Seriously Unwelcome Surprises

Michael Schrage notes that the real value of a model or simulation stems from its power to generate useful surprise:

Louis Pasteur once remarked that "chance favors the prepared mind." It holds equally true that chance favors the prepared prototype: models and simulations can and should be media to create and capture surprise and serendipity. Yet surprises are not always welcome.

Indeed, surprises are not always welcome:

Clark Abt of Abt Associates, a pioneer in applying simulation games to public policy, recalls running a simulation for the Agency for International Development (AID) involving sustainable economic development in a developing country. "The simulation was biased in favor of saving the forests, while still allowing for a growing population and increasing the standard of living," Abt recalls. The overt goal was, in his words, "to learn how to save the environment in a politically responsible way while having healthy economic development." But practically every run of every simulation led to the relatively rapid destruction of the econologically cherished but commercially irresistible forests. "By the end of the day, the forests were all gone," Abt remembers. "The AID types were really pissed off."

So what did AID do in the ugly face of this consistent and politically incorrect outcome?

I think you already know what they did:

The agency shut down the exercise.

Abt makes a few amusing points about models and simulations:

• "You know you have something when the model has a life of its own."
• Abt compares models to women's skirts: "They should be long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting."

GraphJam

GraphJam calls itself "pop culture for people in cubicles." I enjoyed Wired's sampler of their work:

Turboencabulator

I only recently learned about the turboencabulator by way of this Rockwell Retro Encabulator promotional piece:



The turboencabulator has a long history:

In 1946 one of the earliest references to the turbo-encabulator appeared in Time Magazine on, April 15, 1946 by Bernard Salwen, a New York lawyer working in Washington, DC. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and wrote the classic description of a non-existent turboencabulator.

In 1955 the turboencabulator was supposedly described by a "J.H. Quick" in "The Institution of Electrical Engineers, Students Quarterly Journal" 25 (London), p184 in 1955. (Other sources give vol 15 no. 58 p. 22, December 1944.)

In 1962 a turboencabulator datasheet was created by engineers at General Electric's Instrument Dept, in West Lynn, Mass. quoting much of the above sources and inserted into the General Electric Handbook. Perhaps to make the hoax more believable, the turboencabulator data sheet had the same format as the other pages in the GE Handbook. And the engineers added "Shure Stat" in "Technical Features" (which was peculiar only to the Instrument Dept.) and included the first known graphic representation of a 'manufactured' turboencabulator using parts made at the instrument Dept.

Website traders get rich quick

Website traders get rich quick by following a well-established off-line model — buy, fix up, and flip:

Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $US1800 three years ago. He simply saw a website that was "very, very poorly done", and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $US173,000.
[...]
While there is no data on how many people flip websites, the number of sites sold on eBay has doubled over the past three months, the company says. At SitePoints marketplace, a similar forum where users can auction off websites, sales have quadrupled in the past year, says site founder Matt Mickiewicz.

The changing economics of the web have made it easier to find and exploit niche communities on the internet. Building niche websites and small-scale online stores has become cheap and easy. Free software, advertising systems such as Google's, and "drop shipping" services that allow website owners to handle products through a third-party supplier, have lowered the cost of doing business.

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth? Yes, Brad Templeton discovers, after pulling numbers from the U.S. government bureau of transportation statistics and the Dept. of Energy Transportation Energy Data Book (especially table 2-12).

USA Transportation Energy Use
BTUs per passenger-mile


How can this be?

A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars, sometimes quite a bit more so. But transit systems never consist of nothing but full vehicles. They run most of their day with light loads. The above calculations came from figures citing the average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light or heavy) holds 22. If that seems low, remember that every packed train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down the track.

Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking. And most transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic. Indeed, you'll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years, private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse. The market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.

In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent service, all day long. They want to know they have the freedom to leave at different times. But that means emptier vehicles outside of rush hour. You've all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just haven't thought of how anti-green they were. It would be better if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that implies too much capital cost -- no transit agency will buy enough equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for light demand periods.

