Where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles?

Where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles we teach our high school and college students about WWII? Pretty much nowhere. And yet it decided the course of the war:

“I remember well how, in the spring and summer of 1939, my curiosity was gripped by short newspaper accounts of an undeclared war that was raging between the Japanese and Soviet armies on a desolate stretch of disputed frontier lying between the client states of Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia.”

– Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan

That battle, Nomonhan or Khalkhin Gol, depending on your perspective, was a watershed in the global conflict that rivaled its contemporary event, the invasion of Poland, in its significance:

“It is generally agreed that, despite IJA silence on the subject, the Japanese decision in 1941 to transfer strategic emphasis to the south, involving war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, stemmed in part from the Kwantung Army’s failure against the Russians in 1939.”

– Ibid

In large part. Had the Japanese succeeded agaisnt Zhukov and joined the Nazis in a two front war against the Russians, the Second Front would have been a disaster for Stalin. Had the Japanese not moved against Pearl Harbor in 1941, war with the US would have been at least delayed, and Roosevelt would have needed some other pretext to come to beleaguered Britain’s aid in its darkest and finest hour.

Failure to understand that conflict and the lessons it taught about the IJA by people who should have taken a much more professional interest led to much needless bloodshed on the part of the British and American military in the Pacific War. The defeat of the Kwantung army by Zhukov (a name that should have been well noted by Americans and Germans alike in 1939), was the primary event that turned the Japanese on a collision course with the US.

Yet where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles we teach our high school and college students about WWII? Pretty much nowhere. Apropos another conversation on this blog, it seems that the professional military historians outside academia take the study of this battle a little more seriously.

(I've mentioned Khalkhin Gol before.)

Quantum of Solace Teaser Trailer

The new Quantum of Solace teaser trailer is out:



As I mentioned before, the odd title comes from a story by Bond creator Ian Fleming that appears in the collection For Your Eyes Only — but the original is not a story about Bond; it's a story told to Bond. Fleming saw it as a way to write a story in the style of W Somerset Maugham — and to see it published. The movie screenplay is not an adaptation of that story but a continuation of Casino Royale.

Public schools aren't designed to be bad

Public schools aren't designed to be bad, Paul Graham notes; they just seem that way:

There is an idea floating around that public schools are deliberately designed to turn out brainless conformists. I don't believe this. I think public schools are just what you get by default. If you build a giant building out in the suburbs and lock the kids in it during weekdays in the care of a few overworked and mostly uninspired adults, you'll get brainless conformists. You don't need to posit a conspiracy.

I think nearly everything that's wrong in schools can be explained by the lack of any external force pushing them to be good. They don't compete with one another, except in sports (at which they do become good). Parents, though they may choose where to live based on the quality of the schools, never presume to demand more of a given school. College admissions departments, instead of demanding more of high schools, actively compensate for their flaws; they expect less from students from inferior schools, and this is only fair. Standardized tests are explicitly (though unsuccessfully) designed to be a test of aptitude rather than preparation.

Form follows function. Everything evolves into a shape dictated by the demands placed on it. And no one demands more of schools than that they keep kids off the streets till they're old enough for college. So that's what they do. At my school, it was easy not to learn anything, but hard to get out of the building without getting caught.

Accidental fungus leads to promising cancer drug

Accidental fungus leads to promising cancer drug — after some polymers are added:

The drug was known experimentally as TNP-470, and was originally isolated from a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus fresenius.

Harvards's Donald Ingber discovered the fungus by accident while trying to grow endothelial cells — the cells that line blood vessels. The mold affected the cells in a way known to prevent the growth of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries.

Ingber and Folkman developed TNP-470 with the help of Takeda Chemical Industries in Japan in 1990.

But the drug affected the brain, causing depression, dizziness and other side-effects. It also did not stay in the body long and required constant infusions. The lab dropped it.

Efforts to improve it did not work well. Then Benny and colleagues tried nanotechnology, attaching two "pom-pom"-shaped polymers to TNP-470, protecting it from stomach acid.

In mice, the altered drug, now named lodamin, went straight to tumor cells and helped suppress melanoma and lung cancer, with no apparent side effects, Benny said.

All untreated mice had fluid in the abdominal cavity, and enlarged livers covered with tumors. Mice treated with lodamin had normal-looking livers and spleens, the researchers said.

Twenty days after being injected with cancer cells, four out of seven untreated mice had died, while all treated mice were still alive, Benny's team reported.

Americans love a winner

Steve Sailer notes that, as Patton said, Americans love a winner — and don't care who was right:

The Anti-Federalists would write, "If the Constitution is ratified,the federal government will grab the power to do X [or Y, or Z]." And Madison, Hamilton, or Jay would answer back, "Oh, no, that would never happen in a million years. It explicitly says right here in Article Whatever that only the states can do that."

But the funny thing is, Bailyn's long list of about a dozen or more things the Anti-Federalists warned would happen if the Constitution were ratified ... they have all happened. They didn't all happen right away. Many took until the Civil War, or the New Deal, or the Warren Court, or whatever. Still, when it comes to making long-run accurate predictions, the despised Anti-Federalists were right and the sainted Federalists were wrong.

But, nobody cares. People care about who won, not who turned out to be right.

(Hat tip to Michael Blowhard.)

