What The F**k Is Dana White Fighting For?

What The F**k Is Dana White Fighting For? I'm not sure Erik Hedegaard, writing in Rolling Stone, answers the question, but I still find mainstream-media coverage of mixed martial arts interesting:

The way things are going, Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, may soon be hailed as the greatest sports promoter ever, of all time, bigger even than boxing's Don King, bigger even than pro wrestling's Vince McMahon.

He's taken mixed martial arts, a sport that was essentially moribund seven years ago — the bare-knuckle, anything-goes, kick-'em-in-the-kernels fights were outlawed in 36 states — and turned it into a moneymaking, crowd-frazzling sensation, a new heavyweight pay-per-view box-office champ. He accomplished this by using various business-savvy stratagems and dodges, but in a sense the inside mechanics are beside the point. How he did it really is by the force of his own multifaceted personality. At 38, he is profane, charming, ambitious, cunning, controlling, a whole lot of fun to hang around with, open like a book, closed like a fist. In fighters and fans, he inspires loyalty and fear, admiration and disgust. He has a shaved head. He wears skintight T-shirts. He looks badass, he talks badass, he is badass. In all respects, he has been the exact right guy to bring the UFC back from the dead.

Games Girls Play

Brian Caulfield of Forbes discusses Games Girls Play — that is, the casual video games that adult women play:

Consumers paid $2.25 billion for such games last year, and the demand for titles like "Diner Dash" is growing 20% year-over-year, according to the Casual Gaming Association.

And while casual games appeal to everyone from pre-teens to old men (the world's richest man, Warren Buffet, 77, haunts online bridge parlors while using the handle "T-bone"), women over 35 are the most likely to pay for them; 75% percent of those who pay for casual games are women, and 72% are over 35 years old.

The result: The gaming industry is hustling to remake itself to please these paying customers.

Dungeon Contraband

With Wizards of the Coast due to release the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons on June 6, Klaus Kneale of Forbes discusses Dungeon Contraband:

There have been blog entries about game prototypes, excerpts from the books, interviews with developers and sample adventures. Fans have devoured every morsel. ENWorld.org, a Web site that has covered everything about the release since it was announced August last year, is logging 10 million visits a month.

And fans have been taking notes. Careful notes. Andrew White, a 31-year-old in Calgary, Canada, compiled every rule and statistic mentioned in those tidbits and published his own "4th Edition Pre-Release Rules Compilation" reference. White's project turned into a massive engineering feat itself, going through 12 revisions involving 40 people, and consuming at least 150 hours of White's life. He released an 86-page final version on Thursday. In his spare time, White is working on a doctoral degree in archeology.

Even worse for Hasbro, just before midnight Wednesday, scans of the books appeared online, too. They weren't homebrewed rip-offs like the Chinese editions of Harry Potter — the muttering online is that they were stolen copies of the electronic printing proofs, grabbed when the manuscripts were sent to the printer in March. The clue: Some of the contraband pages have prepress design symbols and a notation that dates the files to 10 days before Wizards announced they had sent the final product off to the printer.

Wizards spokesperson Tolena Thorburn confirmed that the leaked online editions are real. "We are fairly confident that we’ve identified where the leak occurred, and are moving forward on handling it appropriately." The fairly specific nature of the material no doubt left a clear trail to this particular rogue.

Despite the free copies circulating, fans are buzzing on the Web about their plans to buy the books anyway. The purloined copies have even won a few new customers for Wizards: some bloggers who feigned disinterest in the fourth edition now say that the illegal copies have convinced them to buy the new version.

And then there are the slipups. Buy.com shipped out a chunk of the books pre-release. No more than 100 (less than 10% of Buy.com's total preorders for the books) shipped before the error was caught. But the lucky fans who got their copies early have been boasting about their treasure.

Buy.com’s vice president of marketing, Jeff Wisot, says his team is investigating whether there was a miscommunication over the publishing date. "The parties involved have been dealt with and there are consequences for breaking the street date," wrote Scott Rouse, senior brand manager for Dungeons & Dragons, in an online forum.

Trichobatrachus robustus breaks its own bones to produce claws

Trichobatrachus robustus breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog's toe pads, probably when it is threatened:

David Blackburn and colleagues at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, think the gruesome behaviour is a defence mechanism.

The researchers say there are salamanders that force their ribs through their skin to produce protective barbs on demand, but nothing quite like this mechanism has been seen before.

The feature is also found in nine of the 11 frogs belonging to the Astylosternus genus, most of which live in Cameroon.

"Some other frogs have bony spines that project from their wrist, but in those species it appears that the bones grow through the skin rather than pierce it when needed for defence," says Blackburn.

At rest, the claws of T. robustus, found on the hind feet only, are nestled inside a mass of connective tissue. A chunk of collagen forms a bond between the claw's sharp point and a small piece of bone at the tip of the frog's toe.

The other end of the claw is connected to a muscle. Blackburn and his colleagues believe that when the animal is attacked, it contracts this muscle, which pulls the claw downwards. The sharp point then breaks away from the bony tip and cuts through the toe pad, emerging on the underside.

The end result may look like a cat's claw, but the breaking and cutting mechanism is very different and unique among vertebrates. Also unique is the fact that the claw is just bone and does not have an outer coating of keratin like other claws do.

Because Blackburn has only studied dead specimens, he says he does not know what happens when the claw retracts – or even how it retracts. It does not appear to have a muscle to pull it back inside so the team think it may passively slide back into the toe pad when its muscle relaxes.

"Being amphibians, it would not be surprising if some parts of the wound heal and the tissue is regenerated," says Blackburn.

Males of the species, which grows to about 11 centimetres, also produce long hair-like strands of skin and arteries when they breed (see image). It is thought that the "hairs" allow them to take in more oxygen through their skin while they take care of their brood.

In Cameroon, they are roasted and eaten. Hunters use long spears and machetes to kill the frogs, apparently to avoid being hurt by their claws.

Can we assume its claws go snikt! when deployed?

Paul Van Riper's Recommended Reading

Monitor Talent presents a profile for retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper — famous for his role as red team commanders in war games — in which he lists his recommended reading:

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S, Kuhn
• Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, Jeremy Campbell
• The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert A. Simon
• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life, Robert Jervis
• Managing as Designing, Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Fred Collopy
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson
• Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, Peter Checkland
• Intuition At Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better At What You Do, Gary Klein
• Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, John Gaddis
• Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and The Evidence of History, Colin S. Gray

He also lists web-sites:

• ISAAC-EINSTein, An Artificial-Life Approach to Land Combat
• Artificial Life Links
• Systems Dynamics Home Page
• KLI Theory Lab
• Clausewitz Home Page
• The Visual Thesaurus
• The Works of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press

Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency

Roger Trinquier wrote Modern Warfare after the French defeat in Vietnam and just before the final French defeat in Algeria, when terrorism was a new tactic:

The terrorist has become a soldier, like the aviator or the infantryman.

