Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral:

Four commonly found sunscreen ingredients can awaken dormant viruses in the symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae that live inside reef-building coral species.

The chemicals cause the viruses to replicate until their algae hosts explode, spilling viruses into the surrounding seawater, where they can infect neighboring coral communities.

Zooxanthellae provide coral with food energy through photosynthesis and contribute to the organisms' vibrant color. Without them, the coral "bleaches" — turns white — and dies.

"The algae that live in the coral tissue and feed these animals explode or are just released by the tissue, thus leaving naked the skeleton of the coral," said study leader Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.

The researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching.

Logic Test

I suppose a logic test isn't meant to be terribly challenging for a (former) computer scientist.

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen:

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6–10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris — effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour — a condition known as albinism.

Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.

What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites

Security expert Bruce Schneier notes that what "our top spy" — Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell — doesn't "get" when he says "Privacy and security are a zero-sum game," is that Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites:

I'm sure they have that saying in their business. And it's precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.

I suppose an economist would say that we don't have to trade privacy for security unless we're on an efficient frontier — and we're clearly not trading off the least privacy for the most security right now.

A Very Stimulating Crisis

We face A Very Stimulating Crisis, and economists are no longer so sure they know what to do:

Does the U.S. economy in early 2008 need a stimulus? If so, will tax cuts or attempts by the Fed to lower interest rates do the trick?

I used to be able to answer such questions with confidence. Now I cannot.

The theory of the causes of unemployment, interest rates, and inflation falls under the subject known as macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is like astrology or Freudian psychology, in that a lot of people used to believe it, and a lot of people still do, but many with a scientific bent tend to stay away from it.

When Health Care Becomes Personal

Arnold Kling discusses how the medical establishment has treated his elderly father, in When Health Care Becomes Personal — then draws some larger conclusions:

Medicare is wonderful for relieving the elderly from the burden of worrying about health care expenses. By the same token, it is wonderful for relieving doctors of the burden of worrying about the elderly as customers. You get paid for understanding the billing system, not for understanding your patients.

Scientists Are Learning How Weed Causes Paranoia

Scientists Are Learning How Weed Causes Paranoia:

By injecting small amounts of the marijuana-derived drug into different parts of a rat's brain and then watching for behavioral cues, they learned that THC works wonders in the prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus, but causes anxious behavior when dribbled into the basolateral amygdala.

German biochemists had an even better story to tell: Beat Lutz and his colleagues at Johannes Gutenberg-University studied an enzyme that is partially responsible for anxiety. Make a drug that can slow it down and you may be able to prevent paranoia.

They proved their point in two ways: Knockout mice, animals lacking the genetic recipe for that protein, were resistant to nervous behavior. Also, unusually nervous lab mice were calmed by an experimental chemical that inactivates the same molecule.

(Hat tip to Mike.)

The Electric Car Acid Test

Shai Agassi, who has spent his entire career in software, and who has no previous experience in either the auto or energy industries, is now facing The Electric Car Acid Test:

Just over a year ago, on Dec. 31, 2006, Shai Agassi settled into a leather couch in the office of Ehud Olmert to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister. Agassi, then a top executive at German software giant SAP, had come to pitch the idea of his native Israel reducing its dependence on oil by replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones. Olmert liked the concept but laid down a steep challenge: He wanted Agassi to raise hundreds of millions in venture capital and get an auto industry CEO on board before he would pledge his support. "You go find the money and find a major automaker who will commit to this, and I'll give you the policy backing you need," Olmert said.

Within a year, Agassi had pulled off everything Olmert had asked. He raised $200 million in venture capital and, with help from Israeli President Shimon Peres, persuaded Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Renault and Nissan, to make a new kind of electric car for the Israeli market. On Jan. 21, Agassi, Olmert, Peres, and Ghosn unveiled the novel project, under which Agassi's Silicon Valley company, Better Place, will sell electric cars and build a network of locations where drivers can charge and replace batteries. Olmert has done his part, too. Israel just boosted the sales tax on gasoline-powered cars to as much as 60% and pledged to buy up old gas cars to get them off the road.

His idea requires a decent amount of infrastructure, but that's not such a big barrier in a small, dense country where you have the government's support:

The trouble with traditional electric cars is that they can go only 50 or 100 miles and then they need to stop for hours to recharge their batteries. Hybrids overcome the mileage limitations, but only by burning gasoline. One of Agassi's unconventional ideas is to separate the battery from the car. That will allow drivers to pull into a battery-swapping station, a car-wash-like contraption, and wait for 10 minutes while their spent batteries are lowered from the car and fully charged replacements are hoisted into place. Better Place will build the service stations, as well as hundreds of thousands of charging locations, similar to parking meters.