Devo is suing McDonald's

Post-punk pioneer band Devo is suing McDonald's over its New Wave Nigel Happy Meal doll, which sports the band's signature red flower pot hat:

In April the fast food chain released a series of American Idol Happy Meal toys in the US based on a range of music genres, including Disco Dave, Country Clay, Rockin' Riley and Soulful Selma.

Devo's complaint relates to New Wave Nigel, a toy kitted out in an orange jumpsuit, pink shades, and Devo's "energy dome" hat.
[...]
"This New Wave Nigel doll that they've created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed, and it's copyrighted and trademarked.

"They didn't ask us anything. Plus, we don't like McDonald's, and we don't like American Idol, so we're doubly offended."

(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)

Go Home, Bill

Cringely says, Go Home, Bill:

The last two executive actions on the part of Bill Gates that had singular effects on the future of Microsoft were: 1) his 1995 Think Week that resulted in Microsoft shifting course to flow with the "Internet Tidal Wave," ultimately destroying Netscape, and; 2) his 1988 decision to back Jeff Raikes' proposal to bundle most of Microsoft's productivity applications into what they called Microsoft Office, which effectively destroyed all Microsoft's competitors for shrink-wrapped applications. The first action was that of a strong chief executive operating at the very top of his game while the second was that of a major shareholder who was willing to accept lower earnings in the short term for the long-term success of his investment.

These were radical and dynamic positions to take that resulted in creating thousands of millionaires in the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth since OPEC. But they were also 13 and 20 years ago, respectively. If Gates took another Think Week and determined Microsoft's future lay in baked goods or virtualization, could he turn the entire company toward one or both of those product directions today? I don't think so.

No one person can control Microsoft today, which has been obvious to Gates for at least eight years, since that's how long ago he put Steve Ballmer in the CEO job. For at least eight years, then, these guys have known that their jobs are not so much to steer the Microsoft ship as to try and keep it from drifting onto the rocks. That's the way it is with huge and successful companies. At best you can trim the sails, because to come about (to significantly shift direction) is just too dangerous for the money machine.

The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man

Susan Casey calls Don Wildman The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man — although fittest is probably more accurate:

Wildman himself is a world-class athlete in several sports. In recent years, he has competed in the Ironman Triathlon nine times, the three-thousand-mile Race Across America bike race, the Aspen downhill ski race, and the New York and L.A. marathons. In the sailing world, Wildman made history by winning all three of the Chicago Yacht Club's famed Mackinac races in one season. He snowboards the Alaskan backcountry with Olympic downhill champion Tommy Moe. Two years ago, he paddled through the entire chain of Hawaiian islands on a surfboard.

Wildman leads a brutal group workout he calls The Circuit:

"People come here and say, 'This is madness! What the hell are you doing this for?' " he says, working his way through a set of shoulder presses. And it does seem fair to ask whether, maybe, two thousand repetitions might be enough to do the trick (especially since most people his age consider lawn bowling a fine workout). That kind of thinking is alien to Wildman, just as it is to the hardcore group of regulars who adhere to the same philosophy: When it comes to endorphin production, more is more. Along with Hamilton, Commerford, and Winn, the group includes John McEnroe, Detroit Red Wings defenseman Chris Chelios, and another dozen ultrafit men. In Wildman's crew there are stuntmen and ski racers and motocross riders. There's a sheriff, a restaurateur, and an ultimate fighter. There is the occasional celebrity (Sean Penn, John Cusack, John C. McGinley) or rock star (Kid Rock, Eddie Vedder). And one time, there was NBA star Reggie Miller.

"Ohhh, Reggie got torn up by this workout," Commerford says. "I saw him the next day, and man."

"Well, that's because Laird tried to kill him," Wildman says, shaking his head. "We definitely did all six rounds that day."

Thing is, for Wildman and his crew, this kind of behavior isn't abusive at all -- it's fun, heavily laced with lactic acid. "It's just that our play is harder than 99 percent of other people's work," he explains.

The assassination, the Bay of Pigs, and Camelot were useless drivel and a distraction

John Jay says that the assassination, the Bay of Pigs, and Camelot were useless drivel and a distraction to the serious study of history:

In fact, the most likely (and I do not presume to have the final world on this) candidate for the seminal event of 1960–1964 is Kennedy’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. From this flowed a tremendous amount of history, and not just the further commitments of LBJ and the subsequent social upheaval in the US. If the officers I talked to in the late Soviet period are correct, the Vietnam War bankrupted the Soviet Union. The Soviets spent approximately $1 billion per year in a war it truly could not afford:

“The Soviet Union poured billions of rubles into Vietnam... During 1965-1975 military aid was central, and economic aid was geared entirely to the war effort. By the 1970s Soviet aid amounted to $1 billion or more annually, without which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) could not have continued the war.”

The adventure in Vietnam and the attendant arms race crippled the economy of the USSR. It severely curtailed their foreign policy adventures. And when Reagan came along and proposed Star Wars, Gorbachev threw in the towel. Not because he thought that the American missile shield would achieve 100% coverage against missile attacks. The Russians were not stupid. And not because they thought we’d even get 75% coverage. It was because even 30% coverage was considerably better than the 0% the Soviets could muster in the near term. And because it would have sapped a couple of percent of our GDP, while even attempting to match it would have cost a significantly grater fraction of their GDP (some officers I talked to estimated as much as 50%). And the US technology would have gotten better with time and experience, which would have sapped even more Russian resources. In this respect, the events of 1989 and 1991 were a direct result of Kennedy’s decision to commit to Vietnam and Reagan’s willingness to capitalize on the advantage gained by bankrupting the USSR and sending it into the period the Russians call “The Stagnation”.

