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.

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.

Cancer and the bacterial connection

Brendan Borrell, writing for the Los Angeles Times, looks at Cancer and the bacterial connection:

In the 1890s, a New York surgeon named William Coley tested a radical cancer treatment. He took a hypodermic needle teeming with bacteria and plunged it into the flesh of patients.

After suffering through weeks of chills and fevers, many showed significant regression of their tumors, but even Coley himself could not explain the phenomenon.

His experiments were sparked by the observation that certain cancer patients improved after contracting infections. One patient experienced regression in a tumor in her arm after developing Saint Anthony's fire, a streptococcus skin infection.

Doctors at the time considered Coley's bacterial mixtures to be more black magic than medicine, and with the advent of radiation therapy, the well-meaning doctor was soon consigned to the annals of quackery.
[...]
Almost a century after Coley, in the 1980s, dermatologists began noticing that patients with severe acne, which is caused by another type of bacterium, have reduced rates of skin cancer, lymphoma and leukemia. According to a paper by Dr. Mohammad Namazi at the Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in Iran, studies showed that these bacteria, when injected into animals, appear to stimulate the immune system and shrink tumors.

More recent evidence for this phenomenon comes from studies on cotton and livestock workers, who are constantly breathing endotoxins, a component of bacterial cell walls that causes swelling of lung tissue.

In reports published in the last two years, Harvey Checkoway, a University of Washington epidemiologist, has found that female cotton workers in Shanghai have a 40% to 60% lower risk of lung, breast, and pancreas cancer than other factory workers.

Other recent studies by Giuseppe Mastrangelo at the University of Padua in Italy found that dairy farmers exposed to high levels of manure dust are up to five times less likely to develop lung cancer than their colleagues who work in open fields.

Ben-Hur

I just — finally — got around to seeing the film classic, Ben-Hur, and certain parts had me asking, "Did this play really differently in 1959?" It turns out that a Wikipedia contributor noted the same thing:

In interviews for the 1986 book The Celluloid Closet, and later the 1995 documentary of the same name, screenwriter Gore Vidal asserts that he persuaded director Wyler to allow a carefully veiled homoerotic subtext between Messala and Ben-Hur. Vidal says his aim was to explain Messala’s extreme reaction to Ben-Hur’s refusal to name fellow Jews. Surely, Vidal argued, Messala should have been able to understand that Ben-Hur, his close friend since childhood, would not be willing to name the names of his fellow Jews to a Roman officer. Vidal suggested a motivation to Wyler: Messala and Ben-Hur had been homosexual lovers while growing up, and then separated for a few years while Messala was in Rome. When Messala returns to Judea, he wants to renew the relationship with Ben-Hur, but Ben-Hur is no longer interested. It is the anger of a scorned lover which motivates Messala’s vindictiveness toward Ben-Hur. Since the Hollywood production code would not permit this to appear on screen explicitly, it would have to be implied by the actors. Vidal suggested to Wyler that he would direct Stephen Boyd to play the role that way, but not tell Heston. Vidal claims that Wyler took his advice, and that the results can be seen in the film. Vidal is the only person ever to make this claim, and Heston insisted that Vidal had little to do with the final film. However, Vidal responded by producing extracts from Heston's 1978 biography An Actor's Life, in which the star described Vidal authoring most of the final screenplay.

On a more serious note, the novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, was a phenomenal success in its day:

The novel was a phenomenal best-seller; it soon surpassed Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as the best-selling American novel and retained this distinction until the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. In 1912, Sears Roebuck published one million copies to sell for 39 cents apiece: the largest single-year print edition in American history. The book was also the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope.

One last thing: Roman naval ships did not use galley slaves at the oars. Oarsmen were trained professionals in the classical world.

Can you build a life from $25?

Can you build a life from $25? Evidently, yes:

Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charles­ton, S.C.

But Shepard's descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents' home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading Nickel and Dimed, in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

He tells his story in Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve.

How Technology Almost Lost the War

Noah Shachtman explains How Technology Almost Lost the War in Iraq, where the critical networks are social, not electronic:

The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory's many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.

For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.

What's perplexing — infuriating, really — is that many experts and even non-experts knew the basics of counterinsurgency going into the war. And yet it still took three years to get American troops out of their fortified bases.

There are other obvious facts that we'd rather ignore, including what Luttwak (Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook) calls the easy and reliable way of defeating all insurencies everywhere:

Perfectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods. It is enough to consider these methods to see why the armed forces of the United States or of any other democratic country cannot possibly use them.

The simple starting point is that insurgents are not the only ones who can intimidate or terrorize civilians. For instance, whenever insurgents are believed to be present in a village, small town, or distinct city district — a very common occurrence in Iraq at present, as in other insurgency situations — the local notables can be compelled to surrender them to the authorities, under the threat of escalating punishments, all the way to mass executions. That is how the Ottoman Empire could control entire provinces with a few feared janissaries and a squadron or two of cavalry. The Turks were simply too few to hunt down hidden rebels, but they did not have to: they went to the village chiefs and town notables instead, to demand their surrender, or else. A massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades. So it was mostly by social pressure rather than brute force that the Ottomans preserved their rule: it was the leaders of each ethnic or religious group inclined to rebellion that did their best to keep things quiet, and if they failed, they were quite likely to tell the Turks where to find the rebels before more harm was done.

Long before the Ottoman Empire, the Romans knew how to combine sticks and carrots to obtain obedience and suppress insurgencies. Conquered peoples too proud to accept the benefits of their rule, from public baths and free circus shows to reliable law courts, were “de-bellicized” (a very Roman idea). It was done by killing all who dared to resist in arms — it made good combat practice for the legions — by selling into slavery any who were captured in battle, by leveling towns that held out under siege instead of promptly surrendering, and by readily accepting as peaceful subjects and future citizens all who submitted to Roman rule. In the first two and most successful centuries of imperial Rome, some 300,000 soldiers in all, only half of them highly trained legionary troops, were enough to secure a vast empire that stretched well beyond the Mediterranean basin that formed its core, today the territory of some thirty European, Middle Eastern, and North African states. The Romans could not disperse their soldiers in hundreds of cities, thousands of towns, and countless hamlets to repress riot or rebellion; the troops were needed to guard the frontiers. Instead, they relied on deterrence, which was periodically reinforced by exemplary punishments. Most inhabitants of the empire never rebelled after their initial conquest. A few tribes and nations had to be reconquered after trying and failing to overthrow Roman rule. A few simply refused to become obedient, and so they were killed off: “They make a wasteland and call it peace” was the bitter complaint of a Scottish chieftain (as reported by Tacitus).

Terrible reprisals to deter any form of resistance were standard operating procedure for the German armed forces in the Second World War, and very effective they were in containing resistance with very few troops. As against all the dramatic films and books that describe the heroic achievements of the resistance all over occupied Europe, military historians have documented the tranquillity that the German occupiers mostly enjoyed, and the normality of collaboration, not merely by notorious traitors such as the incautious French poet or the failed Norwegian politician but by vast numbers of ordinary people. Polish railwaymen, for example, secured the entire sustenance of the German eastern front. As for the daring resistance attacks that feature in films, they did happen occasionally, but not often, and not because of any lack of bravery in fighting the routinely formidable Germans but because of the terrible punishments they inflicted on the population.

