me.
[...]
I went through four cycles of chemo. It was grueling, and I was lucky to have friends who cooked for me and drove me to my appointments. Two months later, despite the prognosis, I was still alive. A month after that, in August, I had another CT scan: The mass on my pancreas had shrunk a hopeful 50 percent, and the liver lesions were also slightly reduced. I was thrilled — until I learned that a lesion on one of my abdominal muscles had grown by half a centimeter. Suddenly, my joy vanished; all I felt was devastated.

I went home and thought about what wasn't working with the chemo and, ultimately, figured that the drugs may not have been reaching the inside of my abdomen well enough. I remembered a journal article I had read, which described a procedure in which medicine is surgically delivered into the peritoneal cavity, where it can bathe the tumor cells directly. It's a method Dr. Bender had long used for ovarian cancer, one that only recently became standard treatment for that disease. Dr. Bender and I discussed the idea, and we agreed it was a good approach. The only glitch: We had to wait a month; my body needed to recuperate and build immunity after the last round of chemo, so I wouldn't be susceptible to infection during surgery.

I was so energized to have a new strategy that it was hard to wait. Finally, in October, my surgeon installed a port between my lowest two ribs, where the drugs would be infused. He discovered that, despite the enlarged tumor, every abdominal cancer kernel had been obliterated. Gone! I'll never forget the smile on his face when he told me. I smiled, too — I was making progress.

The abdominal infusions made my belly puff up, and I felt tiny electrical-shock sensations and harsh gastrointestinal cramping that lasted a week. In March 2007, after 18 weeks of treatment, my CT scan showed a clean abdomen. The news was incredible, but I still had a tumor on my pancreas, so I devised yet another regimen of chemo. Our hope was that switching therapies would keep the cancer from becoming resistant to treatment.

It's been a year and a half since I was given only two months to live. The CT scan I had this past August showed no metastatic cancer anywhere, and the primary tumor on the pancreas had shrunk to 2 centimeters and formed calcified plaques, which most likely indicate dying or dead tissue. Even so, I have no delusions: Pancreatic cancer has a nearly 100 percent chance of recurring. Until that happens, I'm taking full advantage of the time I've been given. I spent the summer in Italy with my kids, I see friends and I pick up my squash racket to play when I can.

Hellboy II:The Golden Army

It looks like we can expect Hellboy II:The Golden Army on July 11th of next year. Here's the trailer:



The trailer's also available in HD over at IGN. All the action's over at the production site though.

Wikipedia cites Mignola on the premise of the movie:

It's not Nazis, machines and mad scientists but the old gods and characters who have been kind of shoved out of our world. I kind of equate it to the whole American Indian situation. The Indians were shoved onto reservations. You had your old, wise Indians who said, "You know, this is the way it is. We can't fight anymore. We just have to accept our fate." You then have your Geronimo character saying, "Or we could just kill the White Man." That's kind of the situation we have in the film. We have our elf characters resigning to the way things are and then there's one saying, "Or we could take the world back." The main difference is - what if the Indians had a nuclear warhead? The elves have their equivalent of the weapon that is too terrible to use. What if this guy decided to use it?

If you've already watched the Director's Cut and can't wait for more, you might check it the animated Hellboy offerings, Blood and Iron and Sword of Storms.

Unwrapping the Miraculous Logistics Behind Operation Christmas

Unwrapping the Miraculous Logistics Behind Operation Christmas:

Here's our theory: There is, in fact, a nonsupernatural Santa. It's a transnational corporation with one mission-critical fulfillment goal: Every kid who celebrates the holiday gets a toy on Christmas eve.

Wired spoke with business process consultants, surveillance experts, shipping pros, and a former Navy SEAL to piece together the basic outlines of the operation — focusing, for purposes of this exposé, on points of service in the continental US. From command and control at the North Pole to secret manufacturing facilities in China and Eastern Europe, from the Pacific shipping lanes to the deployment of domestic-access operatives, Santa owns the silent night. With NSA surveillance tech, they see you when you're sleeping, and they know when you're awake. They know when you've been bad or good — thanks to algorithms that make Google look like Pong. You better not shout. You better not cry. Operation Santa is coming to town.

View the entire infographic.