How rich people spend their time

Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has looked at how rich people spend their time, and — surprising to some people — they spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed:

People who make less than $20,000 a year, for example, told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure — watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way — putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional. The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were active, structured and often stressful — shopping, child care and exercise.

That all sounds highly skewed by using rich to mean high-income. Obviously people who are working very hard to make money have less leisure time. The question is, how do they spend their time once they've accumulated a lot of wealth and have a steady stream of investment income?

The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator

Charlie Sorrel of Wired describes Julius von Bismarck as The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator:

But first, about that name: According to von Bismarck, 'Image Fulgurator' comes from the Latin for 'lightning' (fulgur) and means 'Flash Thrower'.

First, let us make clear that von Bismarck has applied for a patent for the Fulgurator. He stressed this point. Of course, anyone with the requisite skills can make one of their own, but Julius wants to keep some degree of control over commercial use.

To see why, consider how it works. The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.

The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.

Fossil fills out water-land leap

Fossil fills out water-land leap:

About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega [curonica] was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia.

According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers.

"From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

"In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic."

Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land.

Sexual Antagonism

Sexual antagonism provides a genetic explanation for homosexuality:

Gay couples can't have biological kids together. So if homosexuality is genetic, why hasn't it died out?

A study published last week in PLoS One tackles the question. It starts with four curious patterns. First, male homosexuality occurs at a low but stable frequency in a wide range of societies. Second, the female relatives of gay men produce children at a higher rate than other women do. Third, among these female relatives, those related to the gay man's mother produce children at a higher rate than do those related to his father. Fourth, among the man's male relatives, homosexuality is more common in those related to his mother than in those related to his father.

Can genes account for these patterns? To find out, the authors posit several possible mechanisms and compute their effects over time. They conclude that only one theory fits the data. The theory is called "sexually antagonistic selection." It holds that a gene can be reproductively harmful to one sex as long as it's helpful to the other. The gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men's mothers, sisters, and aunts.

This theory doesn't account for female homosexuality, which another new study (reviewed in Human Nature last week) attributes to nongenetic factors. It also doesn't account for environmental or prenatal chemical factors in male homosexuality, such as the correlation between a man's probability of homosexuality and the number of boys previously gestated in his mother's womb. But it does explain the high similarity of sexual orientation between identical twins, as well as patterns of homosexuality in families. It's also plausible because sexually antagonistic selection has been found in other species. And many scientists who think environmental and prenatal factors influence homosexuality also believe that genes play a role.

The authors note that according to their computations, the theory implies some testable predictions. One such prediction can be checked against existing data. The prediction is that on average, if you're a straight man, the reproductive pattern among your aunts will reverse the pattern seen among aunts of gay men. That is, your paternal aunts will produce children at a higher rate than your maternal aunts will. The authors check this prediction against the available data. Sure enough, it holds up.

So the genes aren't for homosexuality so much as they're for androphilia, i.e., attraction to men.

It’s mine, I tell you

Researchers have started studying the evolutionary roots of the endowment effect:

Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, and Sarah Brosnan, a primatologist at Georgia State University, suspect the answer is that, in the evolutionary past, giving things up, even when an apparently fair exchange seemed to be on offer, was just too risky. These days, as they discuss in a paper just published in the William and Mary Law Review, there are contracts, rights and other ways of enforcing bargains. Animal societies have none of these mechanisms. As Adam Smith observed in the “Wealth of Nations”, “nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”

To put flesh on their idea, Dr Jones and Dr Brosnan have been trying to overcome Smith’s observation by training chimpanzees to trade. In 2006 Keith Chen of Yale University showed that capuchin monkeys could learn to do so, and also seemed to exhibit the endowment effect. Chimps, it turns out, can manage to truck too. In the chimp study, tubes of peanut butter and frozen juice bars were used. Both treats were designed to be difficult to eat quickly. This makes it possible for animals that would otherwise consume any food they were given at the first opportunity at least to consider the idea of an exchange.

When presented with a choice, 60% of the chimps preferred peanut butter to juice. However, when they were endowed with peanut butter, 80% of them chose to keep it instead of exchanging it for juice. It was as if the peanut butter became more valuable as soon as it was possessed. And an opposite endowment effect was observed when the chimps were given juice.

Observing the endowment effect in three primate species suggests it does, indeed, have deep evolutionary roots. Better still, before they started work Dr Jones and Dr Brosnan predicted that the strength of the effect would vary with the evolutionary salience of the item in question. Lo and behold, when they tried the same experiments using bone and rope toys, no endowment effect was seen. Food is vital. Toys are not.

Steffen Huck, an economist at University College, London, has an alternative hypothesis:

In societies with markets, customers can go elsewhere. But in a small, tribal society there may be no alternative seller. In that case, those who were reluctant to trade might get better prices. It may thus make sense for an owner to be psychologically predisposed to hold out for a high price as soon as someone else expresses interest in one of his possessions—something Dr Huck’s models predict would, indeed, be evolutionarily beneficial.