Transit planning is also driven by different economies. Often transit infrastructure (including vehicles) is paid for by state or federal money, while drivers (but also fuel) are paid from local city budgets. This seems to push local city transit agencies to get bigger vehicles and fewer drivers where they can, since drivers tend to be hired full-time and can't be kept idling in low-demand periods.

In Templeton's opinion, you should still take transit, because the marginal energy cost of one more transit passenger is much less than the energy cost of one more car, even if the average cost is no lower.

In fact, because transit systems have high fixed costs and low variable costs, they need high ridership to make sense, which has led to massive subsidies to reduce prices:

Transit fares are highly subsidized. It's not uncommon for a $1.50 transit ticket to offer a ride that costs the agency 3-4 times as much to provide. (In U.S. big cities, on average subsidies pay for 44% of rail cost and 69% of bus cost. Suburban buses can see almost 90%.) Cars are also subsidized of course, via roads (which also provide subsidy to buses, trucks and street cars, of course) and via free parking and forced parking construction requirements. To the extent that roads are funded by gasoline taxes — which varies from place to place — this is not a subsidy so much as a user fee.

Anyway, Templeton also provides his numbers in MPG-equivalents.

Serious Accidents and Teamwork

In Serious Play, Michael Schrage describes how a life-or-death management issue was uncovered by accident, when regulators went to test the safety of pilots working longer shifts in the newly deregulated air-travel market of the 1980s:

The researchers tested two groups of test crews: those who flew the scenario after a minimum of two days off, as if it were the first leg of a three-day trip (preduty) and those who flew the scenario as the last segment of a three-day trip (postduty). The scenario was characterized by poor weather that forced a missed approach to a landing. The missed approach was further complicated by a hydraulic-system failure that created a high-speed, high-workload situation. The two pilots had to select an alternate landing site and manually extend the plane's gears and flaps while flying an approach at higher-than-normal speed.

As expected, the postduty crews had had less presimulation sleep and reported singificantly more fatigue. But, to the researcher' astonishment, "fatigued crews were rated as performing significatnly better and made fewer serious operational errors than the rested, preduty crews."

As NASA's researchers commented, "in hindsight, the finding shouldn't have been a surprise at all. By the very nature of the scheduling, most crews in the postduty condition had just completed three days of operation as a team. By contrast, those in the preduty condition normally did not have the beneft of recent experience with their other crew members."

When the researchers reanalyzed their data, fatigue was found to be a far less statistically significant safety factor than whether the crews had recently flown together. The simulation fidings indicate that crew schedules resulting in frequent mixing of pilot teams can have significant operational implications. The NASA researchers noted that no fewer than three of the wors 1980s-era accidents — a stall under icy conditions, an aborted takeoff that landed the plane in the water, and a runway collison in dense fog — all involved crews paired for the first time.

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet:

Former vice president Al Gore — who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save — launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

"I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen," said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. "They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn't they heed me before it was too late?"

Al Gore — or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al — placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity's hubristic folly.

You can thank The Onion for that one.

OPEC 2.0

In OPEC 2.0, Tim Wu makes an eye-opening comparison:

Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

More-Efficient OLED Lighting

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Princeton University have developed more-efficient OLED lighting:

Energy efficiency and flexible lighting applications have long been the promise of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). The technology hasn't lived up to its promise, however, because in typical OLEDs, only 20 percent of the light generated is released from the device. That means that most light is trapped inside the bulb, making it highly inefficient.

The new technology boosts illumination by 60 percent by using micro-lenses to guide the trapped light out of the device:

In OLEDs, white light is generated by using electricity to send an electron into nanometer-thick layers of organic materials that behave like semiconductor materials. Typically, the light in the substrate is internally reflected and runs parallel and not perpendicular. That's the crux of the problem because the light can't escape in the vertical direction without some coaxing. In Forrest's devices, the grids refract the trapped light, sending it to the five micrometers dome-shaped micro lenses. The light is sent off in a vertical orientation that helps release the trapped rays.

Forrest and his coworkers report that the technology emits about 70 lumens from a watt of power. In comparison, incandescent lightbulbs emit 15 lumens per watt. Fluorescent lights put out roughly 90 lumens of light per watt but have liabilities: they produce harsh light, lack longevity, and use environment-damaging substances like mercury.