Occupiers can thus be successful without need of any specialized counterinsurgency methods or tactics if they are willing to out-terrorize the insurgents, so that the fear of reprisals outweighs the desire to help the insurgents or their threats. The Germans also established secure and economical forms of occupation by exploiting isolated resistance attacks to achieve much broader demonstration effects. Lone German dispatch riders were easily toppled by tensed wires or otherwise intercepted and killed, but then troops would arrive on the scene to burn or demolish the surrounding buildings or farms or the nearest village, seizing and killing anyone who aroused suspicion or just happened to be there. After word of the terrible deeds spread and was duly exaggerated, German dispatch riders could safely continue on their way, until reaching some other uninstructed part of the world, where the sequence would have to be repeated.

Likewise in the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were skilled in using terror to secure their pervasive territorial control and very ready to use any amount of violence against civilians, from countless individual assassinations to mass executions, as in Hue in 1968. The Communist cause had its enthusiasts, “fellow travelers,” and opportunistic followers, but Vietnamese who were none of the above, and not outright enemies, were compelled to collaborate actively or passively by the threat of the violence so liberally used. That is exactly what the insurgents in Iraq are now doing, and this is no coincidence. All insurgencies follow the same pattern. Locals who are not sympathetic to begin with, who cannot be recruited to the cause, are compelled to collaborate by the fear of violence, readily reinforced by the demonstrative killing of those who insist on refusing to help the resistance. Neutrality is not an option.

By contrast, the capacity of American armed forces to inflict collective punishments does not extend much beyond curfews and other such restrictions, inconvenient to be sure and perhaps sufficient to impose real hardship, but obviously insufficient to out-terrorize insurgents. Needless to say, this is not a political limitation that Americans would ever want their armed forces to overcome, but it does leave the insurgents in control of the population, the real “terrain” of any insurgency.

Trolls

Paul Graham compares Internet trolls to graffiti taggers:

Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.

Six Principles for Making New Things

Paul Graham shares his Six Principles for Making New Things:

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.

Google iPhone usage shocks search giant

Google iPhone usage shocks search giant:

Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.

What Harford Didn't Say About Statistical Discrimination

I was perusing Tim Harford's new book, The Logic of Life, at the book store the other day — his old book is The Undercover Economist — and I stumbled across the chapter on "rational racism" — which he bends over backwards to deplore.

Bryan Caplan looks at What Harford Didn't Say About Statistical Discrimination in his new book:

As Tim asks, "Why bother to get a degree or work experience if you are young, gifted, and black?"

But is it really true that the market fails to reward blacks for getting more education? Is it even true that the market rewards them less? I tested these claims using one of the world's best labor data sets, the NLSY. The results directly contradict Tim's self-fulfilling prophesy story. Blacks actually get a substantially larger return to education than non-blacks! The same goes for experience, though the result is not statistically significant. The real lesson of the data is that if you are young, gifted, and black, you should get a ton of education, because it has an exceptionally large pay-off.

Why would this be so? I'm not sure, but one simple story is that counter-stereotypical behavior stands out. When my sons were young, my wife was working a lot, so I often took my kids places on my own. Funny thing: Time and again, strangers came up and said, "Wow, you're such a great dad!" But there were moms of young kids doing the same thing in plain sight, and the strangers rarely praised them. Why not? Because a dad taking care of two babies is counter-stereotypical, which grabs people's attention.

Purely anecdotal, yes. But it is consistent with the small academic literature on counter-stereotypical behavior. If you clearly violate expectations, people not only notice; they often over-react.

The upshot is that stereotypes may actually be self-reversing rather than self-fulfilling. The marginal payoff of distinguishing yourself from the pack is high if people think poorly of the typical member of the pack.

Bryan says much more; read the whole thing.

What's interesting is that Harford has responded to Caplan's complaints.

The politically incorrect Steve Sailer adds his own comments:

Tim,

As I've mentioned before, it's in your overall best interests to stay away from writing about race.

A. There's too much danger of getting your career Watsoned if you follow the facts out to their logical conclusions.

B. But when you try to come up with something politically correct enough to say publicly about such a potentially career-killing topic as race, you start to lose the respect of EconLog, Marginal Revolution, and the handful of other elite sites whose respect you are smart enough and honest enough to crave.

Writing about race is a no-win situation for you, so why don't you just avoid the topic for a few years?

Sandia, Stirling Energy Systems set new world record for solar-to-grid conversion efficiency

Sandia, Stirling Energy Systems set new world record for solar-to-grid conversion efficiency:

On a perfect New Mexico winter day — with the sky almost 10 percent brighter than usual — Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility.

The conversion efficiency is calculated by measuring the net energy delivered to the grid and dividing it by the solar energy hitting the dish mirrors. Auxiliary loads, such as water pumps, computers and tracking motors, are accounted for in the net power measurement.

“Gaining two whole points of conversion efficiency in this type of system is phenomenal,” says Bruce Osborn, SES president and CEO. “This is a significant advancement that takes our dish engine systems well beyond the capacities of any other solar dish collectors and one step closer to commercializing an affordable system.”

Since a Stirling engine works off of a difference in temperatures, a bright, sunny, cold day was ideal.

The biggest technical improvement was in the mirrors:

The Stirling dishes are made with a low iron glass with a silver backing that make them highly reflective — focusing as much as 94 percent of the incident sunlight to the engine package, where prior efforts reflected about 91 percent. The mirror facets, patented by Sandia and Paneltec Corp. of Lafayette, Colo., are highly accurate and have minimal imperfections in shape.

Both improvements allow for the loss-control aperture to be reduced to seven inches in diameter — meaning light is highly concentrated as it enters the receiver.

Randall Parker at FuturePundit seems upset that "it took them 24 years to gain 2% of efficiency, and it is still more expensive than coal electric or nuclear."

Sweet Heart

Since it's Valentine's Day, I suppose I should bring back this anatomically correct candy heart:

Artist Nathan Sawaya makes awesome Lego sculptures, but he also produces some super-sweet candy art. Case in point, this human heart fashioned from Necco Conversation Hearts, and "star bursts" made from Starbursts.

5 Ways Hollywood Tricks You Into Seeing Bad Movies

This piece on 5 Ways Hollywood Tricks You Into Seeing Bad Movies isn't particularly clever, but I did enjoy this infographic on Sweeney Todd's target market:

Robot Dinosaurs In Love

Ken Denmead notes that the makers of Pleo have embraced the "hacking" of their dinosaur and even plan on releasing an SDK — which they're calling the PDK, of course — but before getting to that "they are putting out fun personality overlays that can be loaded via SD cards," including the first one, just in time for Valentine's Day, for Robot Dinosaurs In Love:

He sulks when left alone, but pet him ... he wiggles, coos, and sighs happily. Cuddle Pleo and his heart beats with joy as he purrs and nuzzles. Pet him just so; he'll profess his love and blow kisses. Whistling when he sees something he likes, this baby dino is quite a flirt!