But the aviator flying over a city knows that antiaircraft shells can kill or maim him. The infantryman wounded on the battlefield accepts physical suffering, often for long hours, when he falls between the lines and it is impossible to rescue him. It never occurs to him to complain and to ask, for example, that his enemy renounce the use of the rifle, the shell, or the bomb. If he can, he goes back to a hospital knowing this to be his lot. The soldier, therefore, admits the possibility of physical suffering as part of the job. The risks he runs on the battlefield and the suffering he endures are the price of the glory he receives.

The terrorist claims the same honors while rejecting the same obligations. His kind of organization permits him to escape from the police, his victims cannot defend themselves, and the army cannot use the power of its weapons against him because he hides himself permanently within the midst of a population going about its peaceful pursuits.

But he must be made to realize that, when he is captured, he cannot be treated as an ordinary criminal, nor like a prisoner taken on the battlefield. What the forces of order who have arrested him are seeking is not to punish a crime, for which he is otherwise not personally responsible, but, as in any war, the destruction of the enemy army or its surrender. Therefore he is not asked details about himself or about attacks that he may or may not have committed and that are not of immediate interest, but rather for precise information about his organization. In particular, each man has a superior whom he knows; he will first have to give the name of this person, along with his address, so that it will be possible to proceed with the arrest without delay.

* In France during the Nazi occupation, members of the Resistance violated the rules of warfare. They knew they could not hide behind them, and they were perfectly aware of the risks to which they were exposing themselves. Their glory is to have calmly faced those risks with full knowledge of the consequences.

MIT creates new material for fuel cells

MIT creates new material for fuel cells — which boosts power output by 50 percent:

Like a battery, a fuel cell has three principal parts: two electrodes (a cathode and anode) separated by an electrolyte. Chemical reactions at the electrodes produce an electronic current that can be made to flow through an appliance connected to the battery or fuel cell. The principal difference between the two? Fuel cells get their energy from an external source of hydrogen fuel, while conventional batteries draw from a finite source in a contained system.

The MIT team focused on direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), in which the methanol is directly used as the fuel and reforming of alcohol down to hydrogen is not required. Such a fuel cell is attractive because the only waste products are water and carbon dioxide (the latter produced in small quantities). Also, because methanol is a liquid, it is easier to store and transport than hydrogen gas, and is safer (it won't explode). Methanol also has a high energy density--a little goes a long way, making it especially interesting for portable devices.

The DMFCs currently on the market, however, have limitations. For example, the material currently used for the electrolyte sandwiched between the electrodes is expensive. Even more important: that material, known as Nafion, is permeable to methanol, allowing some of the fuel to seep across the center of the fuel cell. Among other disadvantages, this wastes fuel--and lowers the efficiency of the cell--because the fuel isn't available for the reactions that generate electricity.

Using a relatively new technique known as layer-by-layer assembly, the MIT researchers created an alternative to Nafion. "We were able to tune the structure of [our] film a few nanometers at a time," Hammond said, getting around some of the problems associated with other approaches. The result is a thin film that is two orders of magnitude less permeable to methanol but compares favorably to Nafion in proton conductivity.

To test their creation, the engineers coated a Nafion membrane with the new film and incorporated the whole into a direct methanol fuel cell. The result was an increase in power output of more than 50 percent.

GooTube

Apparently GooTube is making money:

Google drew sneers when it paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in November 2006. Only 63 people worked at this little video distributor in San Bruno, Calif. It had minimal revenue but more clips, bigger buzz and a better user experience than Google.

Sneer no more. YouTube is bigger than ever. The Google people are taking over the place, and they've found the buttons on the cash register — vindication for YouTube's original crew, especially founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Or, rather, partial vindication, since the original managers have been largely replaced by Google apparatchiks.

The three-year-old YouTube site probably crossed a billion views per day worldwide a few months ago, exceeding even the lofty expectations by Google when it made the acquisition. (YouTube will only confirm it does hundreds of millions of views per day.) Thirty-eight percent of the video streamed on the Web now comes from YouTube, according to ComScore. No other player has more than 4%. Google owns the biggest television station on the planet. It will upload 600 years' worth of video this year.

"A studio declining to do business with YouTube would be like a cereal maker not dealing with Wal-Mart," says Bobby Tulsiani, a JupiterResearch analyst.

Google doesn't share numbers, but it appears that YouTube will generate $200 million this year and maybe $350 million the next. It's a mere 1% of Google's sales, but up from a minuscule amount last year. In YouTube's early days the main objective was to get eyeballs. Now it's to get ads. Web video ad spending will climb from $775 million last year to $1.35 billion this year, estimates Emarketer.
[...]
An ad on the YouTube home page, something Chad Hurley experimented with before Google bought YouTube, now costs $175,000 a day, plus a commitment to spend $50,000 more in ads on Google or YouTube.
[...]
Pricing for display advertising next to user-generated content has collapsed. Rates on sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube have fallen 45% since February, to 18 cents per thousand page views, according to digital analytics outfit PubMatic. Most of the momentum now, says Chris B. Allen, director of video innovation at media buyer Starcom, is for ads within full episodes run on the TV networks' sites, such as NBC and Fox's Hulu, ABC.com and CBS.com. It's a format that advertisers understand.

That's why YouTube is pushing studios and networks for professionally produced content like movie trailers and TV clips. It also offers them branded channels, with customized backgrounds and well-selected video. Hundreds of channels are sold to advertisers such as Nestlé, Hanes, 3M, Procter & Gamble and Hewlett-Packard. These go for $200,000 apiece. Last December YouTube opened the program up to individuals, picking up a few thousand more places to run ads. MySpaceTV is building a similar branded arena where professionals can build channels with ads tucked in before, during or after their films roll.

YouTube has done a lot of experimenting with ad formats and found some surprises. Pre-roll video ads prior to the main video cause the audience to click away up to 70% of the time. Better: short banners that pop up from the bottom of the video window. The NBA channel runs rollover Patrón tequila ads that turn into a video how-to for making margaritas. "It's finally a way that advertisers can leverage the massive amount of video streams without the fear of being next to the soccer kid getting kicked in the nuts," says Davis Brewer, lead strategist for emerging channels for media planning firm Spark Communications. People click on those rollover ads 8 times as often as on standard display ads next to the video. The rollover ads are most effective if they appear 15 seconds into the video. Any earlier and people get turned off. When the rollover is run in tandem with a display ad next to the video box, the chance of someone clicking can be 46 times as good.