Foster care better than orphanages for kids' IQs

Foster care better than orphanages for kids' IQs — when the orphanage is in Romania, and the foster care is provided by specially trained parents:

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest's six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.

The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.

By 4½, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.

Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.

Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster-care kids.

Who Benefits from the Federal Government?

Who Benefits from the Federal Government?

Social Security, the biggest category, doesn't benefit the rich at all because net Social Security payments are heavily biased against the rich. According to Eugene Steuerle and Adam Carasso of the liberal Urban Institute a two earner couple earning $230,000 a year (thus putting them at the mean household income for the top 20%) and scheduled to retire in 2030 will pay $227,886 more in social security taxes than they receive in benefits (in present value).

Defense is the next biggest category. To me a lot of "defense" spending doesn't benefit anyone but let's be generous and say that the rich benefit from military spending in proportion to their income share which for the top 20% means 55%. Thus $301b.

Medicare benefits the rich less than the poor since they are healthier (plus they must pay higher premiums) but let's say that Medicare benefits the rich in proportion to their population. If we say the top 20% are rich and assume that this is the same in the 65 and older category then 20% of Medicare goes to the rich. $78.8b.

Medicaid doesn't benefit the rich. The rich do use unemployment insurance but at far lower rates than the poor. Does welfare benefit the rich? Not directly but maybe from the warm glow. I don't think the benefits of charity are what most people mean when they say that the rich benefit from the federal government but who knows. Let's again be generous and say that the warm glow goes just to the rich and that it is worth 20% of the benefit to the poor. $73.4b

Everything else includes the example that people always seem to mention first, roads! Alas, the entire transportation budget is just $77 billion, not much there even if a lot of it goes to the rich. By my judgment a lot of "everything else" has low value but again let's be generous and say that the rich benefit from everything else in proportion to their income share (.55). $233b.

Excluding the national debt gives us a total of $687 billion out of $2597 billion going to the rich or 26%. If we assume that the division of the national debt is the same as for the government as a whole (since this is just past expenditures) the percentage is still 26%.

Thus in a generous accounting the rich get 26% of the benefits of federal spending and pay 68.7% of the costs. In percentage terms the rich get about 37 cents on the dollar.

Alternatively stated about 63 cents of every dollar in taxes paid by the rich is transferred down. Given that the median voter is a taxeater not a taxpayer we should not be too surprised, although this is a smaller number than I would have guessed before I did the calculation.

Whales may have evolved from raccoon-sized creature

Whales may have evolved from raccoon-sized creature:

In the search for a missing evolutionary link to modern whales, scientists have come up with an unlikely land cousin -- a raccoon-sized creature with the body of a small deer.

Prior molecular studies have proposed the hippo as the closest land relative of today's whales, but researchers reporting in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggest a four-footed creature from India known as Indohyus, which probably hid in water in times of danger.

Asteroid may hit Mars in next month

Asteroid may hit Mars in next month:

Mars could be in for an asteroid hit.

A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.

"These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track ... threatening asteroids," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.

A 1-in-75 chance seems much, much higher when the target is our planet.

E.P.A. Says 17 States Can’t Set Emission Rules

E.P.A. Says 17 States Can’t Set Emission Rules:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said California had failed to make a compelling case that it needed authority to write its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks to help curb global warming.

The decision immediately provoked a heated debate over its scientific basis and whether political pressure was applied by the automobile industry to help it escape the proposed California regulations. Officials from the states and numerous environmental groups vowed to sue to overturn the edict.

In an evening conference call with reporters, Mr. Johnson defended his agency’s decision.

“The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules,” he said. “I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone.”

The 17 states — including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — had waited two years for the Bush administration to issue a ruling on an application to set stricter air quality standards than those adopted by the federal government. The decision, technically known as a Clean Air Act waiver, was the first time California was refused permission to impose its own pollution rules; the federal government had previously granted the state more than 50 waivers.

The emissions standards California proposed in 2004 — but never approved by the federal government — would have forced automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent in new cars and light trucks by 2016, with the cutbacks to begin in 2009 models.

That would have translated into roughly 43 miles per gallon for cars and some light trucks and about 27 miles per gallon for heavier trucks and sport utility vehicles.

The new federal law will require automakers to meet a 35-mile-per-gallon fleetwide standard for cars and trucks sold in the United States by 2020. It does not address carbon dioxide emissions, but such emissions would be reduced as cars were forced to become more fuel efficient.