Subterranean Tutoring

Geek-dad Kevin Kelly suggests Subterranean Tutoring:

A lot of us geeky dads worry that our kids are not as geeky as we are. We unpack nifty kits which are never built. We want our children to finish up that science fair project on-their-own. Or come out with us to the garage when we open the hood of the car. But they shrug. Even a rocket launch may not get them away from the computer.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson once told me something memorable as we were hanging out in his back yard. He pointed to an unfinished kayak under a tarp. He said he was slowly working on it, in part to mentor his kids, even though they did no work on the boat, nor express the least bit of interest in this project. None-the-less he continued puttering on the undertaking while they were home. Stephenson said when he was a kid, his dad was constantly tinkering on some garage project or another, and despite Neal's complete indifference for any of his dad's enthusiasms at the time, he was influenced by this embedded tinkering. It was part of the family scene, part of his household, like mealtime style, or the pattern of interactions between siblings. Later on when Neal did attempt to make stuff on his own, the pattern was right at hand. It felt comfortable, easy. Without having to try very hard, he knew how to be a nerd.

So he continued the tradition in the faith that while his kids showed no outward enthusiasm for his weekend projects, and didn't pick up a tool to help, they were being trained and coached in a subterranean way.

I noticed a similar subterranean influence at work during our travel with kids. Despite some fairly exotic travel every year, our young kids seem wholly unimpressed by these trips. Bali? It was about chicken poo. When our girls were 8 and 10, they accompanied me for 4 weeks in the very rugged hill country of the Kam region in Tibet, the mountain kingdoms near Lijiang, Yunnan, and in the fantastic karst formations near Guilin, China. For them the highlight of their month-long trip was the 2-story McDonalds in Chengdu we visited on the last day (which I have to admit was an experience). But it was all they would talk about for years afterward. Yet when they reached their teenage years and beyond, that particular trip kept surfacing as an immense influence on their lives. The things they had witnessed first-hand years ago had become touchstones as they matured. Details I had no idea they had even noticed, were now central to their identity. Despite their silence they had not missed much. It just took a while to comprehend it. You can't really "remember" something until you make sense of it.

Electronic Reminders More Than Double Exercise

Randall Parker cites a recent study showing that Electronic Reminders More Than Double Exercise:

The Dell Axim X5, chosen for its large-sized, easy-to-read screen and good contrast, was fitted with a program that asked participants approximately three minutes' worth of questions. Among the questions: Where are you now" Who are you with" What barriers did you face in doing your physical activity routine" The device automatically beeped once in the afternoon and once in the evening; if participants ignored it the first time, it beeped three additional times at 30-minute intervals. During the second (evening) session, the device also asked participants about their goals for the next day.

With this program, participants could set goals, track their physical activity progress twice a day and get feedback on how well they were meeting their goals. After eight weeks, the researchers found that while participants assigned to the PDA group devoted approximately five hours each week to exercise, those in the control group spent only about two hours on physical activities-in other words, the PDA users were more than twice as active.

One surprise was the participants' positive response to the program's persistence. The PDA users liked the three additional "reminder" beeps that went off if they failed to respond to the first one. In fact, almost half of them wound up responding to the PDA only after being beeped for the fourth time.

"The PDAs can really keep on you," King observed with wry humor. "We were surprised by that; we thought by the time they heard the fourth beep, they might find it annoying and not respond at all."

Robbery fact of the day

Tyler Cowen shares this robbery fact of the day from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational:

In 2004, the total cost of all robberies in the United States was $525 million...every year, employees' theft and fraud at the workplace are estimated at about $600 billion.

Note the million versus billion there.

Obama: Most Liberal Senator in 2007

The National Journal scored Obama the Most Liberal Senator in 2007:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.

How about some conservatives?

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the only other senator whose presidential candidacy survived the initial round of primaries and caucuses this year, did not vote frequently enough in 2007 to draw a composite score. He missed more than half of the votes in both the economic and foreign-policy categories. On social issues, which include immigration, McCain received a conservative score of 59.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the lone House member still in the presidential race, had a composite conservative score of 60.2, making him the 178th-most-conservative lawmaker in that chamber in 2007. His libertarian views placed him close to the center of the House in both the social issues and foreign-policy categories. He registered more conservative on economic issues.

Blue and white found equal in judo

Blue and white found equal in judo:

The color of a judoka's suit plays no part in the outcome of a match, British researchers say.

Seems pretty obvious, but earlier studies found that blue had an advantage:

Past studies had suggested that contestants in blue had an advantage because the color was more intimidating, or that the white competitor might be more visible, allowing an opponent to better anticipate his movements.

However, Dijkstra said those studies did not take into account that higher seeded — and therefore more skilled — competitors wore the blue uniforms. So it made sense that they would win more often, he said.

This seemingly minor point jumped out at me:

"We focused on judo but the finding may have wider implications for sports in general," said Peter Dijkstra, an behavioral biologist at the University of Glasgow, who led the study. "We show there is no color association for a winning bias."

Why? Because previous studies have shown that if you want to win in sports, you should wear red.

Bats could fly before they had 'radar'

Bats could fly before they had 'radar':

A fossil found in Wyoming has apparently resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radar-like ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night. The answer: after they started flying.

The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived some 25.5 million years ago.

Its skeleton shows it could fly, but that it lacked a series of bony features associated with "echolocation," the ability to emit high-pitched sounds and then hear them bounce back from objects and prey, researchers said.

Wiihabilitation

More and more physical therapists are recommending Wiihabilitation:

Nintendo's Wii video game system, whose popularity already extends beyond the teen gaming set, is fast becoming a craze in rehab therapy for patients recovering from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries.

Kung Fu Panda

Jack Black as Kung Fu Panda? Yeah, I think I'm going to have to see that.

Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

Stefan Thiel of Newsweek reports on Europe’s Philosophy of Failure:

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues ... Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.
[...]
Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems.

(Hat tip to Radley Balko of Reason.)

Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles

For years, exercise physiologists thought that muscle fatigue was a result of lactic acid. Feel the burn. Now they have A New Explanation of Muscle Fatigue:

Muscle contraction and relaxation are controlled by the release and storage of calcium ions within muscle fibers. Scientists at Columbia University say thtat muscle fatigue, largely misunderstood for decades, is caused by calcium leaking into muscle cells.

Muscle Contraction
Calcium ions are released into the cell, causing filaments in the muscle fiber to contract.

Muscle Relaxation
Calcium ions are pumped into storage, allowing the muscle filaments to relax.

The discovery came while looking at heart disease:

As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

What can be done about that?

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. Columbia obtained a patent for the drugs and licensed them to a start-up company, Armgo Pharma of New York. Dr. Marks is a consultant to the company.
[...]
“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

It looks like it works on human cyclists too — so I have to assume human cyclists will be using it outside the lab.

Uncanny New Clone Wars

Discerning geeks recognize that the animated Clone Wars shorts that played on Cartoon Network were much, much better than the live-action movies.