In March Google rolled out an analytic tool for users and advertisers called Insight that shows a video's daily traffic and demographic stats inside an interactive window copied from Google's stock quote pages. A dynamic map shows creators where their work is popular over time, so a movie studio planning a film opening can decide where to deploy its marketing budget. A rock band can plan its next tour route based on where the fans of its videos live. "They can't believe the data we have," says Hoffner.

Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera

Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera:

The world's rarest rhinoceros has been captured on film by a specially installed camera in the jungles of Java, Indonesia.

But the female rhino, which was accompanied by a calf, promptly charged the camera, sending it flying.

The animals are at severe risk of extinction, with only 60-70 animals left in the wild.

A spokesperson for WWF said the footage provided an unusual glimpse of the rare beasts in their natural habitat.

Rachmat Hariyadi, who leads WWF-Indonesia's project in Java's Ujung Kulon National Park, said the motion-triggered camera "traps" were a useful way to observe the ways in which animals used their habitats, aiding conservation efforts.

But Stephen Hogg, also from WWF, who designed the hidden cameras, said he was puzzled by the rhino's attack.

"The assault on the camera still has us baffled because we specifically use infrared lights as the source of illumination when we designed and built these units so as to not scare animals away when the camera activates," he said.

Javan rhinos are found only in two locations; Ujung Kulong National Park is home to 90% of the total population.

Efforts are underway to create additional Javan rhino breeding groups by translocating a few individuals from Ujung Kulon to another suitable site.

This could help prevent an extinction caused by disease or a natural disaster, conservationists say.

Uncontacted Indian tribe spotted in Brazil

Uncontacted Indian tribe spotted in Brazil:

In this image made available Thursday May 29, 2008, from Survival International, showing 'uncontacted Indians' of the Envira, who have never before had any contact with the outside world, photographed during an overflight in May 2008, as they react to the overflight at their camp in the Terra Indigena Kampa e Isolados do Envira, Acre state, Brazil, close to the border with Peru. 'We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,' said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior.

I can't help but think that Doc Savage already speaks their language...

Truth or Consequences

In Truth or Consequences, Thomas Friedman asks us to imagine a presidential candidate telling us what we really need to do about energy policy:

No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever.

This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today.

We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a “price floor” for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price.

This is pretty obviously begging the question of why we want to conserve gasoline. If gasoline is a precious resource, and we only have so much to go around — in the short or long term — that is presumably reflected in a high price, and people make all kinds of trade-offs to use less gasoline: driving less in the short term and buying smaller cars or moving closer to work in the longer term. If gasoline prices are low, there's little reason to make those trade-offs.

This is a question of resource allocation, not moral rectitude, and making sacrifices in the short term is not always right.

Now, while it makes little sense to tax gasoline because we might run out some day, it does make some sense to use a gasoline tax as a use tax for public roads, or as a crude tax on pollution.

Humans As Climbers

If we look at humans as climbers, we're not half-bad:

A fascinating brief study published in Science (May 16 2008) shows the cost of climbing a meter per unit of body mass is essentially the same over non-human primates and humans (Hs in the figure). The data are all matched for climbing speed. Walking efficiency is also indicated in yellow.

We homo sapiens are pretty efficient climbers, though being the largest of the primates we may be a bit slower at it. On the other hand we are more efficient in walking. The reason for that is we have longer legs per unit of body mass.

Sewer Ice

The ocean environment obviously plays a large role in any seasteading effort — but it's not clear that "sewer ice" will play such a large role:

Methane hydrate is a crystalline solid that consists of methane surrounded by a cage of water molecules. It looks much like water ice. This strange substance, found in vast quantities in permafrost and on the ocean floor, has a fascinating history. Natural hydrates were first found in the 1930s when chlorine hydrate (a similar material with chlorine instead of methane) plugged natural gas pipelines. Most research focused on preventing their formation.

In the 1960s, scientists discovered naturally occuring methane hydrate in Siberian gas reservoirs. Before this period, methane hydrate was thought of as an unusual and unnatural substance that only occured in chem labs and gas pipelines. No one suspected that it was common in nature, let alone in the vast amounts which we currently estimate. Stable at depths greater than 300m, it melts quickly when removed from its natural environment. Because of this, it was not actually seen until 1974, when Soviet scientists successfully recovered nodules from the floor of the Black Sea.

Methane is the byproduct of bacterial breakdown of organic matter (ie "rotting"), which also creates hydrogen sulfide, which our noses recognize as sewer gas. Since organic material constantly falls to the ocean floor, in retrospect it makes sense that bacteria there digest it. On land, methane escapes into the atmosphere, but on the ocean floor, low temperatures and high pressures trap it into sewer ice.

The oceans have been around for quite awhile, and the earth's reserves of this previously unknown substance are staggering. Methane hydrates are conservatively estimated to contain twice as much carbon as all other known fossil fuels, and this discovery means that scientists need to re-think the global carbon cycle. It has naturally been considered as a possible fuel, and a number of governments are digesting this possibility. Fantastic though it sounds, frozen flatulence may fuel the future!

More seriously, this discovery poses some serious worries on the global warming front. Methane is ten times more effective a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and so much of it is trapped in hydrates that it could have a major effect on our climate. This might happen through a dangerous feedback loop. First, some other effect causes a slight warming of the earth, including its oceans. This melts some methane hydrate, releasing methane into the atmosphere. This adds to the greenhouse effect, making temperatures go up more, and the cycle repeats. In fact, Dr. Euan Nisbet of the University of Saskatchewan thinks this effect may have been behind the rapid climate change which followed the last glaciation.

The most recent twist in this strange tale comes from Monash University in Australia. Researchers there have theorized that some unexplained ship sinkings may have been caused by giant bubbles of methane. These bubbles are released occasionally when methane hydrate melts. If one of these bubbles comes up underneath a ship, the ship will briefly lose buoyancy (since its sitting on gas instead of water). Depending on the location of the bubble (experiments suggest that off to one side is the most dangerous), the ship may capsize. In fact, a sunken vessel has been found in the North Sea in the center of a large methane eruption site called the Witches Hole. As if drowning isn't bad enough, imagine your last sensation being the overpowering smell of rotting eggs...

There is a lot of energy stored in the form of hydrates.