How to Survive A Disaster

Amanda Ripley has written an entire book — The Unthinkable — on how to survive a disaster, and John Robb (Brave New War) has written a review:

I’m living, breathing proof that you can survive a disaster. I’ve lived through two airplane crashes (“catastrophic mishaps” in Air Force jargon), one at the start and one near the end of my Air Force piloting career, as well as a countless number of close calls in between. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to understand fully why I was so successful at navigating disaster and others in similar circumstances weren’t. There hasn’t been a source of solid thinking on the subject until now. Amanda Ripley’s new book, The Unthinkable, is a riveting exploration of the factors that dictate whether you will live through or perish in a disaster — if you’re ever unlucky enough to confront one.

Based on my experience, the top objective in all catastrophes is to move to a safe zone and take as many people with you as you can. While this goal may seem simple, achieving it during the onrush of chaos isn’t. Thinking clearly during a crisis is tough, for reasons more complex than we realize. Ripley shows us what stands in our way as we navigate what she calls the “survival arc,” which consists of two phases: denial and deliberation.

Denial keeps you from realizing that you are in danger. It’s rooted in bad risk assessment, overconfidence, and a lack of relevant experience. Bouts with denial can delay your response, as Ripley illustrates through the testimony of Elia Zedeno, who relates her painfully slow escape from the 73rd floor of Tower One on September 11. Once you realize the extent of the peril, though, fear might take over. Deliberation requires overcoming fear to regain the ability to think clearly. [...] Contrary to popular understanding, group behavior during disasters is rarely panic-driven, but more often extremely docile and overly polite. Getting a group to respond and act effectively often requires aggressive behavior, like barking orders.

Our bodily reaction to fear — regulated by the amygdala and catalyzed by cortisol and adrenaline — deprives us of our higher mental functions and can induce everything from tunnel vision to time compression to extreme dissociation:

We can counter fear, however. The best method, FBI trainers say, is to get control of your breathing. “Combat breathing” is a simple variant on Lamaze or yoga training — breathe in four counts, hold four counts, exhale four counts, and repeat. It works because breathing is a combination of the somatic (which we control) and the autonomic (which we can’t easily control) nervous systems. Regulation of the autonomic system deescalates the biological-fear response and returns our higher-level brain functions to full capacity.

Some people are naturally suited to dealing with chaos:

What makes them different? Some have a natural psychological buffer that allows them to bounce back from extreme stress. Examination of people who always perform well in extreme circumstances has shown high levels in the blood of “neuropeptide Y” — a compound that allows one to stay mentally focused under stress. It’s so closely correlated with success in pressure situations that it is almost a biological marker for selection into elite groups for military special operations.

One of the disaster tales Ripley tells is of the M.V. Estonia, which went down in the Baltic Sea after suddenly listing starboard 30° at 1 AM:

In the bar, almost everyone fell violently against the side of the boat. Härstedt managed to grab on to the iron bar railing and hold on, hanging above everyone else.

"In just one second, everything went from a loud, happy, wonderful moment to total silence. Every brain, I guess, was working like a computer trying to realize what had happened," he says. Then came the screaming and crying. People had been badly hurt in the fall, and the tilt of the ship made it extremely difficult to move.

Härstedt began to strategize, tapping into some of the survival skills he had learned in the military. "I started to react very differently from normal. I started to say, 'O.K., there is option one, option two. Decide. Act.' I didn't say, 'Oh, the boat is sinking.' I didn't even think about the wider perspective." Like many survivors, Härstedt experienced the illusion of centrality, a coping mechanism in which the brain fixates on the individual experience. "I just saw my very small world."

But as Härstedt made his way into the corridor, he noticed something strange about some of the other passengers. They weren't doing what he was doing. "Some people didn't seem to realize what had happened. They were just sitting there," he says. Not just one or two people, but entire groups seemed to be immobilized. They were conscious, but they were not reacting.

Contrary to popular expectations, this is what happens in many disasters. Crowds generally become quiet and docile. Panic is rare. The bigger problem is that people do too little, too slowly. They sometimes shut down completely, falling into a stupor.

On the Estonia, Härstedt climbed up the stairwell, fighting against gravity. Out on the deck, the ship's lights were on, and the moon was shining. The full range of human capacities was on display. Incredibly, one man stood to the side, smoking a cigarette, Härstedt remembers. Most people strained to hold on to the rolling ship and, at the same time, to look for life jackets and lifeboats. British passenger Paul Barney remembers groups of people standing still like statues. "I kept saying to myself, 'Why don't they try to get out of here?'" he later told the Observer.

Ripley tells another disaster tale, this one about the Beverly Hills Supper Club south of Cincinnati, in which a small electrical fire spread, killing 167:

The disaster delivered many brutal lessons. Some were obvious — and tragic: the club had no sprinkler or audible fire-alarm systems. But the fire also complicated official expectations for crowd behavior: in the middle of a crisis, the basic tenets of civilization actually hold. People move in groups whenever possible. They tend to look out for one another, and they maintain hierarchies. "People die the same way they live," says disaster sociologist Lee Clarke, "with friends, loved ones and colleagues, in communities."

At the Beverly Hills, servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated but bypassed other sections (that weren't "theirs"). Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving.

And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the rooms. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills.

As the smoke intensified, Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the club, stumbled into a hallway jammed with a hundred guests. The lights flickered off and on, and the smoke started to get heavy. But what he remembers most about that crowded hallway is the silence. "Man, there wasn't a sound in there. Not a scream, nothing," he says. Standing there in the dark, the crowd was waiting to be led.
[...]
People were remarkably loyal to their identities. An estimated 60% of the employees tried to help in some way — either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17% of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity shaped behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who — naturally — began to organize the doctors and nurses.