Starbucks has deployed a new type of employee

Starbucks has deployed a new type of employee at its 58th-St. store in New York, and Joel Spolsky is displeased:

This employee wore a radio headset. Her main job was to go down the line of people waiting to order and ask them what they wanted in advance of their arriving at the cash register.

What's the problem?

There [at the register], they would be asked to repeat their order before paying and finally joining the line of customers waiting for their drinks to appear.

I have to agree; that sounds truly annoying. Someone at Starbucks Gossip explained the "benefit" of this system:

I learned from the website that the woman I had seen in the headset taking orders was officially called an expediter — but the job title is something of a red herring, according to the collective wisdom of the Starbucks staff members chatting on the site.

Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer's order is filled more quickly, they believe. Rather, expediters exist solely to prevent people in line from giving up and wandering off, maybe to go to the Dunkin' Donuts around the corner. Once a customer places an order, the logic goes, he or she feels an ethical obligation to wait for it to be filled, no matter how long the process takes. Expediters are there to lock in that order as soon as possible.

The Biggest Issue

In his recent op-ed piece, The Biggest Issue, David Brooks asserts that the U.S. became the leading economic power of the 20th century because of its "ferocious belief" that people have the power to transform their own lives, which led to an "unparalleled commitment" to education, hard work and economic freedom:

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years. [...] Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

Brooks calls this a "happy era" and laments that it ended around 1970, but he seems to assume that all education is good education, and that any additional education must lead inexorably to economic progress — or at least to capturing a bigger piece of the pie:

Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

This implies to me that a handful of remarkable technologists move us all forward, but more-educated workers capture more of the surplus than unskilled workers.

Anyway, I've commented on James Heckman's Schools, Skills, and Synapses (PDF) before. Brooks emphasizes a few of Heckman's points:

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability.

I'm not sure how Brooks can read Heckman's work and emphasize the "depressing accuracy" of educational predictions and still draw the policy conclusions he draws:

It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

How do we "boost educational attainment at the bottom" when educational attainment is "depressingly" easy to predict by age 5?

More-Efficient Thermoelectrics

Thermoelectrics — semiconductors that converts heat into electricity — haven't been widely used because they are expensive and inefficient, but researchers have recently developed much more efficient thermoelectrics by adding trace amounts of thallium to lead telluride:

The added thallium doubled the material's ability to convert heat into electricity by increasing the voltage that it produces. Heremans says that the improved efficiency could translate into a 10 percent increase in the fuel economy of cars if the devices are used to replace alternators in automobiles by generating electricity from the heat in exhaust.
[...]
Conventional lead telluride thermoelectrics convert about 6 percent of the energy in heat into electricity. Once it's incorporated into a thermoelectric generator, the more efficient thallium-enhanced material could increase this to 10 percent, once losses, such as those from making electrical connections, are taken into account.

One drawback is that thallium is extremely toxic.

Anyway, thermoelectrics could increase the fuel economy of cars, because cars waste a lot of energy as heat — almost all of it, in fact.



Currently cars use an alternator to transform mechanical energy into electricity — to recharge the battery, etc. — but thermoelectrics could transform some of that wasted heat instead.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Mamma Mia! is dangerous, perhaps evil, and certainly hypocritical in the extreme

Conservative science-fiction author Orson Scott Card says that Mamma Mia! is excellent art and entertainment — but it is also dangerous, perhaps evil, and certainly hypocritical in the extreme:

As entertainment, as art, there is so much to love.

As a social artifact, this movie is so loathsome it almost gives me a rash. Here's why:

I can live with all the politically correct cant: You don't need to find your father to find yourself! I'm glad I raised my daughter alone, it was better that way. We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall! (Oh, wait, that was Joni Mitchell — but the sentiment is there, all right.) Isn't it cute that Colin Firth's character turns out to be gay?