Challenger

Twenty-two years ago — wow — the space shuttle Challenger blew up. Five years ago — again, wow — I cited Malcolm Gladwell's already-old Blowup, which looks at the inherent dangers of complex systems:

But what if the assumptions that underlie our disaster rituals aren't true? What if these public post mortems don't help us avoid future accidents? Over the past few years, a group of scholars has begun making the unsettling argument that the rituals that follow things like plane crashes or the Three Mile Island crisis are as much exercises in self-deception as they are genuine opportunities for reassurance. For these revisionists, high-technology accidents may not have clear causes at all. They may be inherent in the complexity of the technological systems we have created.

Fight Science

The National Geographic Channel — "Nat Geo" to its friends — has been very good to me lately, first with Fight Club: No Limits and now with two new episodes of Fight Science.

The MMA episode was great, despite the laughable narration, written by someone who clearly does not "get" the sport. Two things really stood out to me. First, Bas Rutten really does punch twice as hard — well, almost twice as hard — as Randy Couture, a UFC champion — and kicks much harder than the Muay Thai "expert" they tested in a previous episode. Second, Couture's ground and pound strikes were four times as hard as his standing punches.

The Special Ops episode focused on environmental extremes. A Navy SEAL sat in an ice bath for an hour before he started showing negative effects from exposure. He was able to "compartmentalize" his blood flow to keep his internal organs and brain functioning — in fact, his core temperature went up when they put him in the ice water. When they put him through a tactical drill after that, he performed roughly as well as when he was fresh. Then they put an Israeli commando on a treadmill, in a plastic suit, with a fifty-pound vest on, under heat lamps. After they brought his core temperature up to 103-point-something, they put him through his own tactical drill, and he vastly outperformed his fresh run.

The next episode, Fighting Back, looks at self-defense techniques — which might explain the Krav Maga ad during the show.

Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors

Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors in Britain:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.
[...]
Obesity costs the British taxpayer £7 billion a year. Overweight people are more likely to contract diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and to require replacement joints or stomach-stapling operations.

Meanwhile, £1.7 billion is spent treating diseases caused by smoking, such as lung cancer, bronchitis and emphysema, with a similar sum spent by the NHS on alcohol problems. Cases of cirrhosis have tripled over the past decade.

Among the survey of 870 family and hospital doctors, almost 60 per cent said the NHS could not provide full healthcare to everyone and that some individuals should pay for services.

One in three said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. Half thought that smokers should be denied a heart bypass, while a quarter believed that the obese should be denied hip replacements.

Del Toro doubles up to direct big-screen "Hobbit"

Del Toro doubles up to direct big-screen "Hobbit":

Guillermo del Toro is in talks to direct back-to-back installments of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," which is being co-financed by New Line and MGM.
[...]
Del Toro has built that goodwill through such films as the Oscar-nominated "Pan's Labyrinth," "Hellboy," "Blade 2" (which was made by New Line) and "The Devil's Backbone."
[...]
The December resolution of the Jackson suit, facilitated by MGM CEO Harry Sloan, paved the way for "Hobbit" to get back on the road to the screen. However, because of other commitments that included "The Lovely Bones" and "Tintin," Jackson could not take on writing and directing roles, opting instead to become an executive producer with approval over creative elements of the pair of films.

Orca Attack Wave

An Orca pod attacks a lone seal — with waves:



Why were five killer whales spending so much effort on one seal?

In January 2006 while visiting Antarctica, we witnessed a most unusual method for orca to dislodge a crabeater seal from an ice floe — they made large waves to wash the seal off the relative safety of the ice. Later the orca put the seal back on the ice and dislodged the seal a second time which suggested strongly they were training their young.

Don't Get in a Street Fight in Bali

Listen to champion MMA fighter Urijah Faber tell his tale of trouble in Bali — and imagine what would happen to any of the rest of us:



(Skip two minutes in for the story.)

Fight Club: No Limits

Years ago — wow, maybe a dozen years ago now — I went to one of the Dog Brothers' Gatherings of the Pack, back when it was an informal meeting in a park near one of the Dog's homes. I simply had to see live stickfighting, especially since it was "no holds barred" — in the sense that grappling was allowed, and minimal pads were involved. It was an experience.

You'll note that I didn't jump in that day, and I didn't ramp up my Filipino Martial Arts training in order to jump in next time either. Once you've seen a guy get hit hard enough that his fencing mask gets stuck on, you have to take the whole thing seriously.

The other night, National Geographic had an excellent documentary on the Dog Brothers, Fight Club: No Limits, which largely — with the exception of an interviewed professor or two — seemed to "get" the ethos of the event:



The "elders" of the pack run the event by these magic words: No judges, no referees, no trophies. One rule only: Be friends at the end of the day. Our goal is that everyone leaves with the IQ with which they came. No suing no one for no reason for nothing no how no way!

One element has changed over the years: the knife fights now use a Shocknife to keep things "real" — and it does hurt, from what I've heard. Too bad it's $500...