Cities and Ambition

Paul Graham discusses Cities and Ambition. I enjoyed this footnote:

How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 3 in DC, 7 in London, 11 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

(Zagat's lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets but I couldn't believe it, so I called to check and in fact they don't. Apparently there's only one restaurant left on the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)

Magic Ink

Bret Victor suggests we should view software as Magic Ink — not a machine, but a medium for visual communication:

The first step toward the information software revolution is widespread recognition of the need for design. It must be universally understood that information software is not a machine, but a medium for visual communication, and both publishers and public must hold it to the same standards that they hold print. People constantly settle for ugly, clunky software, but demand informative, professionally-designed books, newspapers, magazines, and—ironically—brochures, ads, and manuals for that very software. (As brochures have become websites, this duality has veered into absurdity: “Let’s design beautiful software to sell our ugly software!” The wrapper tastes better than the candy.)

I enjoyed this bit of visualization trivia:

Before 1786, authors invariably presented quantitative data as tables of numbers. In this year, an economist named William Playfair published a book called The Commercial and Political Atlas. Remarkable recent efforts have brought this classic back into print, as Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary (2005). In order to illustrate his economic arguments, Playfair single-handedly invented the line graph, the bar graph, and the pie chart, and thereby the entire field of statistical graphics. Within years, his inventions had spread across Europe, transforming the landscape of visual communications and heralding an age of discoveries in data made visible. Today, children take these graphical forms for granted; they seem as obvious and fundamental as written language.

There is quite a bit to the article.

How Linear Programming Began

George Dantzig explains how linear programming began:

Seeing that economists did not have a method of solution, I next decided to try my own luck at finding an algorithm. I owe a great debt to Jerzy Neyman, the leading mathematical statistician of his day, who guided my graduate work at Berkeley. My thesis was on two famous unsolved problems in mathematical statistics which I mistakenly thought were a homework assignment and solved. One of the results, published jointly with Abraham Wald, was on the Neyman-Pearson Lemma. In today’s terminology, this part of my thesis was on the existence of Lagrange multipliers (or dual variables) for a semi-infinite linear program whose variables were bounded between zero and one and satisfied linear constraints expressed in the form of Lebesgue integrals. There was also a linear objective to be extremized.

Luckily the particular geometry used in my thesis was the one associated with the columns of the matrix instead of its rows. This column geometry gave me the insight which led me to believe that the simplex method would be a very efficient solution technique. I earlier had rejected the method when I viewed it in the row geometry because running around the outside edges seemed so unpromising.

I proposed the simplex method in the summer 1947. But it took nearly a year before my colleagues and I in the Pentagon realized just how powerful the method really was. In the meantime, I decided to consult with the great, Johnny von Neumann to see what he could suggest in the way of solution techniques. He was considered by many as the leading mathematician in the world. On October 3, 1947, 1 met him for the first time at the Institute Advanced Study at Princeton.

John von Neumann made a strong impression on everyone. People came to him for help with their problems because of his great insight. In the initial stages of the development of a new field like linear programming, atomic physics, computers, or whatever, his advice proved invaluable. After these fields were developed in greater depth, however, it became more difficult for him to make the same spectacular contributions. I guess everyone has a finite capacity, and Johnny was no exception.

I remember trying to describe to von Neumann (as I would to an ordinary mortal) the Air Force problem. I began with the formulation of the linear programming model in terms of activities and items, etc. He did something which I believe was uncharacteristic of him. “Get to the point,” he snapped at me impatiently. Having at times a somewhat low kindling point, I said to myself, “OK, if he wants a quickie, then that’s what he’ll get.” In under one minute I slapped on the blackboard a geometric and algebraic version of the problem. Von Neumann stood up and said, “Oh that!” Then, for the next hour and a half, he proceeded to give me a lecture on the mathematical theory of linear programs.

At one point, seeing me sitting there with my eyes popping and my mouth open (after all I had searched the literature and found nothing), von Neumann said:

I don’t want you to think I am pulling all this out of my sleeve on the spur of the moment like a magician. I have recently completed a book with Oscar Morgenstern on the theory of games. What I am doing is conjecturing that the two problems are equivalent. The theory that I am outlining is an analogue to the one we have developed for games.

Google, Chevron Build Mirrors in Desert to Beat Coal With Solar

The headline is upbeat — Google, Chevron Build Mirrors in Desert to Beat Coal With Solar — but here's an important bit of solar-thermal reality that intrudes:

Development slowed when Congress eliminated tax credits for alternative energy in the early 1990s. Laws put in place in 2005 give solar investors a 30 percent tax credit.

Lots of things start to look good with "subsidy goggles" on.

As gas goes up, driving goes down

As gas goes up, driving goes down — which should surprise no one:

Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less — that's 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT's Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it "the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history." Records have been kept since 1942.
[...]
According to AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas rose to a record $3.936. That compares with an average price per gallon of $3.23 last Memorial Day.

That's a 22-percent increase in gas prices leading to a 4.3-percent decrease in miles driven — which might imply a slightly more than 4.3-percent decrease in gas consumption.

Sure enough, the price elasticity of gasoline demand is relatively inelastic, at 0.2. But we already knew that.

Cost of converting entire U.S. to electric cars? Zero.

Philip Greenspun runs an interesting little thought experiment. Cost of converting entire U.S. to electric cars? Zero.

• total oil consumption in the U.S.: 21 million barrels every day (CIA Factbook)
• cost per barrel: $130
• days in year: 365
• total spent per year: $1 trillion
• percentage of oil consumed by passenger cars: 40
• total spent per year on oil for passenger cars: $400 billion
• at 5% interest, how much we could we borrow and pay $400 billion every year in interest: $8 trillion
• number of registered cars in the U.S.: 250 million (Wikipedia)
• cost of a new electric car, if mass-produced: $20,000
• value of a used car, if exported to Latin America or China: $5,000
• cost to upgrade average existing American car to a brand-new electric car: $15,000
• number that could be converted for $8 trillion: more than 500 million cars (i.e., twice as many as we have now)

Aztec Chinampas

Wayne C. Gramlich, Patri Friedman, and Andrew Houser open their Practical Guide to Seasteading with a review of previous seasteading-like efforts, including the Aztec Chinampas rafts:

The floating gardens of the Aztecs of Central America, a nomadic tribe, they were driven onto the marshy shore of Lake Tenochtitlan, located in the great central valley of what is now Mexico. Roughly treated by their more powerful neighbors, denied any arable land, the Aztecs survived by exercising remarkable powers of invention. Since they had no land on which to grow crops, they determined to manufacture it from the materials at hand.