Now Lucas is bringing us some Uncanny New Clone Wars, done in CGI and stylized, but not quite enough to make the human characters look like cartoons rather than zombies.

Patent goo: self-replicating Paxil

Fascinating. Nick Szabo looks at self-replicating Paxil:

Self-replicating chemicals are not merely hypothetical: since Cat's Cradle, scientists have discovered some real-world example of crystals that seed the environment, converting other forms (polymorphs) of the crystal into their own. The population of the original polymorph diminishes as it is converted into the new form: it is a “disappearing polymorph.” In 1996 Abbott Labs began manufacturing the new anti-AIDS drug ritonavir. In 1998 a more stable polymorph appeared in the American manufacturing plant. It converted the old form of the drug into a new polymorph, Form 2, that did not fight AIDS nearly as well. Abbott’s plant was contaminated, and it could no longer manufacture effective rintonavir. Abbott continued to successfully manufacture the drug in its Italian plant. Then American scientists visited, and that plant too was contaminated was contaminated and could henceforth only produce the ineffective Form 2. Apparently the scientists had carried some Form 2 crystals into the plant on their clothing.

Another instance of the “disappearing polymorph” may be the anti-depressant, Paxil (U.S. brand name for the chemical paroxetine hydrochloride). No, self-replicating Paxil doesn’t naturally spread into our brains and make people happy for free. It's not "happy goo." On the contrary, self-replicating Paxil converted, according to one of the parties in the ensuing lawsuit, an old, and now off-patent, form of Paxil into a new, patented form of Paxil. Once the new form, the hemihydrate form of Paxil, was created, its crystals started floating about, converting small fractions of the old form, anhydrous Paxil, into hemihydrate. Both forms of the drug work equally well as an anti-depressant, but it became impossible to manufacture the off-patent anhydrate without some of it being converted into the patented form. Call it "patent goo."

That's the interesting science. Here's the interesting law:

Apotex, a generic drug manufacturer, was all set up to manufacture the off-patent anhydrous generic Paxil when it discovered small fractions of it were being converted into the hemihydrate. They couldn’t remove the contamination. Smithkline, owner of the patent on the hemihydrate, sued them for patent infringement. Apotex argued that the hemihydrate form occurred naturally, so that Smithkline’s patent was invalid. Smithkline argued that it was a disappearing polymorph, that the hemihydrate form had not existed before they had created it in their labs, and that it was up to Apotex to remove the hemihydrate from its product or pay it a royalty. Apotex was unable to remove the hemihydrate and unwilling to pay a royalty.

Judge Richard Posner heard this case in the trial court and wrote an opinion that contains a good explanation of the self-replicating Paxil controversy. The Federal Circuit heard the appeal and decided that Smithkline’s patent on the hemihydrate was invalid as “inherently anticipated” because anhydrate naturally converts into hemihydrate. Normally, anticipation would require an actual reference describing the claimed chemical structure (in patent lingo that the hemihydrate was "taught in the prior art"). But Judge Rader held that inherent anticipation occurs when, more likely than not, an operation that is taught in the prior art would result in the claimed chemical. The anhydrate which was taught in the prior art would more than likely result in natural creation of some hemihydrate. Judge Gajarsa in concurrence argued that the drug was discovered not invented, making it unpatentable subject matter. Gajarsa’s opinion may have inspired the United States Supreme Court to raise the subject matter issue on its own (i.e., it had not been argued by the parties to the case) in Metabolite. The Supreme Court is considering whether to take the appeal on the self-replicating Paxil case as well.

Body-builders pluck stranded car from ditch

Body-builders pluck stranded car from ditch:

A group of 10 body-builders from a German gym took a break from their normal training routine to help a driver whose car was stuck in a ditch, police said on Monday.

The men were training at the Explosives fitness studio in Bad Zwischenahn near the western city of Oldenburg when the 38-year-old driver lost control of his vehicle, veered into a meadow and plunged the front of his car into the two-meter (6 feet) deep ditch.

"They dropped their sweat towels and water bottles and ran over the road to the crash site," a police spokesman told Reuters. "They then heaved the car out. It only took them a few minutes."

The grateful driver joined the men at the fitness studio bar and treated them to a round of energy drinks, the police spokesman said.

Your presidential candidate: Hot or not?

Your presidential candidate: Hot or not? looks at various voting schemes, because the scheme we use in the U.S. is not the only way to vote:

Voting experts — academics who study what's known as "social choice theory" — have long complained that the counting system the United States uses for most state and federal elections, called plurality voting, is probably the worst electoral system one can design. Arrow's theorem shows that no method is perfect, but ours is particularly susceptible to the "spoiler effect." The plurality vote awards the election to the candidate who gets the largest share of the vote, regardless of whether that share suggests any meaningful support in the population. If there are more than three people on the ballot, the candidates who share the most popular positions will split the vote, increasing the electability of the candidate whom the majority finds most objectionable.

Poundstone writes that in at least five of the 45 presidential elections that the United States has held since 1828 (the first year that presidents were picked through a popular vote), the plurality vote caused the second most popular candidate to win. The most recent such race, of course, was in 2000, when Nader siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore in Florida to hand the state, and thus the nation, to Bush (Nader won 97,000 votes there; Bush won by 537). Other spoiled elections occurred in 1844, 1848, 1884 and 1912. The 1992 race, starring Ross Perot, was also probably spoiled for George H.W. Bush, in Bill Clinton's favor. With New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg considering a run this year, we might see another billionaire spoil the chances of a front-runner; Bloomberg, unlike Perot, would probably split votes with a Democrat, improving a Republican candidate's prospects.

Considering this history of spoiled elections, Poundstone calculates at least "an 11 percent rate of catastrophic failure" for the plurality vote. "Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner, it would be recognized for what it is — a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed," he writes.
[...]
The spoiler effect is just the most pernicious of the many shortcomings of our current voting system. Another problem is strategic voting: Because we're all hyper-aware of the power of spoilers, plurality voting pushes us to vote not the way we feel, but the way we expect others will vote. There were many voters in 2000 who ranked Nader first, Gore second and Bush third. But according to polls, a huge percentage of these people didn't vote for their first choice — Nader — but, instead, for their second, Gore, because Nader had no chance of winning, and thus a vote for him was actually a vote for Bush. So Nader, like other third-party candidates, got short-changed. Though he may have appealed to a large slice of the electorate, his results underreported his popularity.

As the article title implies, one of the many alternate voting schemes is the one used on Hot or Not:

The method is called "range voting," and it works in the same way you rate movies on Netflix, books on Amazon, or people on Hot or Not. When you go to vote, you give each candidate on the ballot a rating on a 10- or 100-point scale. Maybe you say Bush is 1 out of 10, Nader is 8, Gore is 5. The winner is the candidate who has the highest average score. Range voting has a number of advantages over how we vote today: Like IRV, it prevents spoilers, but it also obeys monotonocity (a winner can't lose by getting more votes), it's quite impervious to strategic voting (it's hard to game the system by giving false ratings to your candidate or his opponents), and it's "expressive" — you get to say not only that you like one candidate more than another, but by how much you like him.