I can live with it because I've been numbed. But what I can't live with is the vile hypocrisy of it. Because, while the dialogue keeps delivering punchy little slogans for the elitist anti-marriage crowd (and all the pro-marriage sentiments are uttered by a naif who, at the end, changes her mind), this movie absolutely depends, for all its emotional interest and impact, on the audience's innate longing for love and marriage, monogamy and fidelity, babies and nuclear families with a mom and a dad.

In other words, they're having their cake and eating it, too. This movie has no point, it does not work, without the audience's commitment to the traditional (and, one might even say, culturally necessary) moral worldview.

And yet the movie pretends to be post-marriage and post-family.

The problem is that while coasting on tradition, Mamma Mia! is normalizing the civilizational deathwish of our current cultural elite. As a social artifact, it isn't worth scraping off of the bottom of my shoe.

I had a wonderful time watching it.

Zucchiniware

It has been a while since I mentioned Michael Schrage's Serious Play, but I thought I'd share the story of Zucchiniware:

One of the dullest low-level tasks in creating software at Microsoft is managing "the daily build," which is, in practice, a daily prototype of the product in process. The person performing the daily build collects all the code from the programmers on the product team and puts it on a single computer to see if it all works together. For years, this task was performed by an entry-level person and regarded as mind-numbing grunt work. One manager changed that in a way that made the process more efficient and more effective. Instead of delegating the task to a grunt, the manager gave the daily-build responsibilities to the people writing the code. Each day the programmers would give their code to one "buildmeister," who put it all together. If the code wasn't compatible, the person whose software "broke the build" became buildmeister as punishment until someone else's code broke the build. In the summer of 1996, the buildmeister was also given an enormous zucchini — "the zucchini of questionable freshness," — sometimes with Groucho Marx glasses and a fake nose, to keep until the next buildmeister was named.

Delegating the task of buildmesiter to the team changed Microsoft's daily prototyping process for the better. More developers got to see how their work fit together, or didn't. No one wanted to be buildmeister, so an extra incentive to hand in quality code was created. What's more, the unpleasant task of build management was equitably shared by everyone in the group. Accountability, responsibility, and quality were thus aligned.

The realignment had other important repercussions. The smartest and savviest high-level software developers hated being buildmeisters and wanted to spend as little time on the task as possible. But instead of weaseling out, they wrote tools to automate the task of buildmeister. The result? Microsoft developrs now manage the build with a fraction of the friction and in a fraction of the time they did in the mid-1990s.

Army Wants 'First-Person Thinker' Video Game

David Axe notes that "video games are all the rage in the U.S. Army," but "almost all of them are street-level, tactical games for young grunts." Major Kyle Burley, a staffer at the Army War College, wants to see something to help make better generals, something he calls a first-person thinker:

Today Burley uses a moderated, text-based game that simulates top command during an imaginary Second Korean War. Essentially, the game is just a series of chat rooms where colonels hash out potential command decisions, and a moderator decides whether they’re good decisions or not. What Burley wants is an "immersive" game with a live 3D environment and avatars for the players. "Ideally, we would have a virtual, online, Web-access roleplaying environment which allows students to be an avatar [that] probably looks much like the student, and they're given a skin like in Second Life that is equivalent to their position, and they go into different moderated rooms and talk to fellow roleplayers that are in that scenario."

I think Burley is missing the point. There's nothing first-person about being a general; a general gives orders. His job is to get information, usually by talking to people, and make decisions, which has nothing to do with 3D movement.

Leopard savaging a crocodile caught on camera

Crocodiles have been known to catch and eat leopards from time to time, but now a leopard has been caught on camera "savaging" a crocodile — which is a pretty big risk to take for not much meat:

















(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Tall ships make a comeback as oil price hits exports

Tall ships make a comeback as oil price hits exports:

A British schooner docked in Penzance yesterday carrying 30,000 bottles of wine on a voyage that enthusiasts believe will herald a return to wind power in merchant shipping.

The first commercial cargo of French wine to be transported by sail in the modern era is due in Dublin this week after a six-day journey, which is being touted as a green and ultimately cheap alternative to fuel propulsion.

