A Reactionary Theory of Modern History

Mencius Moldbug notes that the only history taught and discussed today comes from a decidedly progressive point of view, so he offers up ten books from which to construct a reactionary theory of modern history:

• Edmund Burke — Reflections on the Revolution in France.
• Henry Maine — Popular Government.
• W.E.H. Lecky — Democracy and Liberty.
• Walter Lippmann — Public Opinion.
  
• Edgar Lee Masters — Lincoln the Man.
• Albert Jay Nock — Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.
  
• John T. Flynn — As We Go Marching.
• Bertrand de Jouvenel — On Power.
• Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — Liberty or Equality.
  
• James Burnham — Suicide of the West.

This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize

This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize:

Many of the contestants begin, like Cinematch does, with something called the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm — or, as the pros call it, kNN. This is what Amazon.com uses to tell you that "customers who purchased Y also purchased Z." Suppose Netflix wants to know what you'll think of Not Another Teen Movie. It compiles a list of movies that are "neighbors" — films that received a high score from users who also liked Not Another Teen Movie and films that received a low score from people who didn't care for that Jaime Pressly yuk-fest. It then predicts your rating based on how you've rated those neighbors. The approach has the advantage of being quite intuitive: If you gave Scream five stars, you'll probably enjoy Not Another Teen Movie.

BellKor uses kNN, but it also employs more abstruse algorithms that identify dimensions along which movies, and movie watchers, vary. One such scale would be "highbrow" to "lowbrow"; you can rank movies this way, and users too, distinguishing between those who reach for Children of Men and those who prefer Children of the Corn.

Of course, this system breaks down when applied to people who like both of those movies. You can address this problem by adding more dimensions — rating movies on a "chick flick" to "jock movie" scale or a "horror" to "romantic comedy" scale. You might imagine that if you kept track of enough of these coordinates, you could use them to profile users' likes and dislikes pretty well. The problem is, how do you know the attributes you've selected are the right ones? Maybe you're analyzing a lot of data that's not really helping you make good predictions, and maybe there are variables that do drive people's ratings that you've completely missed.

BellKor (along with lots of other teams) deals with this problem by means of a tool called singular value decomposition, or SVD, that determines the best dimensions along which to rate movies. These dimensions aren't human-generated scales like "highbrow" versus "lowbrow"; typically they're baroque mathematical combinations of many ratings that can't be described in words, only in pages-long lists of numbers. At the end, SVD often finds relationships between movies that no film critic could ever have thought of but that do help predict future ratings.

The danger is that it's all too easy to find apparent patterns in what's really random noise. If you use these mathematical hallucinations to predict ratings, you fail. Avoiding that disaster — called overfitting — is a bit of an art; and being very good at it separates masters like BellKor from the rest of the field.

In other words: The computer scientists and statisticians at the top of the leaderboard have developed elaborate and carefully tuned algorithms for representing movie watchers by lists of numbers, from which their tastes in movies can be estimated by a formula. Which is fine, in Gavin Potter's view — except people aren't lists of numbers and don't watch movies as if they were.

Potter likes to use what psychologists know about human behavior. "The fact that these ratings were made by humans seems to me to be an important piece of information that should be and needs to be used," he says. [...] One such phenomenon is the anchoring effect, a problem endemic to any numerical rating scheme. If a customer watches three movies in a row that merit four stars — say, the Star Wars trilogy — and then sees one that's a bit better — say, Blade Runner — they'll likely give the last movie five stars. But if they started the week with one-star stinkers like the Star Wars prequels, Blade Runner might get only a 4 or even a 3. Anchoring suggests that rating systems need to take account of inertia — a user who has recently given a lot of above-average ratings is likely to continue to do so. Potter finds precisely this phenomenon in the Netflix data; and by being aware of it, he's able to account for its biasing effects and thus more accurately pin down users' true tastes.

Echocrome Trailer

I never thought I'd see an M.C. Escher video game. This Echocrome Trailer is mind-bending:

The case against democracy

I recently admitted that Mencius Moldbug has hijacked my brain with his ten red pills. Earlier in that same piece he asks us to consider the case against democracy:

Have you ever considered the possibility that democracy is bunk?

I grew up believing in democracy. I'll bet you did too. I spent 20 years of my life in democratic schools. I'll bet you did too.

Suppose you were a Catholic in 16th-century Spain. Imagine how hard it would be for you to stop believing in Catholicism.

You are a Catholic. Your parents were Catholics. You were educated by Catholics. You are governed by Catholics. All your friends are Catholics. All the books you've ever read were written by Catholics.

Sure, you're aware that not everyone in the world is a Catholic. You're also aware that this is the cause of all the violence, death and destruction in the world.