Infantry: New Armor Fixes Old Problems

I'm fighting the urge to make a bad "I want my MTV" joke. Infantry: New Armor Fixes Old Problems:

Last year, the U.S. Army introduced new body army, the Modular Tactical Vests (MTV), this year. This replaced the 1990s era Interceptor body armor. The MTV, true to its name, provides many protection options. If troops only want the same level of protection the Interceptor vests provides, the MTV is about three pounds lighter. But if the side armor, and several other additions, are included, MTV weighs about a pound more (18 pounds) than Interceptor. With all these options, the MTV costs about $2,700 each. The army has bought 230,000 of the new vests. The U.S. Marine Corps adopted the MTV about six months before the army did, and spearheaded the new acceptance of the new armor.

The MTV adds more protection to the sides, back and throat. Troops wearing MTV are expected to suffer 5-10 percent fewer casualties than those wearing the older armor. A precise figure will be available after users experience several thousand combat hours with the new armor. MTV is much more user friendly. It has a quick-release system that enables troops to drop the vest in seconds in emergencies. This has proved very popular with troops who have been in vehicle accidents, or just been hit by a roadside bomb. Without the quick release, they might not have been able to get out of a burning vehicle, or avoid enemy fire on the vehicle. Medics have also found the quick release a life saver, enabling them to treat wounds more quickly.

The vest puts more of the weight on the waist, making it more comfortable to wear. Also included are a lot of nice little features, like channels for radio and computer wires. There's a rifle bolster, making it easier to handle a rifle while wearing the vest. The improved closure system makes it easier to put the MTV on, even after using the quick release.

Quirkology

After following a series of links from Wikipedia's cold reading page, I ended up at Professor Richard Wiseman's Quirkology YouTube Channel, which includes some fun illusions, like his Corkology demonstration:



Did he really do that in one continuous shot, with no editing and no CGI? Yes:



After the fact, it's obvious how he does the psychological card trick, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun the first time through:



I also enjoyed the colour changing card trick:




Swing by his Quirkology site to learn more.

Dangerous Minds

In Dangerous Minds, which originally ran in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell puts criminal profiling under the magnifying glass, and he finds that it bears an uncanny resemblance to cold reading:

A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.'s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the "statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite." ("I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.") The Jacques Statement, named for the character in "As You Like It" who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, "If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger." There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that "leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific." ("I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?") And that's only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

"Moving on to career matters, you don't work with children, do you?" Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the "Vanishing Negative."

No, I don't.

"No, I thought not. That's not really your role."

Of course, if the subject answers differently, there's another way to play the question: "Moving on to career matters, you don't work with children, do you?"

I do, actually, part time.

"Yes, I thought so."

After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board, and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What's more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the F.B.I.'s profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender.

Rambo Death Chart

I haven't seen the new Rambo, but this Rambo Death Chart is priceless:

Too Much Cola Can Cause Kidney Problems

Too Much Cola Can Cause Kidney Problems:

In a study published in the journal Epidemiology, the team compared the dietary habits of 465 people with chronic kidney disease and 467 healthy people. After controlling for various factors, the team found that drinking two or more colas a day — whether artificially sweetened or regular — was linked to a twofold risk of chronic kidney disease.

But drinking two or more noncola carbonated drinks a day, they found, did not increase the risk.

The authors of the study say more research is needed, but their findings support the long-held notion that something about cola — the phosphoric acid, for example, or the ability of cola to pull calcium from bones — seems to increase the risk of kidney stones, renal failure and other conditions affecting the kidneys.

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn:

Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata's vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol.

Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.

Tobey said Coskata's method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

The company plans to have its first commercial-scale plant producing up to 100,000 gallons of ethanol a year by 2011. Friedman and Greene said the timeline is realistic.

May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.

Making ethanol is one thing, but there's almost no infrastructure in place for distributing it. But the company's method solves that problem because ethanol could be made locally from whatever feedstock is available, Tobey said.

"You're not bound by location," he said. "If you're in Orange County, you can use municipal waste. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you can use wood waste. Florida has sugar. The Midwest has corn. Each region has been blessed with the ability to grow its own biomass."

FEMA Independent Study Program

FEMA's Emergency Management Institute has an Independent Study Program with a large selection of classes on disaster preparedness.

[Insert joke here.]

Seriously, take a look. The materials are free to download.

Understanding art for geeks

Understanding art for geeks is a lot of fun — at least if you're both net-savvy and art-savvy.



(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Edit: The owner made the photo set private! Argh!

Dos and don'ts with babies

I enjoyed this illustrated guide to Dos and don'ts with babies:

Virginia's Sangria Ban At Issue in 2 Hearings

Virginia's Sangria Ban At Issue in 2 Hearings:

A Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control agent conducting a routine inspection in 2006 cited La Tasca Spanish Tapas Bar and Restaurant in Old Town Alexandria for violating an obscure 75-year-old state law:

It's illegal to serve sangria in Virginia.

The fruity cocktail of wine and brandy that is a must-have at Spanish restaurants violates a law that forbids mixing wine or beer with spirits. If convicted, a bartender could go to jail for a year.

Apparently spirits should never be mixed with government.