Read the original article for the whole story of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at the World Trade Center.

What got cut from the article was Ripley's list of 5 Ways to Refine Your Disaster Personality:

1. Attitude
   People who perform well in crises and recover well afterwards tend to have three underlying advantages:
   1. They believe they can influence what happens to them.
   2. They find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil.
   3. They are convinced they can learn from both good and bad experiences.


2. Knowledge
   If you learn more about your actual risks — or the risks that scare you most — you will probably be calmer should something go wrong someday. For example, did you know that most serious plane accidents are survivable? Yes, it’s true. Of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2000, 56% survived. (Serious, for those of you who still don’t believe me, is defined by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, AND substantial aircraft damage.)


3. Anxiety Level
   People with higher everyday anxiety levels may have a greater tendency to freeze or totally shut down in an emergency. As in regular life, if you can learn tricks to control your anxiety, you will probably perform better. For example, some police officers are now trained to do rhythmic breathing (in for four, hold for four, out for four) whenever their guns are drawn.


4. Body Weight
   The harsh truth is that overweight people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries like heart attacks and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. On 9/11, people with low physical ability were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the Towers.


5. Training
   It is much better, for example, to stop, drop and roll than to talk about stopping, dropping and rolling. [...] Make surprise drills an annual tradition in your office or home. Take the stairs down to the ground — don’t just stare at the stairwell door.

Living in San Francisco with fifty or sixty leopards loose in the city

Mencius Moldbug notes that living with our current level of crime — indeed, with armed gangs ruling the inner-city streets — would be unthinkable a few short generations ago. But, then again, he couldn't imagine living in San Francisco if there were fifty or sixty leopards loose in the city either:

But I can see how people would get used to it. Leopards are nocturnal, so you stay in at night. They hide in trees, so you cut down the trees. They tend to hunt in certain areas, so you avoid those areas. And the situation could develop gradually — the first leopard is a huge news story, the second is a smaller story, and they build up over time. After a while, the experience of walking down the street while checking for leopards would strike you as completely normal and unremarkable. If one day the leopards were removed, however, you would definitely notice it.

I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch, says Bruce Schneier:

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices — computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders — with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

His conclusion:

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure — or more polite.

Glory Days

Joel Spolsky looks back at his time at Microsoft, during its glory days in the early 90s, when Bill Gates himself would read a spec and grill the designer:

He was flipping through my spec! (Calm down; what are you, a teenager?) And there were notes in all the margins! On every page! He had read the Whole Darn Thing!

As the conversation went on, Bill's questions got harder and more detailed. And they seemed a little bit random. But I didn't care. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy — a nice guy who had read my spec. In my head, I was already thinking of how I would address his comments, pronto.

Finally, the killer question. "I don't know, you guys," Bill said. "Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is BASIC going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?"

This was exactly the question I had spent the previous day investigating. And as I had discovered, there was a discrepancy. In both Excel and BASIC, each date was assigned a numeric code. The code for any day in 1992 that I looked up was the same in both. But when I looked up a date around the turn of the last century, Excel and BASIC were one digit apart. Huh?

When I went to find someone who might be able to help, I was directed to Ed Fries, a longtime Excel programmer famous for inventing those screen savers with the swimming fish. I hadn't had much contact with Ed, but I used to see him every Friday afternoon as he played miniature golf in the hallways outside my office.

"Check out February 28, 1900," he told me.

Its number in the Excel code was 59.

"Now try March 1."

Its number was 61.

"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.

"It's February 29!" I said proudly. "1900 was a leap year!"

"Nope," Ed said, and left me pondering the problem for a little while longer. I eventually figured out, with some more guidance from Ed, that a group of programmers at Lotus had skipped a day in 1900 because it created a mathematical shortcut for them, and they probably figured that nobody would care about a mistake buried in the software's internal calendar more than 90 years in the past. The people who made Excel hadn't cared at all and built the bug into the code that the spreadsheets ran on. But the people who had written the code for BASIC had apparently been offended by the shortcut, so they set the start of their internal calendar a day earlier. That way, it would accurately reflect the actual calendar, but the solution was also practical. Because BASIC started its count a day earlier, the number that BASIC assigned to March 1, 1900, was also 61, and from that point on its date and time functions were aligned with Excel's.

So were the date and time functions compatible?

"Yes," I told Bill. "The dates are exactly the same, except for January and February 1900."

Silence. The F Counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that?

"OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked-up copy of the spec…wait! I wanted that…and left.

"Four," announced the F Counter, and someone said, "Wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, at the time, 36. Later, I had it all explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec," a colleague told me. "He just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard MO is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with, because it's never happened before."

What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing — but not totally:

"So we got an Imax shot of Christian Bale as Batman standing on top of the Sears Tower," Pfister says. "Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that's CGI." Perhaps, but when you see the shot (featured in the first trailer), your eye instinctively detects something different, something thrilling and rare: photographic reality.

Settling for anything less, Nolan feared, would send the Batman franchise back into camp and mummery. That's why he transported his hero to the very real city of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the real world has its drawbacks. "The Chinese government was a nightmare in terms of filming stuff," Pfister sighs. "They wanted to limit the amount of helicopter activity over the city."