Hey, remember federalism? That was a neat idea.

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US:

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

Let's see how this plays out.

New Nanowire Battery Holds 10 Times The Charge Of Existing Ones

New Nanowire Battery Holds 10 Times The Charge Of Existing Ones:

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.

The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

"Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly," Cui said.

The electrical storage capacity of a Li-ion battery is limited by how much lithium can be held in the battery's anode, which is typically made of carbon. Silicon has a much higher capacity than carbon, but also has a drawback.

Silicon placed in a battery swells as it absorbs positively charged lithium atoms during charging, then shrinks during use (i.e., when playing your iPod) as the lithium is drawn out of the silicon. This expand/shrink cycle typically causes the silicon (often in the form of particles or a thin film) to pulverize, degrading the performance of the battery.

Cui's battery gets around this problem with nanotechnology. The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture.

Research on silicon in batteries began three decades ago. Candace Chan, a graduate student of Cui, explained: "The people kind of gave up on it because the capacity wasn't high enough and the cycle life wasn't good enough. And it was just because of the shape they were using. It was just too big, and they couldn't undergo the volume changes."

Then, along came silicon nanowires. "We just kind of put them together," Chan said.

For their experiments, Chan grew the nanowires on a stainless steel substrate, providing an excellent electrical connection. "It was a fantastic moment when Candace told me it was working," Cui said.

Cui said that a patent application has been filed. He is considering formation of a company or an agreement with a battery manufacturer. Manufacturing the nanowire batteries would require "one or two different steps, but the process can certainly be scaled up," he added. "It's a well understood process."

The Daily Mammal

Illustrator Jennifer Rae Atkins has started The Daily Mammal:

In 14 years, I will have drawn every mammal there is! Or something! So to get started, I'm going to be filling some years-old requests from my friend Leigh, beginning with the Rocky Mountain goat. Both sexes have the horns. This guy here has his summer coat.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Solomon Kane

Solomon Kane is coming to theaters:

While Robert E. Howard’s most famous literary creation is the warrior-king Conan, who debuted in WEIRD TALES back in 1932, the pulp-fiction master had more than one great anti-hero in his arsenal. An earlier WEIRD TALES series starred Solomon Kane, a Puritan warrior who traveled the globe battling the evils of the 16th century with sword, knife, and pistol. In 2008, Kane will get his own Hollywood blockbuster starring James Purefoy (Rome, A Knight’s Tale) — and director Michael J. Bassett has just released the first look at the movie’s teaser poster.

I like James Purefoy as Mark Anthony in Rome, but I can't say he would have been my first choice to play the driven Puritan.

I was expecting someone tall, thin, and angular — almost gaunt.

"Wolf-lean" is the term, I believe, from the original stories.

Here's how the Solomon Kane role-playing game artist depicts him — in action, surrounded by teeming hordes of ghouls:



The writer-director, Michael Bassett, describes what he's doing in this video — which is to start off a trilogy with Solomon Kane's origin, which is never quite spelled out in Robert E. Howard's original stores:



Naturally I recommend picking up the original works, which have been collected in The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane.

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star:

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.
[...]
In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford.

Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.

M.I.T. recently expanded its online classes by opening a site aimed at high school students and teachers. Judging from his fan e-mail, Professor Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to students of all ages.

Even Babies May Be Good Judges of Character

Even Babies May Be Good Judges of Character:

In a study that suggests that people may begin evaluating one another for trustworthiness even earlier than believed, researchers showed infants a demonstration in which different shapes played the good guy or the bad guy. Then the infants were allowed to choose one to play with.

The good guy won almost every time.

In the case of Circle, a small wooden character with big eyes, that would be Triangle, who helped him when he was struggling up the hill — not Square, who gave him a good shove back down.

Of course, when the roles were reversed and Triangle was cast as the hinderer, as the researchers called him, the infants preferred Square. (The shapes were moved by a researcher out of the sight of the infants.)

After repeated demonstrations, the infants, 6 and 10 months old, were presented with the helper and the hinderer. They almost always reached for the helper. The study appears in the November 22 issue of Nature; the lead author is J. Kiley Hamlin of Yale.

Mammoths Blasted by Meteor Impact

Mammoths Blasted by M