Look at what Protestants do when they get into power. They nail genitals to the city gates. They behead their own wives. Crazy stuff! And let's not even start on the Turks...

Now suppose you're you. But you have a time machine that lets you talk to this 16th-century Spanish Catholic version of you.

How do you convince this guy or gal that the answer to all the world's problems is not "more Catholicism"? How do you say, um, dude, this Trinity thing — the virgin birth — transsubstantiation... ya know...

So you see how hard it is to explain that democracy is bunk.

Of course, I could be wrong. Who the heck am I? No one. And everyone who is someone agrees: democracy is wonderful.

So I'm not telling you that democracy is bunk. I'm just suggesting you might want to consider the possibility.

Or even just consider considering the possibility. The way you consider, like, UFOs, or something. Put it down in the "extremely improbable, but not inherently impossible" category.

48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007

Wow. 48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007:

The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon's MP3 store can compete with iTunes.

The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

Frankly, it's difficult to watch the first third of Amanda Bagg's video about her autistic way of thinking. Then the computer-generated voice kicks in, speaking the words she has typed:



David Wolman discusses The Truth About Autism:

The YouTube post, she says, was a political statement, designed to call attention to people's tendency to underestimate autistics. It wasn't her first video post, but this one took off. "When the number of viewers began to climb, I got scared out of my mind," Baggs says. As the hit count neared 100,000, her blog was flooded. At 200,000, scientists were inviting her to visit their labs. By 300,000, the TV people came calling, hearts warmed by the story of a young woman's fiery spirit and the rare glimpse into what has long been regarded as the solitary imprisonment of the autistic mind. "I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."

My Favorite Liar

In My Favorite Liar, Kai Chang describes a technique used by one of his favorite professors:

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

I guess that statement requires a bit of explanation.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day." And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention — by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious — immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase "Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on ... "

As the quarter progressed, the Lie of the Day became more subtle, and many ended up slipping past a majority of the students unnoticed until a particularly alert person stopped the lecture to flag the disinformation. Every once in a while, a lecture would end with nobody catching the lie which created its own unique classroom experience — in any other college lecture, end of the class hour prompts a swift rush of feet and zipping up of bookbags as students make a beeline for the door; on the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: "Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all." Those lectures forced us to puzzle things out, work out various angles in study groups so we could approach him with our theories the following week.

Brilliant ... but what made Dr. K's technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down "no, in fact that is true — look at [x]") for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: "Do you remember the first lecture — how I said that 'every lecture has a lie?'"

Exhausted from having our best theories shot down, we nodded.

"Well — THAT was a lie. My previous lecture was completely on the level. But I am glad you reviewed your notes rigorously this weekend — a lot of it will be on the final. Moving on ... " Which prompted an rousing melange of exasperated groans and laughter from the classroom.

And while my knowledge of the Economics of Capital Markets has faded in time, the lessons that stayed with me was his real legacy; I've had many instructors before and since, but few that I remember with as much fondness — and why my favorite professor was a chronic liar.

Intellectual Property Conference

I recently attended a conference on intellectual property — you know, patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets — and I learned two things: (1) I know much more about intellectual property than I realized, and (2) you can't skim a conference. I've been spoiled by the blogosphere.

On a less meta level, I did learn a few things — or at least noted a few interesting quips worth repeating.

It's interesting to note that the U.S. doesn't simply have fairly mature IP law; IP made its way into our Constitution. Here's the factoid I did not know: within 13 years, the U.S., with its low patent fees, had more patents than Great Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution — and a much older country.

Through most of the 19th century, innovation was the work of independent inventors. Bell, for instance, originally outsourced its R&D. It's only after a number of legal rulings enforced employment agreements that transferred IP to employers that companies like Bell brought their R&D in house and formed groups like Bell Labs.

Today, there is talk about outsourcing innovation again, via markets like Eli Lily's Innocentive.

At any rate, a lot of patents, especially software patents, are defensive. On the one hand, if you're Microsoft, you can afford to spend $100 million per year in legal fees over alleged IP infringement. On the other hand, if you're Microsoft, you have to spend $100 million per year in legal fees over alleged IP infringement — because you're a big, fat target. The balance of terror depends on both your resources to bring to the legal battle and the resources other people can extract from you.

One recent issue in IP is the appearance of patent trolls — firms that pop up with a dormant patent they've bought off the inventor and use to blackmail a big, successful firm that thinks it has been operating in the clear. This sounds awful and evil until you realize that the original inventor didn't stop the big, successful firm, because the original inventor wasn't a lawyer; he was an inventor.