Capturing Warmth from Hot Asphalt

BusinessWeek's latest Green Biz column mentions an unusual "green" idea:

A Dutch civil engineering company says it is exploiting an abundant source of energy that has been beneath us for many years—or rather, beneath our car tires. It's the heat captured by asphalt baking under the hot sun. Ooms Avenhorn Holding's Road Energy Systems are networks of pipes woven into asphalt, plus storage systems beneath the ground. Water in the pipes is heated, stored, then pumped to nearby buildings. In winter, the same pipes can help keep ice off the roads, reducing the need for salt, Ooms contends. The company has already begun some experimental installations, including a Dutch industrial park that captures heat from pipes in a 36,000-square-foot swath of pavement.

Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?

Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good? Probably not:

The dramatic 36% figure has an asterisk. Read the smaller type. It says: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor."

Now do some simple math. The numbers in that sentence mean that for every 100 people in the trial, which lasted 3 1/3 years, three people on placebos and two people on Lipitor had heart attacks. The difference credited to the drug? One fewer heart attack per 100 people. So to spare one person a heart attack, 100 people had to take Lipitor for more than three years. The other 99 got no measurable benefit. Or to put it in terms of a little-known but useful statistic, the number needed to treat (or NNT) for one person to benefit is 100.

Lackadaisy Cats

Matt from Drawn! lauds the "unbelievably lush cartooning and edible character designs from Tracy J Butler in her webcomic, Lackadaisy Cats" — and I think he's on to something.

24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot

Somehow I haven't managed to watch 24 yet, but I got a kick out of 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot.



(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

Khalkhin-Gol

Most Americans know very little about the eastern front during World War 2. They know even less about Khalkhin-Gol and the conflict between Russia and Japan:

In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle on the Mongolian border — the largest the world had ever seen.

Under the then unknown Georgy Zhukov, the Soviets won a crushing victory at the batte of Khalkhin-Gol (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident). Defeat persuaded the Japanese to expand into the Pacific, where they saw the United States as a weaker opponent than the Soviet Union. If the Japanese had not lost at Khalkhin Gol, they may never have attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese decision to expand southwards also meant that the Soviet Eastern flank was secured for the duration of the war. Instead of having to fight on two fronts, the Soviets could mass their troops — under the newly promoted General Zhukov — against the threat of Nazi Germany in the West.

SkySail

The SkySail is getting some press, including this graphic from the Telegraph.



The full article offers more:

During the journey from Bremen to Venezuela, the crew will deploy a SkySail, a 160 square metre kite which will fly more than 600ft above the vessel, where winds are stronger and more consistent than at sea level.

Its inventor, Stephan Wrage, a 34-year-old German engineer, claims the kite will significantly reduce carbon emissions, cutting diesel consumption by up to 20 per cent and saving £800 a day in fuel costs. He believes an even bigger kite, up to 5,000 square metres, could result in fuel savings of up to 35 per cent.

Robopult

Behold the Robopult:

Every hacker wants a budget to do bigger, cooler hacks. Well, we got our budget, all $1000 of it, and decided to turn a borrowed industrial robot into a catapult, a hack we'd been hoping to do for a long, long time. We'd been joking about throwing heavy objects with one of these robots ever since we saw the payload specs and an anvil in the shop.

We wanted to make a catapult that could destroy a car with bowling balls from at least 80 feet away, throw fireballs, and be controlled through a computer vision system so it could be aimed from a laptop. Result? Success.

It's a shame the software targeting software didn't quite work out:

When we got to the desert and actually threw some bowling balls I quickly realized two things:

• The range of the projectile scaled strangely, at best, and the robot threw past our 100' tape, so we would have limited data for a scaling function. For example, dropping the speed of the swing to 75% yielded about half of the distance of 100% power, but 87.5% power yielded about two-thirds of the distance of 100% power.


• I didn't bring a long enough usb cable so my laptop and I had to be within 3 feet of the base of robot to hit the serial send command. This wasn't going to happen; I was not going to chance bowling ball-induced death by a catapult that was over 26' tall at full swing.

Our solution was to abandon ranging, try targeting a few times by just manually punching in the numbers from the laptop into the controller. We finally just gave in to manually typing in the target angles into the robot, which made for some amusing trial and error.

(Hat tip to mon père.)

Girl, you'll be a woman sooner than expected

Girl, you'll be a woman sooner than expected — either because of estrogen-mimicking chemicals or obesity:

"We're not backing up all events in puberty," says Sandra Streingraber, biologist and visiting scholar at Ithaca College. "We're backing up the starting point." She has examined the research on female puberty and compiled a summary in an August 2007 report called "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls." The report was financed by the Breast Cancer Fund, an advocacy group interested in exploring environmental causes of that disease.