Range voting is the pet project of Warren Smith, a mathematician who runs a very informative Web site on the subject. Unfortunately, it hasn't progressed much beyond the Web. No major public institution uses range voting to elect officials.

Russia shuts university that displeased Putin

Russia shuts university that displeased Putin:

The Kremlin was yesterday accused of mounting an unprecedented attack on academic freedom after one of Russia's top universities was closed.

The European University at St Petersburg (EUSP) has been forced to suspend its teaching after officials claimed that its historic buildings were "a fire risk". On Friday a court ordered that all academic work cease, classrooms be sealed and the university's library shut.

Academics at the EUSP said the move was politically motivated — and followed a row last year over a programme funded by the European commission to improve the monitoring of Russian elections. The university accepted a three-year, £500,000 EU grant to run a project advising Russia's political parties on matters such as how to ensure elections are not rigged.

Last October, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched a vitriolic attack on the EUSP — which has close links with universities in the UK and US — accusing it of being an agent of foreign meddling.

I hear the Russians like a strong leader.

Amsterdam’s War on Sex

Amsterdam’s War on Sex has begun, and they seem to think they can eliminate "sleaze" by making it illegal again:

Amsterdam without the Red Light District? Wouldn't that be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, and his aldermen have demonstrated little nostalgia for the district, which has been the world's most famous home of sexual permissiveness since the 15th century. They first unveiled the plan to close it in December; last month they revoked the licenses of two widely known sex venues, the Casa Rosso and the Banana Bar. The next step is to buy out the real estate owners. Last fall the city struck a deal with a powerful brothel owner, Charles Geerts (known as "Fat Charlie"), to buy 20 buildings.

The driving force behind the cleanup is Lodewijk Asscher. A young star of the Dutch Labour Party and deputy mayor of Amsterdam, Asscher believes it's time to deliver his hometown from sleaze—even if he's scuppering a $100 million-a-year industry in the process. He is pleasantly surprised, he says, by the public support he's gotten for the plan. "Every day I get e-mails," he says. A recent survey confirms the sentiment: the city administration's polling agency found that 67 percent of Amsterdam's population supports a clampdown on sketchy business. The Amsterdam City Council approved the plan about two weeks ago by an overwhelming 43-2 majority.

Dane, Tunisians arrested in cartoonist murder plot

Dane, Tunisians arrested in cartoonist murder plot:

A Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians were arrested in Denmark on Tuesday over a plot to murder one of 12 cartoonists whose drawings of the Prophet Mohammad caused worldwide uproar in 2006.

The Security and Intelligence Service (PET) said the arrests near Aarhus in western Denmark were made after lengthy surveillance to prevent a "terror-related killing" that was in an early stage of planning.

PET said it expected the 40-year-old Danish citizen to be released pending further investigation. The Tunisians will remain detained while deportation proceedings are brought against them.

According to Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that originally published the cartoons in September 2005, the suspects are accused of planning to kill 73-year-old Kurt Westergaard.

He drew the cartoon that caused the most controversy, depicting the founder of Islam with a bomb in his turban. The paper reproduced that drawing on its Web site on Tuesday.

I didn't notice that last part immediately. Nice.

Pakistan nuclear staff go missing

This does not sound good. Pakistan nuclear staff go missing:

Two employees of Pakistan's atomic energy agency have been abducted in the country's restive north-western region abutting the Afghan border, police say.

The technicians went missing on the same day as Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, was reportedly abducted in the same region.

A Primeval Tide of Toxins

A Primeval Tide of Toxins tells a story that sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi flick:

The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."

As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats.

For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking publicly about their condition. When they finally did speak up, authorities dismissed their complaints — until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab.

Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing.

Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

Even the reason for the fireweed comes straight from sci-fi:

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients — the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen — fertilizer, essentially — than all natural processes on land. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

The consequences are evident worldwide.

I feel like I should have heard some of these stories earlier:

Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call "rhubarb soup." Dead fish bob in the surf. If people get too close, their eyes burn and they have trouble breathing.

On the southern coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, high tide leaves piles of green-brown algae that smell so foul condominium owners have hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning.

On Florida's Gulf Coast, residents complain that harmful algae blooms have become bigger, more frequent and longer-lasting. Toxins from these red tides have killed hundreds of sea mammals and caused emergency rooms to fill up with coastal residents suffering respiratory distress.

North of Venice, Italy, a sticky mixture of algae and bacteria collects on the Adriatic Sea in spring and summer. This white mucus washes ashore, fouling beaches, or congeals into submerged blobs, some bigger than a person.

Along the Spanish coast, jellyfish swarm so thick that nets are strung to protect swimmers from their sting.

First Ache

In First Ache, Annie Murphy Paul discusses infants and pain:

Twenty-five years ago, when Kanwaljeet Anand was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit, his tiny patients, many of them preterm infants, were often wheeled out of the ward and into an operating room. He soon learned what to expect on their return. The babies came back in terrible shape: their skin was gray, their breathing shallow, their pulses weak. Anand spent hours stabilizing their vital signs, increasing their oxygen supply and administering insulin to balance their blood sugar.

“What’s going on in there to make these babies so stressed?” Anand wondered. Breaking with hospital practice, he wrangled permission to follow his patients into the O.R. “That’s when I discovered that the babies were not getting anesthesia,” he recalled recently.

Fortunately, Anand was able to approach the whole thing scientifically:

In a series of clinical trials, he demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or no anesthesia produced a “massive stress response” in newborn babies, releasing a flood of fight-or-flight hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Potent anesthesia, he found, could significantly reduce this reaction. Babies who were put under during an operation had lower stress-hormone levels, more stable breathing and blood-sugar readings and fewer postoperative complications. Anesthesia even made them more likely to survive. Anand showed that when pain relief was provided during and after heart operations on newborns, the mortality rate dropped from around 25 percent to less than 10 percent.

Britain's benefits generation

State handouts are now a way of life for six million Britons:

Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and "benefits are a way of life", a report by MPs revealed yesterday.

And they cost the taxpayer nearly £13 billion a year in state handouts.

This army of families on benefit — nearly one in six of all households in the country — has been untouched by a decade of Labour's attempts to get them into work, said the Public Accounts Committee.

Four out of five of these homes have no one who is even looking for a job.

Wow.

You Are What You Spend

When it comes to being rich or poor, You Are What You Spend:

It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.

The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.

The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? A look at the far right-hand column of the consumption chart, labeled “financial flows,” shows why: those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status.

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

Let’s take the adjustments one step further. Richer households are larger — an average of 3.1 people in the top fifth, compared with 2.5 people in the middle fifth and 1.7 in the bottom fifth. If we look at consumption per person, the difference between the richest and poorest households falls to just 2.1 to 1. The average person in the middle fifth consumes just 29 percent more than someone living in a bottom-fifth household.

Kissing cousins, missing children

In Kissing cousins, missing children, The Economist notes that a wider choice of mates reduces people's reproductive output, and that may explain why families in rich countries are smaller than those in poor ones:

One of the biggest paradoxes in human biology is that as societies grow richer, people have fewer children. In most species, such an increase in available resources leads in the opposite reproductive direction. What makes the demographic transition, as this phenomenon is known, even more paradoxical is that in less developed times and places, the rich do not have smaller families than the poor.