The 108-year-old, wooden, triple-masted Kathleen & May has been chartered by the Compagnie de Transport Maritime à la Voile (CTMV), a shipping company established in France to specialise in merchant sailing. “This is beyond anybody's dreams,” said Steve Clarke, the owner of the Kathleen & May, which was built in 1900 in Ferguson and Baird's yard at Connah's Quay near Chester.

“When I bought this boat in 1966 it was going to be cut up with chainsaws. Nobody ever imagined it would ever sail again.” He said that amid high fuel costs and concern over carbon emissions, commercial sailing ships could have a future. “I think they might have hit on something.”

Amusingly, the Kathleen & May site is still offering "an exceptionally rare opportunity to purchase an important part of Britain’s maritime heritage":

Built in 1900, the Kathleen & May is the only wooden triple-masted sailing schooner still in existence. One of only 60 famous tall ships on the UK’s National Register of Historic Vessels, neighbours include the Cutty Sark and HMS Victory. Beautiful and graceful, this tall ship has been completely and sympathetically renovated to its original 1900 specification.

Why we never need to build another polluting power plant

Joseph Romm argues that we never need to build another power plant, because we can just use our current energy supply more efficiently — but power companies have no incentive to push conservation:

The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops.

California, of course, has pushed conservation:

In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent. If the entire nation had California's much cleaner electric grid, we would cut total U.S. global-warming pollution by more than a quarter without raising American electric bills. And if all of America adopted the same energy-efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another polluting power plant.

How did California do it?

Many of the strategies are obvious: better insulation, energy-efficient lighting, heating and cooling. But some of the strategies were unexpected. The state found that the average residential air duct leaked 20 to 30 percent of the heated and cooled air it carried. It then required leakage rates below 6 percent, and every seventh new house is inspected. The state found that in outdoor lighting for parking lots and streets, about 15 percent of the light was directed up, illuminating nothing but the sky. The state required new outdoor lighting to cut that to below 6 percent. Flat roofs on commercial buildings must be white, which reflects the sunlight and keeps the buildings cooler, reducing air-conditioning energy demands. The state subsidized high-efficiency LED traffic lights for cities that lacked the money, ultimately converting the entire state.

Significantly, California adopted regulations so that utility company profits are not tied to how much electricity they sell. This is called "decoupling." It also allowed utilities to take a share of any energy savings they help consumers and businesses achieve. The bottom line is that California utilities can make money when their customers save money. That puts energy-efficiency investments on the same competitive playing field as generation from new power plants.

The cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2 to 3 cents per avoided kilowatt hour, which is about one-fifth the cost of electricity generated from new nuclear, coal and natural gas-fired plants. And, of course, energy efficiency does not require new power lines and does not generate greenhouse-gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.

Saving energy is a surprisingly easy way to save a lot of money, as Dow Chemical's Louisiana division found out when it held an employee contest for energy-saving ideas:

The first year of the contest had 27 winners requiring a total capital investment of $1.7 million with an average annual return on investment of 173 percent. Many at Dow felt that there couldn't be others with such high returns. The skeptics were wrong. The 1983 contest had 32 winners requiring a total capital investment of $2.2 million and a 340 percent return — a savings of $7.5 million in the first year and every year after that. Even as fuel prices declined in the mid-1980s, the savings kept growing. The average return to the 1989 contest was the highest ever, an astounding 470 percent in 1989 — a payback of 11 weeks that saved the company $37 million a year.

You might think that after 10 years, and nearly 700 projects, the 2,000 Dow employees would be tapped out of ideas. Yet the contest in 1991, 1992 and 1993 each had in excess of 120 winners with an average return on investment of 300 percent. Total savings to Dow from just those projects exceeded $75 million a year.

Ironically, the Department of Energy needed a similar competition to reduce its own energy waste:

As they were at Dow, many DOE employees were skeptical such opportunities existed. Yet the first two contest rounds identified and funded 18 projects that cost $4.6 million and provided the department $10 million in savings every year, while avoiding more than 100 tons of low-level radioactive pollution and other kinds of waste. The DOE's regional operating officers ended up funding 260 projects costing $20 million that have been estimated to achieve annual savings of $90 million a year.