Patent trolls give big, successful firms a much bigger incentive to play nicely with the little guys, because the little guys can sell their IP to someone who knows how to use it — either in the marketplace or in a court of law.

Also, it's easy for a big company to complain about patent trolls when it has brought all its own trolls in house.

Anyway, these "trolls" seem to favor the Eastern District of Texas — where all the asbestos lawyers had great success a couple legal fads ago.

For most large companies then, the focus on IP is on legalities, and IP's largely seen as a negative right — the right to sue someone and get an injunction against their using that IP. IP assets are "owned" by lawyers, and no one argues with simply holding IP "just in case" it becomes valuable later. The rewards for successfully licensing IP are dwarfed by the painful consequences for... successfully licensing IP. "Why did we license that technology away?"

So, at this point, IP is far from liquid and far from fungible, but a number of folks would like to see IP licenses move toward some kind of standardized but parameterized form, like the better-known financial options. As one fellow pointed out, oil-derivative transaction volume dwarfs gasoline sales. The same could happen with IP. "Wall Street will set you free."

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

In Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, Chris Anderson gives a decent run-down of how and why so many more products are going to be nominally free to consumers — but as editor-in-chief of Wired, I don't think he had his article edited for content:

Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that "there's no such thing as a free lunch.

"But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn't necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you'll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we've seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It's as if the restaurant suddenly didn't have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

Surely economics has something to say about that?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

When Milton Friedman said that there's no such thing as a free lunch, the whole point was that someone pays; it's just not obvious who — and how. Obviously you can charge $0.00 for something.

Regarding externalities: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Externalities are not non-pecuniary costs or benefits; they are costs or benefits to parties outside a transaction. If your neighbor turns his garage into a nightclub and plays deafening house music all night long, he might be happy, and his paying customers might be happy, but you might be miserable. That's the externality.

Have Some Phun With Your Kids

Have Some Phun With Your Kids, geek dad Ken Denmead suggests, with this "work of pure genius":



Download it and get to the phun

The case of the 500-mile email

The case of the 500-mile email makes for a great story:

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500 miles?"

"It's not what I think," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago — "

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email. Just not more than — "

" — 500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of statistics. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it — "

"Geostatisticians..."

" — yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands. "When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along. It wasn't April Fool's Day. I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.

Having established that — unbelievably — the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn't been altered — it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option. At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had "patched the server," he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing downgraded Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5 — at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks — could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration options — those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
     * 558.84719
     / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid

The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid — and reap the rewards:

When he released Basecamp in February 2004, Fried expected the monthly subscription fees, which today range from $12 to $149, to generate sales of $5,000 a month by the end of Basecamp's first year; they reached that target in six weeks. Five months later, Hansson packaged his Ruby shortcuts and released them as Ruby on Rails, which started winning converts almost immediately.
[...]
Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals' Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day.

Gun Buyback Misfires

Oakland's Gun Buyback Misfires in a completely predictable way:

Oakland's recent gun buyback was especially ridiculous. The police offered up to $250 for a gun "no questions asked, no ID required." The first people in line? Two gun dealers from Reno with 60 cheap handguns. Fortunately the buyback did manage to get some guns off the street, too bad they were turned in by a bunch of senior citizens from an assisted living facility. Whew, the streets are safe at last.

Alex Tabarrok explains the problem:

Imagine that instead of guns, the Oakland police decided, for whatever strange reason, to buy back sneakers. The idea of a gun buyback is to reduce the supply of guns in Oakland. Do you think that a sneaker buyback program would reduce the number of people wearing sneakers in Oakland? Of course not.

All that would happen is that people would reach into the back of their closet and sell the police a bunch of old, tired, stinky sneakers.

It gets worse:

Imagine that gun dealers offered a guarantee with every gun: Whenever this gun gets old and wears down, the dealer will buy back the gun for $250.

The dealer's guarantee makes guns more valuable, so people will buy more guns.

But the story is exactly the same when it's the police offering the guarantee. If buyers know that they can sell their old guns in a buyback, they are more likely to buy new guns.

Abusing Amazon images

Nat Gertler has a fascinating piece on Abusing Amazon images — by reverse-engineering Amazon's image-generator:

Amazon.com feeds out a lot of product images, putting out the same book cover (say) in a variety of sizes and formats. By experimentation, I found that they don't actually have all the sizes and formats stored. Instead, they have a system that generates each requested image. The details of size and format are built into the image's URL. What that means that, if you want, you can create URLs that generate odd and unlikely Amazon images (you can see my gallery of images here). The proper combination of product choice and added elements and effects could create an interesting visual. What you see here is my best understanding of things based on trial and error and messing with various example URLs I've found.