Most explanations of the demographic transition are social. One school of thought emphasises reduced child mortality, suggesting this means that fewer “spares” need be generated to be sure that some children reach adulthood. Another points out that elderly people in rich countries do not depend on their children to look after them. A third suggests that as people are presented with more choices about how to spend their resources, they more often choose to consume things and experiences other than the joys and tribulations of parenthood. A fourth, somewhat more biological, posits that lavishing time and money on a few children, rather than spreading it around amongst many, produces adults who do better in the next-generation reproductive stakes. None of these ideas, though, is really satisfactory.

Now yet another explanation has been added to the pot. This is that the mixing-up of people caused by the urbanisation which normally accompanies development is, itself, partly responsible. That is because it breaks up optimal mating patterns. The demographic transition is thus, in part, a pure accident.

The science:

The study's principal finding is that the most fecund marriages are between distant cousins. Using Iceland's genealogical records, which allow the degree of relatedness between husband and wife to be calculated with great precision, Dr Helgason showed the optimum degree of outbreeding (measured in terms of the number of children and grandchildren produced) lay somewhere between cousins of the third and fourth degrees.

Probably, the reason is that marriages between close relatives risk inbreeding depression (caused by individuals receiving two copies of broken genes from the same ancestor, but by different paths — one maternal and the other paternal). Outbreeding means this is unlikely to happen, and at least one functional copy of each gene will be received. But outbreed too far and other difficulties arise as genetic incompatibilities between the parents make reproduction harder. (A well-known example is the case of rhesus blood groups, when the mother's immune system may reject a fetus because of its father's genes.)

The optimal degree of outbreeding remained the same in every 25-year generation since 1800, although the overall number of children from marriages of every degree of relatedness did drop gradually over time — an observation that accounts for part of Iceland's demographic transition, and which probably has a social explanation. However, the level of outbreeding in Iceland has also increased markedly over that period, and Dr Helgason's findings suggest that this, too, drives down average family size measured over the whole population by reducing the number of third and fourth cousin marriages.

Scientific American also ran a story on the study — under the questionable title, When Incest Is Best: Kissing Cousins Have More Kin.

A Real Stimulus Plan

Alex Tabarrok offers up A Real Stimulus Plan:

As you know, I'm not enthusiastic about a fiscal stimulus plan. What we need is a stimulus plan that does not increasing the budget deficit or waste taxpayer funds but that does increase the incentive to produce output. So what would I do? Here's a new idea.

The IRS knows how much income that each taxpayer reported last year. So let's cut everyone's marginal tax rate based on last year's income. In other words, suppose that last year Joe earned $66,520 which puts him in a 25% tax bracket. Joe's tax schedule this year will be exactly the same as last year except for every dollar earned above $66,520 the tax rate drops to 15%. We do this for all taxpayers so that each taxpayer has their own schedule and for each taxpayer there is a decreasing marginal tax rate.

Note that this plan increases the incentive to work and it doesn't increase the deficit. In fact, the Tabarrok plan increases tax revenues! The key is a marginal tax cut with a different margin for every taxpayer based upon last year's return.

Six-Gill Shark

This rare sighting of a six-gill shark includes some amazing footage:

This six-gill shark (Hexanchus) was filmed during a submersible dive off the northeast coast of Molokai at a depth of 1000m (3280ft). The 2 red laser dots are 6 inches apart, resulting in a length of about 18 ft for the shark.

Great ecstatic live commentary by University of Hawaii Oceanography Professor Jeff Drazen!

Many thanks to Dr. Craig Smith (University of Hawaii) and Dr. Eric Vetter for permitting release of this footage which was obtained as part of their research data set.

Wary U.S. Olympians Will Bring Food to China

Wary U.S. Olympians Will Bring Food to China — but not because they're afraid of getting sick from local victuals:

When a caterer working for the United States Olympic Committee went to a supermarket in China last year, he encountered a piece of chicken — half of a breast — that measured 14 inches. “Enough to feed a family of eight,” said Frank Puleo, a caterer from Staten Island who has traveled to China to handle food-related issues.

“We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested positive.”

What a splendid excuse.

Nuclear fusion is coming, says noted VC

Nuclear fusion is coming, says noted VC Wal van Lierop:

Chrysalix's optimism is pinned on an angel investment the company made in General Fusion, a Canadian company that says it has found a way to hurdle many of the technical problems surrounding fusion. The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventional electricity.

The company uses a technique called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.

The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site. General Fusion has also filed for several patents.

Husband says Macon police used too much force

This is terrifying. Husband says Macon police used too much force:

It was about 5 a.m.

Bridgett Donahue, 45, awoke at her Cumberland Drive residence. She needed to use the restroom. While washing her hands, she glanced up at the mirror and discovered a reflection that horrified her.

"My face was barely recognizable. My cheeks, my jaws, were all swelled up. My lips were all cracked. My tongue was swelling by the second. I looked down and my arms and legs were swelling too. They got to be about the size of balloons. I started to have difficulty breathing," she said during an interview at her home Thursday.

Donahue, in the initial stages of recovery from a surgical procedure Monday, was having a severe allergic reaction to pain medication prescribed by her doctor.

"I screamed so loud everybody in the house woke up," she said.

At 5 a.m., a 911 dispatcher at the Macon-Bibb Communications 911 Center received Donahue's call. Donahue stated her address, "2528 Cumberland Drive." She said her body was swelling up. She requested an ambulance.

The 911 dispatcher reported the call to the regional ambulance dispatch office at The Medical Center of Central Georgia - routine procedure for a medical emergency - and that dispatcher called for an ambulance to Donahue's home.

Minutes later, Donahue's mother, Cora Jordan of Albany, who was in Macon to help care for Donahue, called 911 again. She asked for an ambulance. Again, she reported Donahue's swelling. And again, the 911 dispatcher transferred the call to an operator at the Medical Center.

A third 911 call was made minutes later.

Donahue's daughter, Brande Jordan, 20, made one of those calls, unsatisfied that nearly 10 minutes later an ambulance had not arrived.

"All I know is my mother is screaming, crying and saying that she feels like she's dying. The fact that no one had come to help didn't make any sense to us," she said.

It was during one of these calls that a dispatch operator at the Medical Center reported hearing yelling, possibly an argument, in the background at the Donahue home.

That dispatcher assumed that a domestic violence situation was occurring at the home and summoned police officers to the scene.

That dispatcher assumed that a domestic violence situation was occurring at the home and summoned police officers to the scene. You can imagine how that plays out.

In Bronx School, Culture Shock, Then Revival

In Bronx School, Culture Shock, Then Revival, as a Hasidic Jew, Shimon Waronker, takes over as principal of Junior High School 22:

Some parents at J.H.S. 22, also called Jordan L. Mott, were suspicious, viewing Mr. Waronker as too much an outsider. In fact, one parent, Angie Vazquez, 37, acknowledged that her upbringing had led her to wonder: “Wow, we’re going to have a Jewish person, what’s going to happen? Are the kids going to have to pay for lunch?”