Earlier breast development is now so typical that the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society urged changing the definition of "normal" development. Until 10 years ago, breast development at age 8 was considered an abnormal event that should be investigated by an endocrinologist. Then a landmark study in the April 1997 journal Pediatrics written by Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that among 17,000 girls in North Carolina, almost half of African Americans and 15% of whites had begun breast development by age 8. Two years later, the society suggested changing what it considered medically normal.

Detroit Public Schools Book Depository Roosevelt Warehouse

This scene from the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository Roosevelt Warehouse could come straight from a post-apocalyptic film — Escape from Detroit.

Of course, then it would be a scene of hope — A Tree Grows in Detroit. (In case you missed it, yes, that's a tree growing inside the book repository.)

In War: Resolution

In In War: Resolution, Victor Davis Hanson claims that "what is missing from the national debate over the 'worst' war in our history is any appreciation of past American military errors — political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical — that nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts."

It's a long list. He starts with intelligence failures:

American intelligence officers missed the almost self-evident Pearl Harbor attack, as an entire Japanese carrier group steamed unnoticed to within a few hundred miles of Hawaii. After fighting for four long years we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe. Almost no one had a clue about the Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950 — or the subsequent Chinese entrance en masse into North Korea months later. Neither the CIA nor the State Department had much inkling that Saddam Hussein would gobble up Kuwait in August 1990.

We should remember that long before the WMD controversy, the triggers for American wars have usually been odd affairs, characterized by poor intelligence gathering and inept diplomacy — and thus endless controversy and conspiracy mongering: for example, the so-called Thornton affair that started the Mexican War; the defense and shelling of Fort Sumter; the cry of "Remember the Maine!" that heralded the Spanish-American War; the murky circumstances surrounding the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania that turned public opinion against the Kaiser; the Pearl Harbor debacle; an offhand remark in January 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson that South Korea was outside our "defense perimeter"; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and an American diplomat's apparent signal of unconcern to Saddam Hussein immediately before he invaded Kuwait.

At the battlefield level, America's intelligence failures are even more shocking. On April 6, 1862, Union forces at Shiloh allowed a large, noisy Confederate army under General Albert Sidney Johnston to approach unnoticed (by both Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman) to within a few thousand yards of their front with disastrous results. Grant — still clueless as to the forces arrayed against him — compounded his error by sending an ambiguous message for reinforcements to General Lew Wallace, resulting in a critical delay of aid for several hours. Hundreds of Union soldiers died in the meantime. Following the battle Union generals knew even less concerning the whereabouts of the retreating, defeated Confederate forces and thus allowed them to escape in safety. The hard-won Union victory became an object of blame-gaming for the remainder of the 19th century.

Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of World War II preceded the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa — both towards the end of the war, after radical improvements in intelligence methods and technology. Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944, despite the battle-tested acumen of our two most respected generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and British and American intercepts of Wehrmacht messages. At Okinawa, American intelligence officers grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the Japanese deployment, and thus vastly overestimated the efficacy of their own pre-invasion bombing attacks. Yet Okinawa was not our first experience with island-hopping. It unfolded as the last invasion assault in the Pacific theater of operations — supposedly after the collective wisdom gleaned from Guadalcanal, the Marianas, Peleilu, the Philippines, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima had been well digested. Yet this late in the war, over 140,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in the Ardennes and on Okinawa.

That's just the beginning.

What Kenya tells us about Democracy in Africa

Curzon looks at What Kenya tells us about Democracy in Africa, which is something Robert Kaplan pointed out years ago (in 1997) in Was Democracy Just a Moment? — democracy works best when it emerges last:

Hitler and Mussolini each came to power through democracy. Democracies do not always make societies more civil — but they do always mercilessly expose the health of the societies in which they operate.
[...]
The lesson to draw is not that dictatorship is good and democracy bad but that democracy emerges successfully only as a capstone to other social and economic achievements.

He also cites an AFP report that Kenyan broadcast programs warning that ghosts would haunt thieves of looted property were more effective in returning stolen goods than the police:

Television footage showed fearful, if not shameful, looters and their accomplices returning beds, sofa sets and other items after rumours that victims had deployed witch doctors to punish the thieves.

Back to Kaplan:

Foreign correspondents in sub-Saharan Africa who equate democracy with progress miss this point, ignoring both history and centuries of political philosophy. They seem to think that the choice is between dictators and democrats. But for many places the only choice is between bad dictators and slightly better ones. To force elections on such places may give us some instant gratification. But after a few months or years a bunch of soldiers with grenades will get bored and greedy, and will easily topple their fledgling democracy. As likely as not, the democratic government will be composed of corrupt, bickering, ineffectual politicians whose weak rule never had an institutional base to start with: modern bureaucracies generally require high literacy rates over several generations. Even India, the great exception that proves the rule, has had a mixed record of success as a democracy, with Bihar and other poverty-wracked places remaining in semi-anarchy. Ross Munro, a noted Asia expert, has documented how Chinese autocracy has better prepared China's population for the economic rigors of the post-industrial age than Indian democracy has prepared India's.