In what must have been a long process of trial and error, they learned how to build rafts of rushes and reeds, lashing the stalks together with tough roots. Then they dredged up soil from the shallow bottom of the lake, piling it on the rafts. Because the soil came from the lake bottom, it was rich in a variety of organic debris, decomposing material that released large amounts of nutrients. These rafts, called Chinampas, had abundant crops of vegetables, flowers, and even trees planted on them. The roots of these plants, pushing down towards a source of water, would grow though the floor of the raft and down into the water.

These rafts, which never sank, were sometimes joined together to form floating islands as much as two hundred feet long. Some Chinampas even had a hut for a resident gardener. On market days, the gardener might pole his raft close to a market place, picking and handing over vegetables or flowers as shoppers purchased them.

By force of arms, the Aztecs defeated and conquered the peoples who had once oppressed them. Despite the great size their empire finally assumed, they never abondoned the site on the lake. Their once crude village became a huge, magnificent city and the rafts, invented in a gamble to stave off poverty, proliferated to keep pace with the demands of the capital city of Central Mexico.

Upon arriving to the New World in search of gold, the sight of these islands astonished the conquering Spainards. Indeed, the spectacle of an entire grove of trees seemingly suspended on the water must have been perplexing, even frightening in those 16th century days of the Spanish conquest.

Needful Provision, Inc.

David A. Nuttle is a former "GS-14 CIA Special Operations Officer" — which sounds impressive — who has gone on to perform humanitarian aid in dangerous places around the world.

He wrote the Volunteer Safety & Survival Reference as "a single, quick reference to the essential information needed to help volunteers survive natural and man-made disasters of all types":

In the decades following initial publication, the earlier 1979 handbook was used by police and military personnel, Boy Scouts, Peace Corps volunteers, and volunteers for charities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations). From the many testimonials of these users, the safety and survival information herein provided helps to save lives. At the same time, this safety and survival guide acted to sustain volunteer operations in high threat areas.

Materials added to this handbook were designed to provide known safety and survival techniques for volunteers working in overseas areas with extensive armed conflict and related hazards. The need for a such information has been emphasized by increased numbers of volunteers being kidnapped and killed in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other nations with high rates of conflict. Moreover, most charities and NGOs seldom effectively train their volunteers in safety and/or survival techniques.

Airship Dreams

The folks over at Dark Roasted Blend lead off their piece on Airship Dreams with the Air Ray "flying structure" — a concept airship that mimics the manta-ray:







Less sci-fi is the SkyFreighter from Millennium Airship, which is designed to haul 500 tons of cargo — including large machinery and equipment intact — at 100 mph for 6000 miles:




Of course, airships scream retro-future, and nothing is more retro-future than an atomic airship:

The best way to understand government

The best way to understand government, Mencius Modlbug claims, is to assume everything you know about it is nonsense:

Growing up in the modern Western world, you learned that in all pre-modern, non-Western societies, everyone — even the smartest and most knowledgeable — put their faith in theories of government now known to be nonsensical. The divine right of kings. The apostolic succession of the Pope. The Marxist evolution of history. Etc.

Why did such nonsense prosper? It outcompeted its non-nonsensical competitors. When can nonsense outcompete truth? When political power is on its side. Call it power distortion.

And why, dear open-minded progressive, do you think your theory of government, which you did not invent yourself but received in the usual way, is anything but yet another artifact of power distortion, adapted to retain your rulers in their comfortable seats?

Probably because there is a categorical difference between modern liberal democracy and the assorted monarchies, empires, dictatorships, theocracies, etc, which practiced the black art of official mind control. The priests of Amun tolerated no dissent. They flayed the heretic, the back-talker, the smartmouth, and stretched his still-living flesh to crack and writhe in the hot African wind, till the hyena or the crocodile came along to finish him. But now they are all pushing up the asphodels, and Google hasn't even thought about deleting my blog.

You think of freedom of thought as a universal antibiotic, a sure cure for power distortion. It certainly allows me to post my seditious blasphemies — for now.

But as a progressive, your beliefs are the beliefs of the great, the good and the fashionable. And as we've seen over the past few weeks, power can corrupt the mind in two ways: by coercion, or by seduction. The Whig, the liberal, the radical, the dissenter, the progressive, protests the former with great umbrage — especially when his ox is being gored. Over the past four centuries, he has ridden the latter to power. He is Boromir. He has worn the Ring and worked it. And it, of course, has worked him.

Today's late Whiggery, gray and huge and soft, lounges louche on its throne, fastened tight to the great plinth of public opinion that it hacked from the rock of history with its own forked and twisted tongue. The mass mind, educated to perfection, is sure. It has two alternatives: the Boromir-thing, or Hitler. And who wants Hitler? Resistance is more than useless. It is ridiculous. The Whig cackles, and knocks back another magnum of Mumm's.

And a few small rats wear out our incisors on the stone. Today we'll learn the real principles of government, which have spent the last four centuries sunk under a Serbonian bog of meretricious liberalism.

Why bother to learn "the real principles" of government though?

The only defense I can offer is Vaclav Havel's idea of "living in truth." As a fellow cog in the global public supermind, you are bombarded constantly and from every direction with the progressive theory of government, with which all humans who are not ignorant, evil or both must agree by definition, and which makes about as much sense as the Holy Trinity. If you are ready to be the nail that sticks up and is hammered down, you can be a "conservative," which ties up a few of the loose ends, and unties others. It also makes you a social pariah, unless most of your neighbors are named "Earl."

From there, Mencius reiterates his thoughts on government, promoting what he cutely calls neocameralism — a term that made little sense to me until I read a bit about paleocameralism, which was the notion that the state should promote the collective prosperity in order to maximize its tax revenue, or, more accurately, its profit. It was also tied to some backward protectionist ideas, including the goal of autarky and immunity to trade wars.

Evernote: Software to help you remember everything, forever

Farhad Manjoo writes about Evernote, which he describes as software to help you remember everything, forever:

If you ever have the pleasure of meeting the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Phil Libin, don't be alarmed — or offended — when he asks you to pose for a photograph. And when you hand Libin your business card, expect him to take a picture of that, too. Libin might also snap shots of signs and placards around your office, billboards and movie posters he passes on the street, the labels of wine and sake bottles he encounters at restaurants, and untold other scraps that pass through his hands during the course of a day.

Libin is a big, friendly, mustachioed fellow, and though there's a certain compulsion to the photographing thing, he isn't actually crazy. He's simply an ardent proselytizer of his product. Libin is the CEO of Evernote, a software company that's building what has been called "a backup for your brain."