Ms. Vazquez was won over by Mr. Waronker’s swift response after her daughter was bullied, saying, “I never had no principal tell me, ‘Let’s file a report, let’s call the other student’s parent and have a meeting.’ ”

I really don't know what to say.

Ireland debates switch to right-hand driving

Ireland debates switch to right-hand driving:

Ireland should consider giving up driving on the left to reduce accidents by foreigners accustomed to right side motoring, a senior politician said Friday.

Donie Cassidy, the leader of Ireland's upper chamber Senate, cited Sweden — which moved to the right in 1967 — as an example of a country that switched decades after most of Europe did.

Ireland's economic growth over the past decade has attracted tens of thousands of workers especially from central and eastern European countries. It is also a popular tourist destination for visitors from the United States.

It's not a bad idea actually, but I think they've left unspoken one popular reason to switch: to screw with the Brits.

Coping With the Caveman in the Crib

Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block, calls the first three months of a baby's life outside the womb the fourth trimester, and he recommends recreating that environment by swaddling the baby tightly, making loud shushing sounds, etc.

Now he offers his advice for Coping With the Caveman in the Crib:

In his latest book, The Happiest Toddler on the Block, Dr. Karp tries to teach parents the skills to communicate with and soothe tantrum-prone children. In doing so, however, he redefines what being a toddler means. In his view, toddlers are not just small people. In fact, for all practical purposes, they’re not even small Homo sapiens.

Dr. Karp notes that in terms of brain development, a toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven, instinctive creature that has yet to develop the thinking skills that define modern humans.
[...]
But Dr. Karp’s method of toddler communication is not for the self-conscious. It involves bringing yourself, both mentally and physically, down to a child’s level when he or she is upset. The goal is not to give in to a child’s demands, but to communicate in a child’s own language of “toddler-ese.”

This means using short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again.

For instance, a toddler throwing a tantrum over a cookie might wail, “I want it. I want it. I want cookie now.”

Often, a parent will adopt a soothing tone saying, “No, honey, you have to wait until after dinner for a cookie.”

Such a response will, almost certainly, make matters worse. “It’s loving, logical and reasonable,” notes Dr. Karp. “And it’s infuriating to a toddler. Now they have to say it over harder and louder to get you to understand.”

Dr. Karp adopts a soothing, childlike voice to demonstrate how to respond to the toddler’s cookie demands.

“You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ ”

It’s hard to imagine an adult talking like this in a public place. But Dr. Karp notes that this same form of “active listening” is a method adults use all the time. The goal is not simply to repeat words but to make it clear that you hear someone’s complaint. “If you were upset and fuming mad, I might say, ‘I know. I know. I know. I get it. I’m really really sorry. I’m sorry.’ That sounds like gibberish out of context,” he says.

On his DVD, Dr. Karp demonstrates the method. Within seconds, teary-eyed toddlers calm and look at him quizzically as he repeats their concerns back at them. Once the child has calmed, a parent can explain the reason for saying no, offer the child comfort and a happy alternative to the original demand.

Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

I obviously wasn't the only person to look at Guitar Hero and think, Couldn't you do this with real guitars? Behold, Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes:

The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos

Witness The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos:











Many of the logo evolutions tell interesting stories. Canon, for instance, was originally named Kwanon, after the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. What's not mentioned is that Canon is "spelled" Kyanon, not Kanon, in Japanese.

Producers reveal title of new James Bond

Producers reveal the title of the new James Bond film — and it's Quantum of Solace?

Producer Michael G. Wilson said the title, chosen only a few days ago, was taken from a story by Bond creator Ian Fleming that appears in the collection For Your Eyes Only.

Craig said Fleming defined a quantum of solace — it means, roughly, a measure of comfort — as "that spark of niceness in a relationship that if you don't have, you might as well give up."

Incidentally, "Quantum of Solace" doesn't appear to be a James Bond story really, but a story told to Bond.

The Benefits of Hegemony

Arnold Kling discusses The Benefits of Hegemony — and our discomfort with hegemony:

Many liberals, of both the classical and modern varieties, are uncomfortable with hegemony. Hegemony suggests militarism and the potential for dictatorship.

Some libertarians envision a government-free world, with people too dependent on trade with one another to engage in war. However, I am more sympathetic to the Hobbesian view that in the absence of government, disputes will escalate to violence.

Some liberals envision a world government, something like the European Union or the United Nations. These model governments enjoy apparently unlimited scope to make rules but ultimately no power to enforce them.

Many historians view hegemony as unstable. Inevitably, challengers arise. When they become sufficiently powerful relative to the hegemon, war breaks out. War destroys the hegemon, leading to chaos and squalid isolation.

The unpopularity of the Iraq war shows that Americans are not eager practitioners of hegemony. That is probably a good thing. However, we also should not be eager to give up hegemony. In theory, there are better alternatives. In practice, there are alternatives that are much worse.

Reform Lessons for the United States

In Reform Lessons for the United States, Johnny Munkhammar shares an amusing quote from Luxemburg's then-Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker:

"We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."

The Last Centurion

The Last Centurion is a post-apocalyptic novel — the apocalypse is by unexpected global cooling combined with a flu pandemic — by John Ringo, who writes from the first-person point of view of his politically and socially conservative soldier protagonist. That means lots of salty language and lots of jabs at socialized medicine and the thinly veiled President Hillary Clinton, which would not work at all with a supposedly omniscient third-person narrator — and which works less and less as the narrator becomes apparently omniscient and the voice of the author.

Anyway, Ringo has posted the first eight chapters online, but it really gets going in chapter three.

Incidentally, there is a PandemicFlu.gov site, if you're interested in what's really being done about the threat — which is mainly things like producing sample chain letters to distribute:

The threat of a flu pandemic is real. It is not a question of IF it will occur, but of WHEN it will occur. You need to be ready to take care of yourself and your family during a flu pandemic.

Preparing now will make it easier for you and your family during a pandemic. Here are a few quick tips:

• Stock up on food, medicines, and supplies. You should have enough for 2 weeks!


• Improve your health habits. Sneeze and cough into a tissue or your sleeve and wash your hands with soap and water frequently.


• Have a plan. Know what you plan to do if schools are dismissed, if you can’t go to work, or if a member of your family becomes sick and needs care.

Now that you’re preparing, do you know if your friends and family are?

Help spread the word about flu pandemic preparation! Send this message to your friends and family.

For more information on how to get prepared, visit
http://www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/individual/checklist.html.

Early Draft of I Am Legend Screenplay

I just came across this early draft of the I Am Legend screenplay. It seems to diverge more from the Richard Matheson novel than the final film does. In fact, it starts with no sign of any "zombie" vampires; the first vampire we meet has placed a mannequin in one of Neville's snares as a trap, and he's lying in wait with a hunting rifle. At least Neville is a legend for killing their kind.