Democracy is a commons, not a market

Before Mencius hijacked my brain, I read another, softer anti-democratic piece, Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. I've discussed it before, but in an election year, it all bears repeating.

And there's the fact that I finally got around to reading the book, not just a good summary or two.

Caplan's ideas are fairly straightforward, if controversial. The key is that he has gone to the data — the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. He isn't just rhapsodizing about political philosophy from his lofty perch.

Despite all the jokes about economists, they really do agree on a number of issues — and ordinary folks do not "get" this economic point of view. An important, but subtle, point is that ordinary folks don't simply make random "mistakes" from an economic perspective. Those would cancel each other out in the aggregate. They make systematic mistakes with systematic biases — against markets, against foreigners, toward making work rather than improving efficiency, and toward pessimism rather than optimism.

The other key point is that citizens have very little incentive to educate themselves on the issues and to improve their understanding of the implications of the economic policies they're voting for or against, because “Democracy is a commons, not a market.”

Your individual vote has a negligible effect on an election. Consider it zero. But your vote does not have a negligible effect on how you feel about yourself. So we all have an incentive to vote for things that feel good, even if they won't work. We can be rationally irrational.

If a policy is bad for the economy, it's bad for the economy, and if it's good for the economy, it's good for the economy, but your one vote, one way or the other, doesn't change whether that policy get implemented or not. You don't individually have the power to choose policy for the nation. But you do have the power to vote your heart.

Is that so bad? Think of it this way: since you don't actually choose policy, you don't have to put your money where your mouth is. And people have all kinds of strong opinions that disappear as soon as you ask, "Wanna bet?"

Mencius Moldbug Has Hijacked My Brain

He doesn't go by Morpheus, but by Mencius, and I first discovered his writing over at 2Blowhards. I was trying to discern whether he was a genius or a lunatic, but his manifesto was long, and I filed it away as something to read more seriously later. That was almost a year ago. For the past week or so I've been reading the entirety of his Unqualified Reservations blog. I invite you to do the same.

Perhaps the best way to ease yourself into his unusual worldview is to consider the ten red pills he offers:

1. Peace, prosperity, and freedom
• Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.
• The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.


2. Democracy, freedom, and law
• Democracy is inseparable from freedom and law.
• At best, democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law. At worst it excludes them entirely, as in Iraq.


3. Fascism and communism
• The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.
• Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.


4. The nature of the state
• The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
• The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don't.


5. The power structure of the West
• Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.
• Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.


6. The extent of the state
• The state consists of elected officials and their appointees.
• The state consists of all those whose interests are aligned with the state. This includes NGOs, universities, and the press, all of whose employees are effectively civil servants, and side with the civil service in almost all conflicts.


7. The danger of right-wing politics
• Right-wing politicians, and the ignorant masses who support them, are a danger to democracy. They must be stopped.
• Right-wing politicians are a classic democratic phenomenon. Domestically, they have little power and are mostly harmless. Their international adventures are destructive, but they are inescapable consequences of democracy itself.


8. Democracy and nonpartisan government
• True democracy is not merely the rule of politicians. For a democracy to succeed, a nonpartisan decisionmaking process is essential. Civil servants, especially judges, must be isolated from politics, or they will become corrupt.
• Democracy is politics. Any other definition is Orwellian. The absence of politics is the absence of democracy, and apolitical civil-service government is indeed better than democracy. But this is a low standard to surpass.


9. The history of Western government
• The present system of Western government is the result of adapting 19th-century classical liberalism to the complex modern world.
• Western governments today are clones of the quasi-democratic FDR regime, whose best modern comparisons are leaders like Mubarak, Putin or Suharto. Its origin was the Progressive movement, which broke classical liberalism, then complained that it didn't work.


10. The future of Western government
• The Western world is moving toward a globalized, transnational free market in which politics is increasingly irrelevant, and technocratic experts and NGOs play larger roles in fighting corruption, protecting the environment, and delivering essential public services.
• Civil-service government works well at first, but it degrades. Its limit as time approaches infinity is sclerotic Brezhnevism. Its justification for ruling is inseparable from democracy, which is mystical nonsense and is rapidly disappearing. It cannot survive without a captive media and educational system, which the Internet will route around. Also, its financial system is a mess and could collapse at any minute. The whole thing will be lucky if it lasts another ten years.

Flocke

Today's second dose of cute comes from Flocke, the polar bear cub at the Tiergarten Nuernberg Zoo.

Martin Taylor Tackles Eduardo Da Silva

I prefer to stick to less dangerous sports, like MMA:

Arsenal's Eduardo Da Silva suffers a serious leg injury after being tackled by Birmingham City's Martin Taylor during their English Premier League soccer match at St Andrews in Birmingham, central England February 23, 2008.