And Nolan needed helicopters. He especially wanted to minimize digital meddling in those high-altitude Imax sequences. His reasons were both aesthetic and practical: Imax film stock is enormous, roughly 10 times the size of 35-mm celluloid, and it soaks up a vast amount of visual information. Those dimensions are what make the image so rich and sharp, even spread over a screen the size of a blimp hangar. While conventional films are digitized at 2K resolution (2,000 pixels across), or 4K at most, adding visual effects to Imax footage requires digitizing each frame at up to 8K. In other words, the difficulty and expense of doing f/x rise exponentially with the size of the negative.

If I may geek out here for a moment — math-geek out, that is — the expense of doing f/x should rise polynomially — quadratically, in fact — with the (linear) size of the negative. An image with twice as many pixels across should have four times as many pixels total — two squared.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test

Mencius Moldbug likes to call the university system — and the mainstream media, which is full of journalists trained within the system — the Cathedral, because it controls public opinion as effectively as the medieval clerisy.

He also likes to note that NGOs have to put non-governmental in the name; otherwise we'd forget, because they wield plenty of power.

A recent NY Times piece — Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test — inadvertently makes it clear how much the university system wants its believers to move into positions of not-quite-governmental power:

A prominent education professor at Harvard has begun leading “reflection” seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their educations and aspirations.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Although others have expressed similar concerns in recent years, his views have gained support on the Harvard campus with students, faculty and even the new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who made the topic the cornerstone of her address to seniors during commencement week. Dr. Faust noted that in the past year, whenever she has met with students, their first question has always been the same: “Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?”

On other campuses as well, officials are questioning with new vigor whether too many top students who might otherwise turn their talents to a broader array of fields are being lured by high-paying corporate jobs, and whether colleges should do more to encourage students to consider other careers, especially public service.

Don't forget, wielding public power is public service.

Bulking Up: Japan's Drugmakers

When I saw the headline — Bulking Up: Japan's Drugmakers — I was expecting a story linking performance-enhancing drugs to Japan, but the story is about M&A:

On June 11 midsize Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo announced it would pay $4.6 billion for control of Ranbaxy Laboratories, India's largest maker of generic drugs. In doing so, Daiichi seems to have beat Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline to the punch, gaining instant access to double-digit growth in India, China, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico. If the deal goes forward, it will be a coup for the little-known Japanese company. "All the big pharmaceutical companies are talking about emerging markets as the next growth opportunities," says Stewart Adkins, head of London-based consultancy Stewart Adkins Advisors.

It looks like they'll have to get used to a more competitive field. The Ranbaxy deal is the third multibillion-dollar overseas acquisition by a Japanese drugmaker in the past seven months. Eisai paid $3.9 billion in December for MGI Pharma of Bloomington, Minn. And Takeda shelled out a hefty $8.8 billion for Cambridge (Mass.)-based biotech Millennium Pharmaceuticals in early April.

The regulatory environment is shifting in Japan, and that is prompting the change in behavior:

Coming regulatory changes in Japan's universal health-care system may further fuel the trend. For years, policymakers have protected the domestic drug industry. By setting medication prices relatively high and erecting clinical trial hurdles for foreign drug products, the government set the stage for one of the world's most crowded, least international markets. At last count, there were 1,200 drugmakers.

The government also has failed to encourage patients to enroll in clinical trials or to increase its number of drug reviewers. Getting a new drug approved often takes up to 22 months, vs. an average of 10 months in the U.S.

Regulatory reforms would allow more low-cost generic drugs into the market and make it easier for foreign drugmakers to get their products cleared. But that means Japan's domestic companies will have to work a lot harder—and for that, they will need some bulk. Takeda, the biggest in the group, ranked 17th in global sales last year, according to researcher IMS Health. Each of the world's Big Three—Pfizer, Glaxo, and Novartis—posted revenues that were more than double Takeda's. And all the Japanese drug companies combined account for just 10% of the $700 billion global industry. Ranbaxy won't level the field. But it won't be the last deal.

Technology: It's Where the Jobs Are

The technology sector is where the jobs are:

The highest concentration of technology workers — 286 for every 1,000 workers — was in, no surprise, Silicon Valley. Boulder, Colo., came in second, with 230, and Huntsville, Ala.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington rounded out the top five in density.

Now for the answer to the question on everyone's mind: Where are the highest salaries? That would be Silicon Valley, where the average tech worker is paid $144,000 a year. That's nearly double the $80,000 national average for tech jobs. Runners up included San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. Austin, Tex., home of Dell came in fourth, and Seattle was fifth. San Juan, Puerto Rico, had the lowest salaries, with an average of $38,000 a year, but living expenses there are also considerably lower.

The Strident Hermit King of Comics

In reviewing Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger — about the artist-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — Geoff Boucher declares Steve Ditko the strident hermit king of comics:

For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear and the imagination quite like Ditko's. In a field defined by brilliant oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks, Ditko is the strident hermit king. He gave the world Spider-Man but then more or less bugged out, deciding in 1969 to stop doing interviews and making public appearances. Now 80, Ditko lives in New York City, and although you can track down his studio, nobody I know who's done so has gotten past the front step. It's not that Ditko is unfriendly -- he's willing to talk, apparently (in one case, for more than an hour), but only while standing in his doorway, blocking any view into his home and his life.

If you're a journalist, however, it's a different story. Last year, the BBC aired a documentary, "In Search of Steve Ditko," in which reporter Jonathan Ross, accompanied by Neil Gaiman, sought an audience with Ditko. He refused to speak on camera, which only reinforces the idea of him as the J.D. Salinger of super-hero comics. This, I suppose, makes Peter Parker a wall-crawling Holden Caulfield.