Afterworld

Afterworld describes itself as an immersive, multi-platform, sci-fi series:

Sometime between 5 and 6 AM EST, the world as we knew it suddenly, inexplicably, changed. After traveling to New York City on a business trip Russell Shoemaker wakes to find all electronic technology dead and more than 99% of the human race missing. Driven by a need to discover the truth and determined to return to his family, he embarks on a journey to his home in Seattle.

AFTERWORLD is the harrowing story of Russell's 3000 mile trek across a post-apocalyptic America as encounters the strange new societies rebuilding themselves. Along the way, he is forced to confront his greatest fears while unraveling the mystery of what caused this global event.

The site is darkly beautiful, and the "video" content reminds me of how effective a narrated slide show can be — and how "uncanny" CGI humans look.

High Temperature Solar Furnace

This High Temperature Solar Furnace is a bit like a magnifying glass aimed at an ant:

The main component of this furnace is a large Fresnel lens. These can be found as surplus or removed from broken large screen televisions. Note that there are two types of lenses in these televisions. One has a "bias" and will blur the focus right to left into a line. This is not suitable for the furnace, although it can be used as a heat source for small heat engines (even small steam engines).

The proper type of Fresnel lens has no bias and will reduce the sunlight to a small area (roughly a centimeter squared). This type of lens will provide the highest concentration of sunlight into the smallest possible area. That is the goal here — placing the most energy into the smallest space.

A suitable lens can concentrate the energy to a density of roughly 6 megawatts per square meter- on par with the "Star Wars" weapons or laser weapons. Because of this, I cannot stress adequately the need for safety.

So how hot does it get?

Once the frame was completed, I tried a few experiments to see just how much heat the lens was capable of providing.

Here is an image of a standard red brick that was held at the focus for about 20 seconds.

The spot at the bottom has been converted to glass in a matter of seconds. Normal brick firing temperatures fuse all the clay granules together without rendering them into a glass. The sunlight, however, quickly surpasses the normal kiln temperatures and completely melts the material.
[...]
A U.S. quarter coin placed at the focus boiled in roughly 25 seconds. Copper melts in seconds, aluminum almost instantly. Wood or plastic at the focus will burst into flames immediately. Sand melts into glass and water will boil at once. Small ceramic items could be glazed at the focus but control would be tricky. Some of the bricks I tested would fracture and I suspect that the same fate would come about for ceramics, due to the expansion and contraction rate.

Giraffe Baby

It's hard not to love this newborn giraffe, named Margaret, who was born at the Chester Zoo, in the UK.

Pros vs. Joes

Last season, I made sure to catch the Pros vs. Joes segments where Randy Couture submitted the Joes and where Roy Jones pummeled them. As much fun as the football and basketball segments might be, it's the combat segments that feature the most fear and drama.

This season Kurt Angle talked an intimidating game, but he didn't punish the Joes with high-amplitude throws. Arturo Gatti, on the other hand, went ahead and knocked out a couple Joes:

The Great British Venn Diagram

The Great British Venn Diagram should clear up some confusion:

The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom are the only two sovereign states in this image. They are shown in red. Ireland and Great Britain are both islands and are shown in green. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom and are shown in orange.

You have the basic idea. There are many other islands in the British Isles which are not shown here. Most of these are politically part of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, with the exceptions of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, which are British crown dependencies and not part of the UK (or ROI) at all.

There are some complications though:

The UK's full name is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". People from the UK are called "British". One British person is called a Briton.

As "British" can be used to mean "of or pertaining to the United Kingdom", people from the Republic of Ireland often object to calling the whole kaboodle "The British Isles", as the ROI isn't actually "British" in that sense. However, there is no consensus on what to call it instead. (May I humbly suggest "The British and Irish Isles"?)

England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland frequently field separate teams in such sports as rugby, football (i.e. the World Cup), cricket and so on. This is largely because our various nations have been playing rugby, football and cricket for longer than the UK has existed.

Lastly, to be pedantic, this is actually an Euler diagram, not a Venn diagram.

Ookla

Years ago — decades ago, really — I had a French teacher — a Turkish fellow — who told a funny story about traveling by train in France and sitting beside a young French fellow wearing a UCLA sweatshirt. "Do you know what that is?" he asked the young man.

"Ookla?" he replied.

What I didn't realize was that Thundarr's Wookiee-like companion got his name the same way:

The show itself was actually the creation of Steve Gerber, creator of Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck. The name Ookla actually comes from UCLA. Gerber and friend Martin Pasko were having dinner in the Westwood area one night during the time Gerber was writing the bible for the series. Gerber commented to Pasko that he hadn't yet decided upon a name for the Wookiee-like character the network insisted be added to the series, over Gerber's objections. As the two walked past the gate to the UCLA campus, Pasko quipped, "Why don't you call him 'Ucla'?"

Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags

Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags:

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

New Operation to Put Heavily Armed Officers in Subways

The New York Times reports on an New Operation to Put Heavily Armed Officers in Subways — but what I noticed was that the reporter kept referring to M4 carbines as rifles, or even high-powered rifles, and the image file had the name 02machinegun.600.jpg. They're not gun people over there at the Times.

Killing of glamour model-bodyguard stuns Moscow

Killing of glamour model-bodyguard stuns Moscow:

As a glamour model, 29-year-old Loginova often appeared on the covers of Russian magazines, scantily clad. She fronted advertisements for high-profile brands in Russia, like the German carmaker BMW.

But behind the glossy images, Loginova had another profession: She was an experienced bodyguard, trained in martial arts, commanding high prices to protect Russia's wealthy elite. One notable client was Russian boxer Kostya Tszyu.

Having a female bodyguard is more than just a status symbol in Russia. Industry insiders say women bodyguards are not recognizable and, thus, allowed to sit at tables with their clients during dinners and other events — unlike their male peers who are usually forced to wait in the lobby.
[...]
It seems that fearlessness may have gotten her killed. On a busy street in southeastern Moscow on Sunday night, police say they recovered her battered body after she tried to prevent her Porsche Cayenne from being stolen — clinging on to the high-end SUV as it sped away. The vehicle was later found abandoned.

"According to eyewitnesses, an intruder just threw her out of the car," explains Oleg Pavlov, a special police investigator in charge of the investigation.

"She grabbed the door handle, but when the car took off and picked up speed, she let go."

No one has been arrested in connection with the killing.

Russian media have been giving the killing prominent coverage, with witnesses expressing their shock that this kind of crime could happen.

But luxury car theft in Moscow is not uncommon, and Loginova herself was no stranger to it. In her last magazine interview, she described how she foiled another carjacking just four months ago as she parked her car outside a flashy Moscow fashion boutique.

"So while I was closing my car, a guy of 30 years old or slightly older jumped on me," Loginova said. "So I did a jujitsu move — I bent his hand that grabbed mine, and struck him in the face with my elbow. It was a total surprise for him.

"As he was leaning back covering his face, I pulled a pistol from my bag and aimed it at him. He obviously realized that was no joke," she said. "Then a car immediately pulled up nearby, something like a Honda, a dark car, and he jumped into it. And I still stood there with my pistol. I was actually spooked too."

That experience apparently emboldened Loginova to defend her car for a second time.

(Hat tip to Todd.)