Yeah, I think that warrants a red card.

Kibongo

Today's dose of cute comes from Kibongo, a baby crowned lemur (Propithecus verreauxi coronatus) making its first official appearance at a zoo in Vincennes, near Paris, February 21, 2008. Kibongo was born December 24, 2007.

Cheap, 'safe' drug kills most cancers

Cheap, 'safe' drug kills most cancers:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Legends of Charlemagne Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth

I do not know how I managed to miss the fact that Bulfinch's Legends of Charlemagne was published as a separate volume — outside of his Mythology — with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

Mr. Door Tree shares some of those illustrations in his Golden Age Comic Book Stories (spread across multiple pages).



(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Mondo

I never quite knew what mondo was supposed to mean — vaguely "over the top" was my understanding — and I certainly didn't know that it had a clear, specific origin:

The fad started with the Italian film Mondo Cane (A Dog's World, also a mild Italian curse; "mondo" literally means "world") made in 1962 by Gualtiero Jacopetti and proved quite popular. Mondo films are often easily recognized by name, as even English language mondo films often included the term "mondo" in their titles. Over the years the film makers wanted to top each other in shock value in order to draw in audiences. Cruelty to animals, accidents, tribal initiation rites and surgeries are a common feature of a typical mondo. Much of the action is also staged, even though the film makers may claim their goal to document only "the reality".

Although the craze really hit in the 1960s, it made a comeback with Faces of Death in the 1980s.

The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur

Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind Zoho. Forbes calls him The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur:

The result? A 100%, bootstrapped, $40-million-a-year revenue business that sends $1 million to the bank every month in profits.

Doing what? you might wonder.

Selling network management tools, to be precise. But with a unique twist. Vembu employs 600 people in Chennai, India, and a mere eight in Silicon Valley. Imagine what that does to his cost structure!

That cost advantage isn't as great as it used to be. Labor arbitrage can only go on so long — which is why Vembu looks for bargains within the Indian labor market:

Not only that, in India Vembu's operation does not hire engineers with highflying degrees from one of the prestigious India Institutes of Technology, thereby squeezing his cost advantage.

"We hire young professionals whom others disregard," Vembu says. "We don't look at colleges, degrees or grades. Not everyone in India comes from a socio-economic background to get the opportunity to go to a top-ranking engineering school, but many are really smart regardless.

"We even go to poor high schools, and hire those kids who are bright but are not going to college due to pressure to start making money right away," Vembu continues. "They need to support their families. We train them, and in nine months, they produce at the level of college grads. Their resumes are not as marketable, but I tell you, these kids can code just as well as the rest. Often, better.”

If you're not familiar with Zoho, it is a Web 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Office — with an extra piece:

It also has a hosted customer relationship management service that is free for very small companies and only costs $10 per user per month for larger ones. It competes with Salesforce.com, which charges $65 per user per month.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, has made an offer to buy Zoho for an undisclosed amount. Benioff seems appropriately nervous, since Salesforce.com's sales and administration costs are high, eating up most of his earnings. Can he afford to compete if Zoho undercuts him at such a dramatic scale?

Vembu has turned Benioff down.

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch, a 61-year-old "dude" named Mike Jeffries, "is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry":

A quirky perfectionist and control freak, he guards his aspirational brands and his utopian chocolate factory with a highly effective zeal. Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. "He's weird and probably insane, but he's also unbelievably driven and brilliant," says a former employee at Paul Harris, a Midwestern women's chain for which Jeffries worked before becoming CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992.

Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports.

His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips. But while he can't turn back the clock, he can — and has — done the next best thing, creating a parallel universe of beauty and exclusivity where his attractions and obsessions have made him millions, shaped modern culture's concepts of gender, masculinity and physical beauty, and made over himself and the world in his image, leaving them both just a little more bizarre than he found them.

Much more than just a brand, Abercrombie & Fitch successfully resuscitated a 1990s version of a 1950s ideal — the white, masculine "beefcake" — during a time of political correctness and rejection of '50s orthodoxy. But it did so with profound and significant differences. A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair. While feigning casualness (many of its clothes look like they've spent years in washing machine, then a hamper), Abercrombie actually celebrates the vain, highly constructed male. After all, there is nothing casual about an A&F sweatshirt worn over two A&F polos worn over an A&F T-shirt.