Naturally Romm thinks the answer lies in more and better federal regulations. I suspect higher energy prices will get companies looking to reduce energy waste.

Writing what I should have written so many years ago

Kevin Myers continues his politically incorrect writing by writing what [he] should have written so many years ago:

The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

(Hat tip to Michael Blowhard.)

TapouT Holds the Ring in a Scrappy Game

MMA has gone mainstream, as evidenced by its MSM coverage.

For me, the highlight of BusinessWeek's recent piece is the picture of Charles "Mask" Lewis, looking like a clown, saying, "We're respected."

Yes, yes, that's exactly what I was thinking — respected.

Sid and Marty Krofft are still pulling the strings

Puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft are still pulling the strings:

Universal Pictures has just finished principal photography on a $100-million adaptation of "Land of the Lost," the mid-1970s Krofft show about a family stranded in a jungle teeming with dinosaurs and hissing reptile-men called Sleestak.

Seriously, a $100-million adaptation of Land of the Lost? It gets wackier:

The remake is a comedy starring Will Ferrell, and Universal has circled it as its big popcorn movie for summer 2009.

Radiation-Seeking Fungus

In Chernobyl, wildlife is thriving. In fact, in the old reactor, a new radiation-seeking fungus is thriving:

In 1999, a robot sent to map the inside of the reactor returned with samples of a particularly black fungi, indicating an abundance of the biological pigment melanin, which also colours your skin.

Though melanin is typically associated with 'protective' properties – absorbing and safely transforming different electromagnetic wavelengths, such as DNA-damaging ultraviolet light – the researchers had an inkling that a more extraordinary phenomenon was allowing the fungi to prosper; something still involving the combination of melanin and radiation, but beyond the bounds of radioactive protection.

After all, even without melanin, many fungi are intrinsically radiation-resistant.

Their hunch was bolstered by findings of melanised fungi, happily congregating in the cooling pools of functional nuclear reactors, and by studies of dark, 'radiation-seeking' fungi, purposefully growing towards radioactive particles in soil, particularly around Chernobyl.

The team looked to the example of photosynthesis as a model, said Casadevall. If plants can use the green pigment, chlorophyll, to absorb energy from the Sun and produce a usable form of chemical energy, they reasoned, fungi might be able to use their melanin pigment and radiation energy in a similar way. They even devised the snazzy moniker, 'radiosynthesis', for the process.

To test their idea, the group analysed three different types of fungi, including Cladosporium sphaerospermum, the species abundant in and around Chernobyl. Using ionising radiation from the radioactive isotope, caesium-137, they exposed the fungi to radiation doses similar to those inside the damaged reactor, and about 500 times greater than the Earth's normal background level.

Melanin-containing fungi exposed to the radiation – even when nutrient-starved on purpose – grew significantly larger and up to 2.5 times faster than fungi without melanin and those not exposed to radiation.

The strange case of the superheroes, the geeks and the studios

The strange case of the superheroes, the geeks and the studios explains that Comic-con is put on by a non-profit entity:

I posited to the folks that put together Comic-con that not only might they be making a wack-load more money if they went into business — or at least had a for-profit arm — but that they might even be better at fulfilling their stated mission. Why let the studios make all this money off their backs? Some obvious profit-maximizing efforts for Comic-con would include raising ticket prices or moving the whole event — which sells out and bursts the seams of San Diego's convention center — to a bigger venue like Las Vegas. Variety recently noted that the event's $75 four-day passes were being scalped for as much as $300.

Here's a quick financial profile, based on Comic-con's most recent publicly-available financial statement, for the fiscal year ended August 2006: The company earned roughly $1 million on revenues of nearly $6 million, and had some $5 million in retained earnings. Only four full-time employees make more than $50,000, and the highest paid made $76,000 that year. One of the four, marketing chief David Glanzer, told me eagerly that the convention "isn't about the money, it's about the content. We're a group of fans trying to put on a show."