All of Libin's photographs — that shot of you, your office, the movie posters and the wine labels and the random notes — fly into his Evernote account. There, the company's servers extract meaning from the image data, rendering Libin's memories searchable.

When he wants to recall the cut of your jib, the name of the sake he ordered last week, the flight number for his recent trip to Vegas, or anything else, Libin can scan his Evernote account by date or keyword. If he searches on "salon writer," for instance, he'll come up with my business card, which includes those words. Because Libin can do this anywhere — from his computer or his mobile phone — the software has become, for him, a kind of Google for the real world.

Evernote is a forgetter's dream, but the tool isn't only for those of us gone mushy in the brain. In the same way that GPS forever changed our relationship to physical spaces, the permanent, constant archiving of both the monumental and the mundane in life will surely alter how each of us navigates the social realm. During a recent interview, I asked Libin whom he considers his target market. In the mode of a TV pitchman, he answered, "Everyone wants a better memory." And yet this makes sense: Everyone forgets, and Evernote makes it so you never have to.

The quest for what Libin calls a "human memory extension" is at least a few decades old. In 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush described a theoretical machine he called the "memex" (for "memory extender"), "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." More recently, Gordon Bell, one of the inventors of the Internet, has been obsessively archiving his life as part of a research project for Microsoft.

Evernote combines several recent tech innovations — digital photography, ubiquitous networking, cheap storage and powerful image processing — to make Gordon Bell's archiving ways possible for ordinary people.

The service runs on a desktop program that works on both Macs and PCs, as well as a Web client for mobile phones (souped-up mobiles with good Web access work best).

The Sky Is Falling

The Sky Is Falling, as it always has, but far more chunks may hit the earth than we realized:

Breakthrough ideas have a way of seeming obvious in retro­spect, and about a decade ago, a Columbia University geophysicist named Dallas Abbott had a breakthrough idea. She had been pondering the craters left by comets and asteroids that smashed into Earth. Geologists had counted them and concluded that space strikes are rare events and had occurred mainly during the era of primordial mists. But, Abbott realized, this deduction was based on the number of craters found on land—and because 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water, wouldn’t most space objects hit the sea? So she began searching for underwater craters caused by impacts rather than by other forces, such as volcanoes. What she has found is spine-chilling: evidence that several enormous asteroids or comets have slammed into our planet quite recently, in geologic terms. If Abbott is right, then you may be here today, reading this magazine, only because by sheer chance those objects struck the ocean rather than land.

Abbott believes that a space object about 300 meters in diameter hit the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Australia, in 536 A.D. An object that size, striking at up to 50,000 miles per hour, could release as much energy as 1,000 nuclear bombs. Debris, dust, and gases thrown into the atmosphere by the impact would have blocked sunlight, temporarily cooling the planet—and indeed, contemporaneous accounts describe dim skies, cold summers, and poor harvests in 536 and 537. “A most dread portent took place,” the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote of 536; the sun “gave forth its light without brightness.” Frost reportedly covered China in the summertime. Still, the harm was mitigated by the ocean impact. When a space object strikes land, it kicks up more dust and debris, increasing the global-cooling effect; at the same time, the combination of shock waves and extreme heating at the point of impact generates nitric and nitrous acids, producing rain as corrosive as battery acid. If the Gulf of Carpentaria object were to strike Miami today, most of the city would be leveled, and the atmospheric effects could trigger crop failures around the world.

What’s more, the Gulf of Carpentaria object was a skipping stone compared with an object that Abbott thinks whammed into the Indian Ocean near Madagascar some 4,800 years ago, or about 2,800 B.C. Researchers generally assume that a space object a kilometer or more across would cause significant global harm: widespread destruction, severe acid rain, and dust storms that would darken the world’s skies for decades. The object that hit the Indian Ocean was three to five kilometers across, Abbott believes, and caused a tsunami in the Pacific 600 feet high—many times higher than the 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. Ancient texts such as Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh support her conjecture, describing an unspeakable planetary flood in roughly the same time period. If the Indian Ocean object were to hit the sea now, many of the world’s coastal cities could be flattened. If it were to hit land, much of a continent would be leveled; years of winter and mass starvation would ensue.

At the start of her research, which has sparked much debate among specialists, Abbott reasoned that if colossal asteroids or comets strike the sea with about the same frequency as they strike land, then given the number of known land craters, perhaps 100 large impact craters might lie beneath the oceans. In less than a decade of searching, she and a few colleagues have already found what appear to be 14 large underwater impact sites. That they’ve found so many so rapidly is hardly reassuring.

Other scientists are making equally unsettling discoveries. Only in the past few decades have astronomers begun to search the nearby skies for objects such as asteroids and comets (for convenience, let’s call them “space rocks”). What they are finding suggests that near-Earth space rocks are more numerous than was once thought, and that their orbits may not be as stable as has been assumed. There is also reason to think that space rocks may not even need to reach Earth’s surface to cause cataclysmic damage. Our solar system appears to be a far more dangerous place than was previously believed.
[...]
A generation ago, the standard assumption was that a dangerous object would strike Earth perhaps once in a million years. By the mid-1990s, researchers began to say that the threat was greater: perhaps a strike every 300,000 years. This winter, I asked William Ailor, an asteroid specialist at The Aerospace Corporation, a think tank for the Air Force, what he thought the risk was. Ailor’s answer: a one-in-10 chance per century of a dangerous space-object strike.

I can't help but think of Lucifer's Hammer and the challenge of bootstrapping society.

How to really change your kid's behavior

Alan E. Kazdin explains how to really change your kid's behavior — because yelling doesn't work, and neither does quietly explaining why what they're doing is wrong:

You begin by deciding what you want the child to do, the positive opposite of whatever behavior you want to stop. The best way to get rid of unwanted behavior is to train a desirable one to replace it. So turn "I want him to stop having tantrums" into "I want him to stay calm and not to raise his voice when I say no to him."

Then you tell the child exactly what you would like him to do. Don't confuse improving his behavior with improving his moral understanding; just make clear what behavior you're looking for and when it's appropriate, and don't muddy the waters by getting into why he should do it. "When you get mad at your sister, I want you to use words or come tell me about it or just get away from her. No matter what, I want you to keep your hands to yourself."

Whenever you see the child do what you would like, or even do something that's a step in the right direction, you not only pay attention to that behavior, but you praise it in specific, effusive terms. "You were angry at me, but you just used words. You didn't hit or kick, and that's great!" Add a smile or a touch — a hug, a kiss, a pat on the shoulder. Verbal praise grows more effective when augmented via another sense.