Honestly, I wasn't sure if Abercrombie & Fitch was an authentic brand with a long history or simply a faux old-school institution:

Founded in 1892, in its heyday it served Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower (they bought their fishing equipment there), Ernest Hemingway (guns), and Cole Porter (evening clothes). During prohibition A&F was where the in crowd went for its hip flasks. But by the 1970s it had become a fashion backwater, holding on for dear life.

Leslee O'Neill, A&F's executive vice president of planning and allocation, remembers what the company was like before Jeffries got there. "We had old clothes that no one liked," she says. "It was a mess, a total disaster. We had this old library at our headquarters with all these really old books. There were croquet sets lying around. It was very English."

Is it wrong not to be offended by these?

In the latest episode, last fall a group of high school girls from Allegheny County, Penn., made the rounds of television talk shows to protest the company's "offensive" T-shirts. Of particular concern were shirts that read "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" and "Do I Make You Look Fat?"

"Abercrombie has a history of insensitivity," the group's well-spoken Emma Blackman-Mathis, 16, told me, "and there is no company with as big an impact on the standards of beauty. There are kids starving themselves so they can be the 'Abercrombie girl,' and there are guys who think they aren't worthy if they don't look exactly like the guys on the wall."

The protest (which resulted in A&F pulling "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" and "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" but retaining "Do I Make You Look Fat?" and others) began after my visit, so I couldn't ask Jeffries about it. But I did ask him about other T-shirt dust-ups, including "It's All Relative in West Virginia" (which West Virginia's governor didn't find funny), Bad Girls Chug. Good Girls Drink Quickly (which angered anti-addiction groups), and Wong Brothers Laundry Service — Two Wongs Can Make It White (which triggered protests from Asian groups).

I Am Paladin (And So Can You)

D&D artist Todd Lockwood has produced a portrait of America's greatest hero, Stephen Colbert.

Yale Test Detects Early Stage Ovarian Cancer With 99 Percent Accuracy

Yale Test Detects Early Stage Ovarian Cancer With 99 Percent Accuracy:

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have developed a blood test with enough sensitivity and specificity to detect early stage ovarian cancer with 99 percent accuracy.

Results of this new study are published in the February 15 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.
[...]
This new phase II clinical trial included 500 patients; 350 healthy controls and 150 ovarian cancer patients. Mor and colleagues validated the previous research and used a new platform called multiplex technology to simplify the test into one single reaction using very small amounts of serum from the blood. The new platform uses six protein biomarkers instead of four, increasing the specificity of the test from 95 to 99.4 percent. The team looked for the presence of specific proteins and quantified the concentration of those proteins in the blood.

The Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) independently evaluated the results of the test.

“This is the most sensitive and specific test currently available,” said Mor. “Previous tests recognized 15 to 20 percent of new tumors. Proteins from the tumors were the only biomarkers used to test for ovarian cancer. That is okay when you have big masses of tumors, but it is not applicable in very early phases of the tumor. Testing the proteins produced by the body in response to the presence of the tumor as well as the proteins the tumors produce, helped us to create a unique picture that can detect early ovarian cancer.”

Mor and colleagues have begun a phase III evaluation in a multi-center clinical trial. In collaboration with EDRN/NCI and Laboratories Corporation of America (LabCorp), they are testing close to 2,000 patients.

The test is available at Yale through the Discovery to Cure program. Yale has licensed the test to three companies: Lab Corp in the United States, Teva in Israel and SurExam in China.

Grad student invents gravity lamp

Grad student invents gravity lamp — which is cool, if not quite as cool as it sounds from the headline:

Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his master's of science degree last year from Virginia Tech, created the lamp as a part of his master's thesis. The LED lamp, named Gravia, is an acrylic column a little more than 4 feet high. The entire column glows when activated by electricity generated by the slow, silent fall of a mass that spins a rotor.

The light output of 600-800 lumens lasts about four hours.

To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp and into a mass sled near the top. The sled begins its gentle glide down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs are illuminated.

"It's more complicated than flipping a switch," said Moulton, "but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee."

Moulton estimates Gravia's mechanisms will last more than 200 years.

Murder, My Sweet

I just watched Murder, My Sweet, the noir classic — and it does include some wonderfully noir cinematography. The film is based on Raymond Chandler's novel, Farewell, My Lovely — they changed the name, because the lead actor, Dick Powell, had starred in a number of musical comedies, and Farewell, My Lovely sounded like one more.

Chandler himself approved of Powell's portrayal of Philip Marlowe, but I had a really tough time seeing Powell as a really tough guy — and I laughed out loud when Claire Trevor (as femme fatale Helen Grayle) said, "You've got a nice build for a private detective." Even for 1944, that is not a good build.