I recommend reading the whole Kaplan piece, but I must cite another timely passage:

In 1993 Pakistan briefly enjoyed the most successful period of governance in its history. The government was neither democratic nor authoritarian but a cross between the two. The unelected Prime Minister, Moin Qureshi, was chosen by the President, who in turn was backed by the military. Because Qureshi had no voters to please, he made bold moves that restored political stability and economic growth. Before Qureshi there had been violence and instability under the elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Bhutto's government was essentially an ethnic-Sindhi mafia based in the south; Sharif's was an ethnic-Punjabi mafia from the geographic center. When Qureshi handed the country back to "the people," elections returned Bhutto to power, and chaos resumed. Finally, in November of last year, Pakistan's military-backed President again deposed Bhutto. The sigh of relief throughout the country was audible. Recent elections brought Sharif, the Punjabi, back to power. He is governing better than the first time, but communal violence has returned to Pakistan's largest city, Karachi. I believe that Pakistan must find its way back to a hybrid regime like the one that worked so well in 1993; the other options are democratic anarchy and military tyranny. (Anarchy and tyranny, of course, are closely related: because power abhors a vacuum, the one necessarily leads to the other. One day in 1996 Kabul, the Afghan capital, was ruled essentially by no one; the next day it was ruled by Taliban, an austere religious movement.)

Five Guys, Taking a Bigger Bite

I hadn't even heard of Five Guys until recently, but they're clearly doing something right:

Four years ago, before franchising, Five Guys was just a little family burger operation with five locations and a steady, if cultish following, in Northern Virginia. Today the business is by some estimates heading toward $1 billion in value. Five Guys has 87 locations. Most are in the Washington region, but a hundred more will open along the East Coast this year, and another thousand are being phased in. Each store, the company says, pulls in about $1 million a year.

Their franchising strategy:

Thus, you can't buy one Five Guys franchise. You have to buy at least five — essentially filling up a small territory. The current price for each one is $45,000, plus 6 percent of annual sales. By comparison, a new McDonald's franchise fee is $45,000.

Requiring a large purchase of stores also, the Murrells said, attracts more professional owners. High-tech executives, former Marriott executives, and owners of fine restaurants have signed up. "They see something that's a good opportunity," said Moseley, who owns Five Guys franchises and works full time selling them for the company. "There's a better than even chance to be really successful in something that belongs to you."

How they make the food:

The Five Guys franchising contract is rather specific, stipulating the number of bacon strips (two) and pickles (four) placed on burgers should those items be requested. The Murrells send in secret customers to make sure, for instance, that the hand-cut French fries are shaken 15 times after seasoning. The Murrells have found through extensive study that this tactic takes off just the right amount of grease.

Also, after a burger is placed on the grill, it is to be flattened only once, so as not to squeeze out all the juice. Tyler Murrell was once a customer at a franchise store. He saw the grill man press down more than once on the meat. He leapt over the counter to stop him.

There is also a stipulation that franchises use Mount Olive pickles. "We have tasted every pickle that you could cut and slice and put in a jar," Matt Murrell said. "We have been using the Mount Olive pickle for the last 10 years. It's crunchy. If you eat pickles, you know there are sweet pickles, sour pickles, soft pickles, crunchy pickles. There's all kinds of pickles, but we like the Mount Olive pickles."

The Murrells, who bake the buns for all the stores, run the operation out of a warehouse in Lorton, with each son overseeing different parts of the business.

VC's New Math: Does Less = More?

VC's New Math: Does Less = More?

Mr. Thiel, the former CEO of online-payment company PayPal, is making waves in Silicon Valley with an investment strategy that differs significantly from the traditional approach. His company invests only modest amounts of money, sometimes just a few hundred thousand dollars, and focuses on entrepreneurs Mr. Thiel and his partners often know personally. He also takes an uncharacteristically hands-off approach to company management.
[...]
Mr. Thiel, who based Founders Fund in San Francisco rather than the traditional VC hotspot of Sand Hill Road in suburban Menlo Park, Calif., is structuring deals differently from how traditional venture capitalists do. Significantly, the fund often buys only a 5% or 10% stake in a company and sets up a special class of stock that start-up founders can sell while they are building their companies — and before venture-capital investors see profits. That way, the thinking goes, the company founders can reap some financial reward and stay motivated to build the company before an IPO or company sale, which can take years.

Some traditional investors don't think founders should make money before backers do, since early paydays might distract them from the task at hand.

All of this is causing traditional VC firms to re-examine the way they invest in tiny tech start-ups. VC concerns including Trinity Ventures, for example, are now letting a few of their entrepreneurs "take money off the table" early on by selling stock.

Many big venture firms have also started looking at much smaller deals. Accel did six deals less than $1 million this year, although the company says that was in response to increasing valuations for larger-sized investments.

About a year ago, Charles River Ventures announced a program to offer $250,000 loans to fledgling Internet start-ups, far smaller than its usual investment size. Charles River is now also making equity investments in companies through its QuickStart program.