When Ditko drew Peter Parker, he drew him as a nerd — a proto-nerd, I suppose — which made perfect sense for the character, but later artists drew him as just another idealized male. Boucher gives this description of Ditko's style:

Although Ditko grew up loving the art of Jerry Robinson and Will Eisner, for much of his career, he had a spindly and off-kilter style that rubbed the heroic off the page and replaced it with an odd, anxious ballet of the surreal and the grotesque.

The recent Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme DVD played down Ditko's "anxious ballet of the surreal and the grotesque" as well as Stan Lee's impressive-sounding mystic mumbo-jumbo, which always alluded to otherworldly things you assumed someone understood.

Ditko is also famous for creating the Question — and infamous for creating Mr. A — which both inspired Alan Moore's Rorschach, from The Watchmen.

A simple sovereign bankruptcy procedure

Mencius Moldbug lays out a simple sovereign bankruptcy procedure — I'm not sure I'd call it simple, by the way — for restoring modern political states to the way they were a century ago, during the Belle Époque:

This implies that in two years, (a) all systematic criminal activity will terminate; (b) anyone of any skin color will be able to walk anywhere in any city, at any time of day or night; (c) no graffiti, litter, or other evidence of institutional lawlessness will be visible; and (d) all 20th-century buildings of a socialist, brutalist, or other antidecorative character will be demolished.

Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

I can't say I was an early bird as a child — and I certainly wasn't as a teenager — but orders from my secret superhero commander would definitely have launched me into action at any hour. Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

Japanese toy company People has released a new age alarm clock that supposedly helps kids wake up by turning them into Ultraman. It's called the Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi — Charenjaa Kitto (Wake Up! First Sun Warrior of the Morning — Challenger Kit) and was manufactured for the Japanese Ministry of Education “early to bed early to rise” program. The $38 kit comes with the extravagant eye shield and helmet; a series of talismans and message cards (no doubt world-saving secret missions); and a 27-day program that will involve your child taking orders from "the commander."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the day."

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Choosing Wisely

Laura Vanderkam reviews Nudge and the idea of "libertarian paternalism" — a way of helping people choose wisely:

The classic example is saving for retirement. Most of us know that we should be saving more—but fully 30 percent of eligible employees fail to enroll in company-sponsored 401(k) retirement plans, even though employers tend to match employee deposits up to a point. Is this because the employees are too strapped to make contributions, even with the employer match? Apparently not, the authors say, citing data from the United Kingdom, where a handful of defined-benefit plans don’t require any employee contribution at all. They do, however, require employees to sign up. Scarcely half of eligible people do. “This is equivalent to not bothering to cash your paycheck,” they write—something that no rational economic actor would ever choose.

A better solution? Rather than requiring employees to opt in, require them to opt out. This changes the numbers dramatically. One 2001 study found that under opt-in 401(k) rules, barely 20 percent of employees had enrolled after three months of employment, and 65 percent had done so after 36 months. With automatic enrollment, 90 percent of new employees were participating shortly after joining their firms. “Never underestimate the power of inertia,” Thaler and Sunstein write. Drop-out rates are modest, suggesting that “workers are not suddenly discovering, to their dismay, that they are saving more than they had wanted.” In other words, on some level, people appreciate the nudge.

The examples of nudge-worthy situations abound. School cafeteria managers, rather than banning junk food, can put the apples at eye level and the Twinkies a little farther away. Utilities pushing conservation can put smiley or frowny faces on power bills, indicating whether a customer is using more or less energy than his neighbors. Universities, rather than getting hysterical about underage drinking, can put up signs noting that most students either don’t drink, or do so moderately. These nudges all recognize that human beings—as opposed to rational economic actors—are systematically biased about their choices. We are biased toward the status quo, toward things that are easy, and toward our notions of what everyone else thinks. “The picture that emerges is one of busy people trying to cope in a complex world in which they cannot afford to think deeply about every choice they have to make,” Thaler and Sunstein write. We are free to ignore the frown on the power bill, but if it gets us to turn off the lights, is it really a bad thing?

Signs don't sort

Drewbot mentions that TSA recently introduced an initiative ripe for gaming:

The Transportation Security Administration is trying to speed up airport screening by asking passengers to choose a line based on their familiarity with checkpoint procedures. But human nature being what it is, this approach may hit its own snags: people typically opt for the shortest line, and all think they are experts.

The signs don't sort properly, Drewbot notes, for the obvious reason that people don't want to sort themselves into the slow line, but the signs do change behavior:

However, by reading the signs, they were aware of what steps they would have to take to pass as experts. Seriously: I have NEVER seen people with their ID and boarding pass in hand so consistently throughout the line. Experts don’t behave like this, only people worried of being discovered (being identified as being non-expert) behave in such a prepared fashion.

Kermit Love, Co-Creator of Big Bird, Dies at 91

It's hard to believe that Big Bird and Snuffleupagus were created by a costume designer named Kermit Love. He also worked for some of ballet’s most renowned choreographers. He just passed away, at age 91 — which the New York Times reported with some not-so-subtle subtext:

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Christopher Lyall, Mr. Love’s partner of 50 years.

Mr. Love played Willy the Hot Dog Man on the show — a character I do not remember — and helped design Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster, but he insisted he was not the namesake of the famous frog.