One odd bit of trivia: In the movie — again, Murder, My Sweet — the evil psychiatrist mentions using digitalis on our hero. In the book — again, Farewell, My Lovely — he uses scopolamine (also known as Columbian devil's breath), which makes much more sense:

"There's a drug called scopolamine, truth serum, that sometimes makes people talk without their knowing it. It's not sure fire, any more than hypnotism is. But it sometimes works."
— Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely

Adding Epicycles

Under the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the earth is at the center of the universe, and the sun and planets revolve around it in circular orbits — but the planets obviously don't revolve around the earth in perfect circular orbits, because the occasionally seem to move in the wrong direction. This retrograde motion was explained via epicycles — the planets supposedly moved along a small circle that itself moved in a circular orbit around the earth.

As early astronomers made more and more observations, they needed more and more epicycles on epicycles to explain the planets' paths:

In part due to sometimes fantastic attempts to make the failed earth-centered model work, "adding epicycles" has come to be used as a derogatory comment in modern scientific discussion. If one continues to try to adjust a theory to make its predictions match the facts, when it has become clear that the basic premise itself should be questioned, one is said to be "adding epicycles".

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved:

Using modern computer x-ray tomography and high resolution surface scanning, a team led by Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth at Cardiff University peered inside fragments of the crust-encased mechanism and read the faintest inscriptions that once covered the outer casing of the machine. Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon. The motion, known as the first lunar anomaly, was developed by the astronomer Hipparcus of Rhodes in the 2nd century BC, and he may have been consulted in the machine's construction, the scientists speculate.

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.

This "computer" is the famous Antikythera Mechanism, so named because it was recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera.

In fact, the only reason we have the mechanism today is that it sunk under 42 meters of water:

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years. One explanation could be that bronze was often recycled in the period the device was made, so many artefacts from that time have long ago been melted down and erased from the archaelogical record. The fateful sinking of the ship carrying the Antikythera Mechanism may have inadvertently preserved it. "This device is extraordinary, the only thing of its kind," said Professor Edmunds. "The astronomy is exactly right ... in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa."

Japanese Roots

Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) looks at Japanese Roots — but the Japanese don't necessarily want to know where they really come from:

Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of history based on the earliest recorded Japanese chronicles, which were written in the eighth century. They describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to Earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 b.c. To fill the gap between 660 b.c. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally announced that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this chronicle account. Unlike American archeologists, who acknowledge that ancient sites in the United States were left by peoples (Native Americans) unrelated to most modern Americans, Japanese archeologists believe all archeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Hence archeology in Japan is supported by astronomical budgets, employs up to 50,000 field-workers each year, and draws public attention to a degree inconceivable anywhere else in the world.

Their chief concern is that they might be descended from ... Koreans. Gasp!

Anyway, the proto-Japanese Jomon people lived an interesting lifestyle — as hunter-gatherers, but not as nomads:

Archeologists studying Jomon hunter-gatherers have found not only hard-to-carry pottery (including pieces up to three feet tall) but also heavy stone tools, remains of substantial houses that show signs of repair, big village sites of 50 or more dwellings, and cemeteries — all further evidence that the Jomon people were sedentary rather than nomadic. Their stay-at-home lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans. Jomon people lived at some of the highest population densities ever estimated for hunter-gatherers, especially in central and northern Japan, with their nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas. The estimate of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak is 250,000 — trivial, of course, compared with today, but impressive for hunter-gatherers.

With all this stress on what Jomon people did have, we need to be clear as well about what they didn’t have. Their lives were very different from those of contemporary societies only a few hundred miles away in mainland China and Korea. Jomon people had no intensive agriculture. Apart from dogs (and perhaps pigs), they had no domestic animals. They had no metal tools, no writing, no weaving, and little social stratification into chiefs and commoners. Regional variation in pottery styles suggests little progress toward political centralization and unification.

Read the whole thing for the full story of Japanese Roots. Especially if you're Korean.

City Jet-Setter's Bizarre LSD Trip

The New York Post tells the sensationalist story of one City Jet-Setter's Bizarre LSD Trip:

A Harvard-educated Manhattan jet-setter has been pegged as the money-laundering mastermind behind a massive LSD drug ring run out of a Kansas missile silo, The Post has learned.

Stefan Wathne, a 39-year-old scion of New York's socially prominent Wathne apparel family, surrendered to federal agents Jan. 7 as he stepped off a plane at Newark Airport — after three years on the lam.

Wathne is accused in a 2005 federal indictment of laundering as much as $3 million through Russia between 1996 and 2000 for what authorities have described as the most prolific LSD operation in US history.

His arrest marks the latest chapter in a bizarre federal drug case that has unfolded over five years and featured a surreal cast of characters.