Partner George Zachary said his company launched the program because it was encountering many companies that didn't need a traditional, multimillion-dollar VC investment and the attendant hand-holding.

Just how successful Mr. Thiel's investing tactics are remains to be seen; Founders Fund hasn't yet seen any payout from the Facebook stake. However, it recently collected a big return when one of its investments, computer-security and antispam concern IronPort Systems Inc., was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. for $830 million.

Atheism and Religion

David Friedman looks at Atheism and Religion — and atheists' arguments against religion:

A correspondent points me at a lecture by Richard Dawkins and two by Sam Harris, attacking religion in pretty strong terms. I'm also an atheist, but I think there are a number of problems with their arguments:

1. Dawkins describes religious belief as due entirely to faith and almost entirely inherited from one's parents, scientific belief as due to rational and skeptical investigation. In doing that, he is implicitly comparing the average religious believer with the professional scientist mdash; indeed, with the upper end of professional scientists. The average believer in evolution or relativity or whatever is no more able to provide a convincing account of the evidence and arguments for his position than the average religious believer mdash; both of them hold their beliefs not because of rational investigation but because the people around them told them those things were true. And religious leaders, at least some of them, offer arguments for their positions which are based on more than just faith, whether or not those arguments are correct mdash; offer the evidence of miracles, rational arguments such as those of Aquinas, and the like. It's true that there is more rehashing of old arguments and less new argumentation in religion than in science mdash; but then, religion is an older project than science, so presumably more of the relevant arguments have already been made.

If, after all, everyone got his religious beliefs from his parents, it's hard to see how multiple sects could come into existence. At some point someone, Luther or Calvin or the founder of one or another of the multiple Islamic sects, concluded that his parents' view was wrong, produced his own, and persuaded others to follow it instead of their parents' views.

2. Dawkins complains about four year old children being labelled "Christian," "Muslim," "Hindu." What he is ignoring is that religious labels identify communities as well as systems of belief. For many people the communal identification mdash; "I am a member of this group" mdash; is probably more important than the belief; there are surely lots of members of one Christian denomination or another who could not adequately explain the difference in beliefs between their denomination and others. Seen from this standpoint, it makes as much sense to describe a four year old child as "Christian" as it would to describe her as "French."

I'm reminded of the story of the visitor to Northern Ireland who is asked by a local whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. He replies that he is a Jew. To which the local responds with "Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?" The religious labels here have become primarily identifications of which faction you are a part of, not of what you believe.

It's tempting to blame religion for a good deal of past violence, but it isn't clear if the fundamental cause was religious beliefs or the tendency of humans to identify with groups. There's been lots of violence between Catholics and Protestants or Christians and Muslims, but also between English and French or French and Germans. And the USSR, whose official religious doctrine was atheism, was also one of the most murderous states in history.

3. Harris, and I think also Dawkins, points out that there are lots of different religions, they disagree with each other, so they can't all be true. That's a persuasive argument against many religious positions taken literally. But it's not a very persuasive argument against religion in general, because there is an obvious rebuttal.

One of the speakers, I think Dawkins, quotes J. B. S. Haldane's speculation that the universe may be too complicated for us to understand. Similarly, it might be that religious truth is too difficult for us to fully understand. If so, different religions might each be giving a partial and imperfect view of the truth, narrowed down to what a human can make sense of.

Consider, for an obvious analogy, the scientific view of the nature of light. A critic could argue that some scientists describe light as particles, some as waves, and they cannot both be true. The response is that they can both be true mdash; we can write down a mathematical description of light that is consistent with all of the experimental evidence. What we can't do is to clearly intuit that description. We can intuit the wave version, we can intuit the particle version, to our intuition they seem inconsistent, but in fact each is a partial description of a single consistent reality.

Part of my skepticism with regard to the efforts of my fellow atheists to demonstrate how absurd the opposing position is comes from knowing a fair number of intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful people who believe in God mdash; including one I am married to. Part comes from weaknesses I can perceive in the foundations for my own view of the world. At some point, I think, each of us is using the superb pattern recognition software that evolution has equipped us with to see a coherent pattern in the world around us mdash; and since the problem is a harder one than the software was designed to deal with, it isn't that surprising that we sometimes get different answers.

Abu Dhabi: East Leans West

In Abu Dhabi: East Leans West, Judith Miller looks at the largest of the United Arab Emirates:

Abu Dhabi’s turning point, al-Fahim observes, was August 1966, when Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan came to power with British support. Two years later, when the British, largely for financial reasons, announced plans to withdraw from the Trucial States — the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, including Abu Dhabi, that they’d controlled for 170 years — Zayed doggedly sought an alliance with the other sheikhs. Bahrain and Qatar opted for independence, but Zayed wooed the others into a federation by promising to share oil with the five emirates that had none, by granting their ruling families considerable autonomy, and by promising to divide key federal posts among the families. So while his clan, the al-Nahyans, continues to rule Abu Dhabi (the sheikh himself died in 2004), the Maktoums have long presided over Dubai, free to pursue their own economic vision (which has been to turn their emirate, producing fewer than 100,000 barrels of oil per day to Abu Dhabi’s 2.7 million, into a world-class financial hub). Zayed’s commitment to his pledges gave the UAE political stability; Emiratis today revere him as their George Washington. And that stability in turn helped Abu Dhabi and the rest of the UAE make effective use of the area’s abundant oil and grow very, very wealthy.