China: Why Western B-Schools Are Leaving

China: Why Western B-Schools Are Leaving:

All foreign schools have to collaborate with a Chinese university and contend with the local education authority and the Education Ministry, which exercise tight control over joint ventures. But the biggest problem is that relatively few Chinese have the requisite language skills to handle an all-English curriculum. And with the cost of these programs averaging $50,000, companies send only those with real potential. "I've done the math several different ways, and I always get the same result: It's a really small market," says Patrick Moreton, managing director of the program offered by Fudan University and the Olin School of Business of Washington University in St. Louis, one of the more successful ventures. The five top programs in Shanghai together have only 230 students enrolled.

HyperCard: What Could Have Been

Leander Kahney talks to Bill Atkinson, the programming genius behind MacPaint and much of the original Macintosh operating system, about HyperCard: What Could Have Been:

Atkinson, now a successful nature photographer, created a string of groundbreaking applications during a long career at Apple.

But he feels that one of his greatest achievements, the HyperCard multimedia programming system, failed to live up to its potential.

HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking "cards" arranged into "stacks." Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk.

The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he'd realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people's machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser.

"I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard," he said from his studio in Menlo Park, California. "I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser."

HyperCard was conceived and created in the 1980s, almost a decade before the explosion of the Internet.

"I thought everyone connected was a pipe dream," he said. "Boy, was I wrong. I missed that one."

Atkinson recalled engineers at Apple drawing network schematics in the form of a bunch of boxes linked together. Sun engineers, however, first drew the network's backbone and then hung boxes off of it. It's a critical difference, and he feels it hindered him.

"If I thought more globally, I would have envisioned (HyperCard) in that way," he said. "You don't transfer someone's website to your hard drive to look at it. You browse it piecemeal.... It's much more powerful than a stack of cards on your hard drive.

"With a 100-year perspective, the real value of the personal computer is not spreadsheets, word processors or even desktop publishing," he added. "It's the Web."

US Retail Gasoline Priced in Gold

As Nick Szabo has pointed out, if you look at US Retail Gasoline Priced in Gold, it hasn't changed in price much at all.

How Are Humans Unique?

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, explains how humans are unique:

[The human 2-year-olds] performed about the same as the apes on the tests that measured how well they understood the physical world of space, quantities and causality. The children performed better only on tests that measured social skills: social learning, communicating and reading the intentions of others.

But such social gifts make all the difference. Imagine a child born alone on a desert island and somehow magically kept alive. What would this child’s cognitive skills look like as an adult — with no one to teach her, no one to imitate, no pre-existing tools, no spoken or written language? She would certainly possess basic skills for dealing with the physical world, but they would not be particularly impressive. She would not invent for herself English, or Arabic numerals, or metal knives, or money. These are the products of collective cognition; they were created by human beings, in effect, putting their heads together.

When you look at apes and children in situations requiring them to put their heads together, a subtle but significant difference emerges. We have observed that children, but not chimpanzees, expect and even demand that others who have committed themselves to a joint activity stay involved and not shirk their duties. When children want to opt out of an activity, they recognize the existence of an obligation to help the group — they know that they must, in their own way, “take leave” to make amends. Humans structure their collaborative actions with joint goals and shared commitments.

Another subtle but crucial difference can be seen in communication. The great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans — communicate almost exclusively for the purpose of getting others to do what they want. Human infants, in addition, gesture and talk in order to share information with others — they want to be helpful. They also share their emotions and attitudes freely — as when an infant points to a passing bird for its mother and squeals with glee. This unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively. The free sharing of information also creates the possibility of pedagogy — in which adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this information with confidence. Our nearest primate relatives do not teach and learn in this manner.

Finally, human infants, but not chimpanzees, put their heads together in pretense. This seemingly useless play activity is in fact a first baby step toward the creation of distinctively human social institutions. In social institutions, participants typically endow someone or something with special powers and obligations; they create roles like president or teacher or wife. Presidents and teachers and wives operate with special powers and obligations because, and only because, we all believe and act as if they fill these roles and have these powers. Two young children pretending together that a stick is a horse have thus taken their first step on the road not just to Oz but also toward inhabiting human institutional reality.

Cat turns into woman in Nigeria

I don't know the first thing about the Nigerian Tribune, but if it is a reputable paper in Nigeria, well, I just don't know what to say. Really, I couldn't make this up. Cat turns into woman in P/Harcourt - 5 killed as cultists clash:

What could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway.

Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though.

According to a source who witnessed what happened, the cat-woman said she and the two other cat-fellows had travelled from Abuja to Port Harcourt to kill three people. “The woman said they came to Port Harcourt from Abuja and that they came to kill three people. She said they had succeeded in killing two people, but the third person, whom I guess might be a pastor, was difficult for them and that they were preparing to go back to Abuja,” said the source.

Another witness, who gave his name as James, said the woman started faking when she saw that many people were gathering around her. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. I saw a woman lying on the road instead of a cat. Blood did not come out of her body at that time. When people gathered and started asking her questions, she pretended that she did not know what had happened," he said.

When the Nigerian Tribune got to the scene of the incident near Garrison Junction, the cat-woman was seen sitting on the ground with blood all over her body. The right side of her face had a deep cut from what was gathered to be from a cutlass.
She was later taken to a hospital for medical attention. It took the intervention of policemen to prevent the mob from killing her.

When reached for information from the police, the Public Relations Officer of the Rivers State police command, Mrs. Rita Inoma-Abbey, said she had been taken to the hospital.

“She has been taken to Teme Clinic. Police will still be guarding her so that she will not disappear,” he said. In another development, at least five people have been confirmed dead while four others were said to be receiving medical treatment following a suspected cult clash in Aluu, one of the host communities of the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

Nigerian Tribune gathered from sources around UNIPORT that the clash, which led to the loss of lives and injury to others, was between two cult groups; Vikings and Black Axe Confraternity, a spill over of the struggle between the two cult groups on the RSUST campus, Port Harcourt.

There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency

There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency, Mencius points out:

That is, there has never been any successful movement employing the tactics of guerrilla or "urban guerrilla" (or "terrorist") war, in which the guerrilla forces were to the political right of the government forces. To some extent you can classify Franco in Spain as a successful right-wing rebel, but his forces were more organized and disciplined than the government's — Franquismo was a coup that turned into a rebellion, and it succeeded in the end only because, for unusual reasons, England and the US declined to intervene against it.