Tesla's wild ride

Tesla's wild ride got particularly wild when PayPal co-founder Elon Musk offered to fund the fledgling electric-car company:

Musk saw the franchise-dealership arrangements that U.S. car companies had tangled themselves up in as an increasingly expensive, margin-killing model. He wanted to own and operate Tesla dealerships rather than franchise them. He wanted final say over all decisions — which he would get by naming himself chairman. And finally, Musk demanded that they close the deal in two weeks. His wife was expecting twins, and he needed everything buttoned up by then. Though Musk had a reputation for outsized thinking and an ego to match, Eberhard wasn't in a position to be picky. As he puts it, "You take money from the people who offer it to you."

Tesla now had funding, a business plan, and even a chassis. The first prototype of Tesla's car, dubbed the Roadster, would be based on a $45,000 fiberglass-skinned sports car that Lotus sold, called the Elise. Lotus made fast, light cars and also had the virtue of being the only sports car manufacturer that would give Tesla management the time of day. While Eberhard was thrilled to have a viable plan to build the Roadster, Musk had even bigger ideas. "Eberhard's initial stimulus for starting Tesla was to build the EV he wanted to buy," says Wright. "Musk had a much grander vision: He wanted to be the next General Motors."
[...]
As the car progressed, staffers began to realize that a green light from Eberhard was not sufficient. "The question always had to be asked," says Tarpenning, "'What will Elon think of that?'"

As time went on, Musk became more and more comfortable pulling rank. Jessica Switzer, who ran marketing at Tesla until the car's official launch in 2006, recalls persuading Eberhard to spend $30,000 on focus groups to test the car's logo, look, and feel. A few weeks later Musk killed the project without explanation. With Eberhard's approval, Switzer hired people from a PR firm in Detroit to drum up publicity in the automotive press before the car's launch. Musk promptly fired them. She later learned that Musk didn't want to spend money on marketing before the car was finished and figured his own involvement and the car itself would drum up more than enough PR.

When it came to design, Musk's vision — building the Next Great American Car Company — soon came into conflict with Eberhard's goal of getting a cool electric sports car to market quickly and relatively cheaply. The Lotus Elise chassis on which the Roadster was based had a high doorsill, a feature that makes entering the car tricky if you are not careful. Getting out is even harder. It took several attempts for Musk's wife to get out of an early Roadster prototype while wearing a dress. So Musk ordered the engineers to lower the doorsill two inches, thereby losing much of the cost savings that come from using a crash-tested off-the-rack chassis. "Have you tried getting out of an Elise?" asks Musk. "It's like you have to be a contortionist."

And rather than use the fiberglass body panels from the Elise that Eberhard had suggested, Musk insisted on carbon fiber, a lighter, stronger, and "cooler" material, in his opinion. He then went on to redesign the headlights and the door latches. After riding for a weekend in an early Roadster model and taking a beating in the standard Lotus seats, he insisted that custom seats be developed. Every change meant additional cost and time. "I always argued that we would sell exactly as many cars whether the door latches were push-button or electronic, whether the body panels were carbon fiber or fiberglass," Eberhard says. "All the nicer, cooler, faster stuff increased risk."

But Musk got his way, in large part because he was putting more and more of his own money into Tesla. He led Tesla's $12 million second round of financing in the fall of 2005, and also convinced some of his high-powered friends, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and eBay employee No. 2, Jeff Skoll, to invest in later rounds. To date, he has personally put in $55 million of the $145 million Tesla has raised.

Musk, who is precise in his sentences, laughs easily, and if fired up will literally leap from his chair to punctuate a comment, admits he poked his nose into everything. "I was very insistent on things during the design phase, and it is true those things cost money," he says, "but you can't sell a $100,000 car that looks like crap." Unfortunately, while the exterior of the Tesla was designed and redesigned to meet Musk's exacting specifications, there was one very big problem: Two months before the car was set to debut in the summer of 2006, it still didn't have a production-ready transmission.

I remember being perplexed by Tesla's transmission problem, because electric vehicles generally have very simple transmissions with just one gear:

Electric motors have the advantage of being lightning fast from a standing start. But to get to the top speed that Tesla had promised (125 mph), they needed either a more powerful drive train or a second gear that could send the car speeding beyond 100 mph.