The tiny native population — Emiratis are just under 20 percent of the UAE’s 4.5 million people, with the rest of the population made up of guest workers — has fully shared in the prosperity. Per-capita income for the 420,000 or so Abu Dhabians, for instance, is a healthy $52,500. And until the 1980s, when land finally ran out, Abu Dhabi gave each citizen free property to develop as he saw fit. “For Emiratis, there is free education, free health care, and many other benefits,” notes Yousef al-Otaiba, 34, the director of international affairs for the crown prince’s office.

Oil Econ 101

Arnold Kling wrote Oil Econ 101 a few years ago, but his point still stands that "oil is oil":

I teach economics in high school. Here is a good question for an introductory course:

If the United States currently satisfies 10 percent of its demand for oil with imports from Saudi Arabia, by what percentage must the U.S. reduce its consumption in order to be 100 percent independent of Saudi oil?

If you answer "10 percent," you get an F. If we reduce oil consumption by 10 percent, then we will not cut 100 percent of our imports from Saudi Arabia. We cannot arrange to consume only American oil and no Saudi oil. Oil is oil. If we reduce demand by 10 percent, we probably will reduce our demand for Saudi oil by 10 percent, not by 100 percent.

(Actually, oil is not exactly the same everywhere. Saudi oil is somewhat cheaper to extract and refine than other oil. What this means is that if we reduce our demand for oil, the impact is likely to be felt somewhat more on other oil, and somewhat less on Saudi oil. Lowering our demand by 10 percent might not lower Saudi oil exports much at all. But we can leave that aside for now. Just keep in mind that oil is oil.)

But what if we passed a law against importing Saudi oil? In that case, the Saudis would export their oil to us via Venezuela. They might not physically use this channel, but if the Venezuelans sell more oil to the U.S. and the Saudis sell more to other customers no longer served by Venezuelans, it has the same effect.
[...]
The correct answer to the question of how much the United States would have to reduced oil consumption in order to drive our demand for Saudi oil to zero is 100 percent. Only if we stop using oil altogether can we be sure that we are not contributing to the demand for Saudi oil. Oil is oil, so that any demand for oil creates demand for Saudi oil.

Inflation or Deflation?

Tyler Cowen makes a point about inflation and deflation:

Any single year there has been inflation, from one year to the next.

From 1900 to 2008 there has been radical deflation, for instance in the Sears catalog. You'd rather spend 10K in the modern catalog than in the old catalog.

David Brin's Two-Dimensional Political Landscape

David Brin offers up his own Two-Dimensional Political Landscape:

In my two dimensional political landscape there is still left versus right. Only now we shall do something unprecedented and actually define our terms. Taking only one of the many and often contradictory attributes commonly associated with the old linear model, let's assign the horizontal axis the task of depicting a person's attitude towards personal property. In other words, the far left is where we'll assign people who consider personal property a suspect, if not an inherently evil notion. The further to the right you go, the more property-holding is seen as innate and irrevocable, one of the fundamental rights of man.

Along our second (vertical) axis we shall then array various opinions regarding State or Private Coercion, or the desirability of some authority with the might to impose its will (perhaps for the “common good”) upon recalcitrant individuals or competing systems.

One advantage of figure two over the old linear model, is apparent at a glance. It separates natural foes who should never have been lumped together in the first place.

Stalin believed nobody should own anything, but that he could and should feel free to torture his opponents to death. Therefore, he is placed in the upper left corner as both coercive and anti-property. Ferdinand Marcos, Anastasio Somoza and Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, ran their nations as personal fiefdoms, enforcing programs of inherited family wealth and power to benefit their oligarchic supporters. They were classic coercive aristocrats of the kind that dominated nearly all human cultures since agriculture and metallurgy came along, feudalists who believed they could by right both torture and own people. That puts them at the upper right.

(Want to learn a magic trick? How to make most dogmatic libertarians turn purple? Show them what we've drawn so far, and ask—WHICH type of coercive repressor destroyed freedom and markets in most cultures, across 4,000 years of recorded history? Taken across that span, it has been propertarian wealth-accumulating aristocracies that were the market-repressors, 99% of the time! True, we grew up terrified by anti-propertarian (socialist) tyrants, like Stalin. But these were, in fact, a recent invention. A mutation of the older, more pervasive pattern of owner-aristocrats. But, having thrown that idea-grenade, let's get back to model-making.)

Let's look at a few other examples. For example, Hitler's position in the top center in no way makes him “moderate.” This chart simply portrays the syndicalist economic program the National Socialist Worker