For example, if oppression and injustice really are the cause of insurgent movements, why was there never anything even close to an insurgency in any of the Soviet-bloc states? Excepting, of course, Afghanistan — a rather suspicious exception. You may be a progressive, but you can't be such a progressive that you believe there was no such thing as Communist oppression. Yet it never spawned any kind of violent reaction. What up with that, dog?

The obvious answer is just Defoe's. "When they had the Power in their hands, those Graces were strangers in their gates." The cause of revolutionary violence is not oppression. The cause of revolutionary violence is weak government. If people avoid revolting against strong governments, it is because they are not stupid, and they know they will lose. There is one and only one way to defeat an insurgency, which is the same way to defeat any movement — make it clear that it has no chance of winning, and no one involved in it will gain by continuing to fight.

I mean, think about it. You hear that in country X, the government is fighting against an insurgency. You know nothing else. Which side would you bet on? The government, of course. Because it is stronger by definition — it has more men and more guns. If it didn't, it wouldn't be the government.

So insurgency in the modern age is not what it appears to be. It is an illusion constructed for a political audience. If Fisher is right, it was not the Continental Army that prevailed in 1783, but the alliance of the Continental Army and the British Whigs. Together they produced a new Whig republic to replace the old one that had collapsed with Cromwell's death. Neither could conceivably have achieved this mission alone.

Insurgency, including what we now call "terrorism," is thus a kind of theater. Guerrilla theater, you might say. It exists as an adjunct to democratic politics, and could not exist without it. (I exclude partisan campaigns of the Peninsular War type, in which the guerrillas are an adjunct to a war proper.)

The goal of an insurgency is simply to demonstrate that the violence will continue until the political demands of its supporters are met. The military arm produces the violence. The political arm explains, generally while deploring the violence, that the violence can be stopped by meeting the demands — and only by meeting the demands.

What's so beautiful about this design, at least from the Devil's perspective, is that it requires no coordination at all. It is completely distributed. There is no "command and control." It often arouses suspicion when politicians and terrorists are good friends. With the insurgency design, both can benefit from each others' actions, without any incriminating connections. They do not even need to think of the effort as a cooperation.

Insurgents and politicians need not even share a value system. There is no reason at all, for example, to think that Ayman al-Zawahiri shares any values with American progressives. I have a fair idea of the kind of government that Sheikh al-Zawahiri would create if he had his druthers. I can certainly say the same for progressives. They have nothing at all to do with each other — regardless of anyone's middle name.

Yet when Sheikh al-Zawahiri attributed the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections to the mujahedeen, he was objectively right. The Democrats won because their prediction that Iraq would become a quagmire for the US military (which everyone and his dog knows is a Republican outfit) turned out to be true. Without the mujahedeen, who would have turned Iraq into a quagmire? Space aliens?

To make a proper feedback loop, the efforts of the politicians must assist the insurgents, and the efforts of the insurgents must assist the politicians. The al-Zawahiri effect — which is not exactly a unique case — is a good example of the latter. The former is provided by a tendency in Whig politics that we can call antimilitarism.

Antimilitarism assists the "armed struggle" in the most obvious way: by opposing its opponents. All things being equal, any professional military force will defeat its nonprofessional opponent, just as an NBA team will defeat the women's junior varsity. The effect of antimilitarism is to adjust the political and military playing field until the insurgents have an equal, or even greater, chance of victory.

Wars in which antimilitarism plays an important role are often described as "asymmetric." The term is a misnomer. A real "asymmetric" war would be a conflict in which one side was much stronger than the other. For obvious reasons, this is a rara avis. A modern asymmetric war is one in which one side's strength is primarily military, and the other's is primarily political. Of course this does not work unless the political and military sides are at least nominally parts of the same government, which means that all asymmetric wars are civil — although they may be fought by foreign soldiers on foreign territory.

How does antimilitarism do its thing? As always in war, in any way it can. In the case of Lord Howe we see what looks very much like deliberate military incompetence. Military mismanagement may occur at the level of military leadership, as in the case of Lord Howe, or in civil-military relations, as with McNamara. The military may win the war and its civilian masters may then simply surrender, as in the case of French Algeria.

The most popular approach today, however, is to alter the rules of war. War is brutal. If you were a space alien, you might expect a person opposed to this brutality to ameliorate it, or at least attempt to, by: (a) deciding to support whichever side is the least brutal; (b) promoting rules of war which minimize the incentive for brutal conduct; and (c) encouraging the war to end as quickly as possible with a decisive and final result.

Modern progressivism does not resemble any of these actions. In fact, it resembles their polar opposite. It is certainly motivated by opposition to brutality, but the actions are not calculated to achieve the effects. In a word, it is antimilitarism.

For example, the modern US military has by far the highest lawyer-to-soldier ratio in any military force in history. It requests legal opinions as a routine aspect of even minor attacks. It is by no means averse to trying its own soldiers for judgment calls made in the heat of battle, a practice that would strike Lord Howe as completely insane. (Here is a personal narrative of the consequences.) Meanwhile, its enemies relish the most barbaric tortures. And which side does the progressive prefer? Or rather, which side do his objective actions favor?

Adjusting the rules of war in this way is an excellent strategy for the 21st-century antimilitarist. He does not have to actually express support for the insurgents, as his crude predecessors of the 1960s did. (As Tom Hayden put it, "We are all Viet Cong now.") Today anyone who can click a mouse can learn that the NLF was the NVA and the NVA were cold-blooded killers, but this knowledge was controversial and hard-to-obtain at the time. The people who knew it were not, in general, the smart ones. "We are all al-Qaeda now" simply does not compute, and you don't hear it. But nor do you need to.

An arbitrary level of antimilitarism can be achieved simply by converging military tactics with judicial and police procedure. Suppose, for example, Britain was invaded by the Bolivian army, in a stunning seaborne coup. Who would win? Probably not the Bolivians, which is why they don't try it.

But suppose that the Bolivian soldiers have the full protection of British law. The only way to detain them is to arrest them, and they must be charged with an actual crime on reasonable suspicion of having committed it. Being a Bolivian in Britain is not a crime. You cannot, of course, shoot them, at least not without a trial and a full appeal process. Any sort of indiscriminate massacre, as via artillery, airstrikes, etc, is of course out of the question. Etc.

So Britain becomes a province of Bolivia. War is always uncertain, but the Bolivians certainly ought to give it a shot. What do they have to lose? A few soldiers, who might have to spend a little time in a British jail. Not exactly the Black Hole of Calcutta. So why not?

And this is how antimilitarism produces war. War is horrible, and no one is willing to fight in it unless they have a chance of winning. Antimilitarism gives the insurgents that chance. And this is the other half of the feedback loop.