Peak Phosphorus?

Are we facing Peak Phosphorus?

In the past 14 months, the price of the raw material — phosphate rock — has surged by more than 700 per cent to more than $367 (£185) per tonne. As well as putting pressure on food prices, some researchers believe that the risk of a future phosphorus shortage blows a hole in the concept of biofuels as a “renewable” source of energy. Ethanol is not truly renewable if the essential fundamental element is, in reality, growing more scarce, researchers say. Within a few decades, according to forecasts used by scientists at Linköping University, in Sweden, a “peak phosphorus” crunch could represent a serious threat to agriculture as global reserves of high-quality phosphate rock go into terminal decline.

Because supplies of phosphates suitable for mining are so limited, a new geopolitical map may be drawn around the remaining reserves — a dynamic that would give a sudden boost to the global importance of Morocco, which holds 32 per cent of the world's proven reserves. Beyond Morocco, the world's chief phosphorus reserves for export are concentrated in Western Sahara, South Africa, Jordan, Syria and Russia.

Natural distribution of phosphorus could create a small number of new “resource superpowers” with a pricing control over fertilisers that some suspect could end up rivalling Opec's control over crude oil. The economic battle to secure phosphorus supply may already have begun. China, according to US Geological Survey estimates, has 13 billion tonnes of phosphate rock reserves and has started to guard them more carefully. Beijing has just imposed a 135 per cent tariff on phosphate rock exports to try to secure enough for its own farmers, alarming the fertiliser industry, as well as Western Europe and India, which are both entirely reliant on phosphorus imports. With America's own phosphorus production down 20 per cent over the past three years, it has begun to ship phosphorus in from Morocco.

American projections suggest that global phosphorus demand could grow at 2.3 per cent annually just to feed the growing world population, an estimate that was made before the growth of biofuels.

Few observers hold out hope of a discovery of phosphorus large enough to meet the continued growth in demand. The ore itself takes millions of years to form, and the prospect of extracting phosphorus from the sea bed presents massive technological and financial challenges.

The answer, say crop scienctists, lies in better husbandry of phosphorus reserves: an effort that may require the creation of an international body to monitor the use and recycling of phosphorus.

I love the naked power grab in recommending an "international body" to "monitor" the use and recycling of phosphorus. Price signals should handle that job just fine — as long as governments don't nationalize reserves, put up export tariffs, etc. Sigh.

(Hat tip to Erik.)

What a Difference a Day Makes

I had a colleague who briefly worked with a mad scientist intent on bringing a "trash laser beam" — that's what we called the plasma furnace — to market. In What a Difference a Day Makes, Robert X. Cringely describes the technology and its potential:

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient.

The Days propose building not just a plasma furnace but a chemical plant around it:

The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

One of the commenters, an Ed Underwood, notes that there's nothing new here:

There have been companies selling plasma incinerators for years. They do a good job of greatly reducing a trash pile but they will not normally generate much energy. The water content of trash greatly reduces the efficiency of the system. Even if you break it into oxygen and hydrogen and burn it — you still dump a huge amount of energy into it to do that and you don't get energy back to make up for that loss. Also when dealing with toxic trash , no matter how many times you feed the exhaust gases back into the system — you will still have to have a scrubber for exhaust — those require a lot of energy and are expensive to maintain.

In his opinion, you can reduce the volume of trash, but you won't produce an energy surplus in the process.

On the Sadness of Higher Education

Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shares his journey through academia and his thoughts On the Sadness of Higher Education, which has transformed itself radically from his own days as a student in the early 1960s:

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective — they do believe that — contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Kors argues that the power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials:

As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his Going Broke by Degree, they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

College is an expensive way of taking an IQ test — but since Griggs v. Duke Power, employers haven't been allowed to use intelligence tests in hiring.

(Hat tip to Richard Fernandez's Belmont Club, at its new location.)

The Good One

Mencius Moldbug likes to call Obama the Good One:

That is, he is good at his job, which is all you can ask of anyone. More precisely, he talks like a competent manager. If I was working in at a startup and I had a boss who gave pep talks this good, I'd feel quite comfortable with the administration. Management is more than just talk, but can you call the Obama campaign anything but a successful operation? The graphic design alone is brilliant.

There is only one problem: this outfit is very good at winning presidential elections. We have no reason to think it is any good at anything else. The candidate is a great presidential candidate. He will probably be a good president, too. Of course, that is to say he will be good at reading his lines and pretending to be an 18th-century statesman, which is the job of a US President in 2008. Perhaps we should just write in Paul Giamatti, who I'm sure could act the Good One off the stage.

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming:

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
[...]
Homer reports that on the day of the slaughter the sun is blotted from the sky, possibly a reference to an eclipse. In addition, he mentions more than once that it is the time of a new moon, which is necessary for a total eclipse, the researchers say.

Other clues include:

• Six days before the slaughter, Venus is visible and high in the sky.


• Twenty-nine days before, two constellations — the Pleiades and Bootes — are simultaneously visible at sunset.


• And 33 days before, Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. This is the researchers' interpretation, anyway. Homer wrote that Hermes, the Greek name for Mercury, traveled far west to deliver a message.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

One of Mencius Moldbug's recurring points is that modern progressivism is in fact a form of secular Quakerism, with its doctrine of the Inner Light only slightly modified.

William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008, inadvertently makes the same point in discussing The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more