In addition to Wathne — an erstwhile financial planner and former American Ballet Theatre trustee — the case has included a prominent Harvard psychiatrist and a deputy director of a UCLA drug-study program.

In another strange twist, singers Sting and Paul Simon helped pay the legal bills for a witness in the case.

The drug ring was cracked in November 2002, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency descended on a decommissioned military silo outside Topeka, which had been converted to a lab capable of churning out massive amounts of LSD.

Cannabis Road Test

This Cannabis Road Test isn't particularly thorough, but it is eye-opening:

Mystery Disease Among Slaughterhouse Workers

I suppose it's never reassuring to hear about a Mystery Disease Among Slaughterhouse Workers, even if it doesn't sound contagious:

Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.

The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.

The disorder seemed to involve nerve damage, but doctors had no idea what was causing it.
[...]
Tests showed that the man’s spinal cord was markedly inflamed. The cause seemed to be an autoimmune reaction: his immune system was mistakenly attacking his own nerves as if they were a foreign body or a germ. Doctors could not figure out why it had happened, but the standard treatment for inflammation — a steroid drug — seemed to help. (The patient was not available for interviews.)

Neurological illnesses sometimes defy understanding, Dr. Lachance said, and this seemed to be one of them. At the time, it did not occur to anyone that the problem might be related to the patient’s occupation.

By spring, he went back to his job. But within weeks, he became ill again. Once more, he recovered after a few months and returned to work — only to get sick all over again.

By then, November 2007, other cases had begun to turn up. Ultimately, there were 12 — 6 men and 6 women, ranging in age from 21 to 51. Doctors and the plant owner, realizing they had an outbreak on their hands, had already called in the Minnesota Department of Health, which, in turn, sought help from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though the outbreak seemed small, the investigation took on urgency because the disease was serious, and health officials worried that it might indicate a new risk to other workers in meatpacking.

“It is important to characterize this because it appears to be a new syndrome, and we don’t truly know how many people may be affected throughout the U.S. or even the world,” said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, a veterinarian from the disease centers.

In early November, Dr. Aaron DeVries, a health department epidemiologist, visited the plant and combed through medical records. The disease bore no resemblance to mad cow disease or to trichinosis, the notorious parasite infection that comes from eating raw or undercooked pork. Nor did it spread person to person — the workers’ relatives were unaffected — or pose any threat to people who ate pork.

A survey of the workers confirmed what the plant’s nurses had suspected: those who got sick were employed at or near the “head table,” where workers cut the meat off severed hog heads.

On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”

As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

The brains were pooled, poured into 10-pound containers and shipped to be sold as food — mostly in China and Korea, where cooks stir-fry them, but also in some parts of the American South, where people like them scrambled up with eggs.

The person blowing brains was separated from the other workers by a plexiglass shield that had enough space under it to allow the heads to ride through on a conveyor belt. There was also enough space for brain tissue to splatter nearby employees.

“You could see aerosolization of brain tissue,” Dr. Lynfield said.

The workers wore hard hats, gloves, lab coats and safety glasses, but many had bare arms, and none had masks or face shields to prevent swallowing or inhaling the mist of brain tissue.

Dr. Lynfield asked Mr. Wadding, “Kelly, what do you think is going on?”

The plant owner watched for a while and said, “Let’s stop harvesting brains.”

Quality Pork halted the procedure that day and ordered face shields for workers at the head table.

Epidemiologists contacted 25 swine slaughterhouses in the United States, and found that only two others used compressed air to extract brains. One, a plant in Nebraska owned by Hormel, has reported no cases. But the other, Indiana Packers in Delphi, Ind., has several possible cases that are being investigated. Both of the other plants, like Quality Pork, have stopped using compressed air.

But why should exposure to hog brains cause illness? And why now, when the compressed air system had been in use in Minnesota since 1998?

At first, health officials thought perhaps the pigs had some new infection that was being transmitted to people by the brain tissue. Sometimes, infections can ignite an immune response in humans that flares out of control, like the condition in the workers. But so far, scores of tests for viruses, bacteria and parasites have found no signs of infection.

As a result, Dr. Lynfield said the investigators had begun leaning toward a seemingly bizarre theory: that exposure to the hog brain itself might have touched off an intense reaction by the immune system, something akin to a giant, out-of-control allergic reaction. Some people might be more susceptible than others, perhaps because of their genetic makeup or their past exposures to animal tissue. The aerosolized brain matter might have been inhaled or swallowed, or might have entered through the eyes, the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth, or breaks in the skin.

On the Origin of Species

The Guardian has an extensive online section celebrating the 150-year anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better

The iPod Hacker shares 100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better.