Problem was, Tesla's engineering team didn't yet have the experience to build a more powerful drive train, and no one had come up with a two-speed transmission that could go from 13,000 rpm to 7,000 rpm and survive for more than a few thousand miles before it wore out. Eberhard was inclined to stay on schedule, get cars on the road by sticking with one gear, and offer a Roadster that topped out at 110 mph.

Instead Musk launched the search for a supplier that could deliver a two-speed transmission. "Why did DeLorean fail?" Musk asks. "Because it was a shitty sports car. It may have looked cool, but it had the acceleration of a Honda Civic. That's what our car would have been with the motor we had and the power electronics we had connected to a single speed."

The whole point of an electric sports car is not top speed.

Homeland Security Cost-Benefit Analysis

Bruce Schneier looks at John Mueller's homeland security cost-benefit analysis, titled The Quixotic Quest for Invulnerability: Assessing the Costs, Benefits, and Probabilities of Protecting the Homeland:

The premises:

1. The number of potential terrorist targets is essentially infinite.
2. The probability that any individual target will be attacked is essentially zero.
3. If one potential target happens to enjoy a degree of protection, the agile terrorist usually can readily move on to another one.
4. Most targets are "vulnerable" in that it is not very difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be rebuilt in fairly short order and at tolerable expense.
5. It is essentially impossible to make a very wide variety of potential terrorist targets invulnerable except by completely closing them down.

The policy implications:

1. Any protective policy should be compared to a "null case": do nothing, and use the money saved to rebuild and to compensate any victims.
   
2. Abandon any effort to imagine a terrorist target list.
   
3. Consider negative effects of protection measures: not only direct cost, but inconvenience, enhancement of fear, negative economic impacts, reduction of liberties.
   
4. Consider the opportunity costs, the tradeoffs, of protection measures.
   

Here's the abstract:

This paper attempts to set out some general parameters for coming to grips with a central homeland security concern: the effort to make potential targets invulnerable, or at least notably less vulnerable, to terrorist attack. It argues that protection makes sense only when protection is feasible for an entire class of potential targets and when the destruction of something in that target set would have quite large physical, economic, psychological, and/or political consequences. There are a very large number of potential targets where protection is essentially a waste of resources and a much more limited one where it may be effective.

The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score

The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score on the Wonderlic IQ test. Ben Fry decided to illustrate this:

Wonderlic himself says that basically, the scores decrease as you move further away from the ball, which is interesting but unsurprising. It’s sort of obvious that a quarterback needs to be on the smarter side, but I was curious to see what this actually looked like. Using this table as a guide, I then grabbed this diagram from Wikipedia showing a typical formation in a football game. I cleaned up the design of the diagram a bit and replaced the positions with their scores....To make the diagram a bit clearer, I scaled each position based on its score....With the proportion, I no longer need the numbers, so I’ve switched back to using the initials for each position’s title:

I'm odd enough that this was one of my first questions:

Don’t tell Tufte that I’ve used the radius, not the proportional area, of the circle as the value for each ellipse! A cardinal sin that I’m using in this case to improve proportion and clarify a point.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)

Royal Marine who jumped on grenade awarded George Cross

A Royal Marine who jumped on a grenade was awarded the George Cross — which is like the Victoria Cross, but is awarded for bravery while not in the face of the enemy:

"It was a case of either having four of us as fatalities or badly wounded — or one," he said after the incident last February in Helmand province

L/Cpl Croucher, 24, was part of a company of 40 Commando sent to investigate a suspected Taliban bomb-making factory near the town of Sangin when he set off the trip-wire booby-trap that unleashed the deadly grenade.

"I thought, 'I've set this bloody thing off and I'm going to do whatever it takes to protect the others,'" he said.

The Marine then shouted "Grenade. Take cover" to three men close to the bomb.

"I knew a grenade like this has a killing circumference of about five metres," he said. "I'd been through this scenario in my mind and realised there was nowhere to take cover — there's no point running off because you're going to catch shrapnel.

"The lads behind me would have caught a lot too."

The serviceman, from Birmingham, "fully expected" to lose a limb but was willing to make the sacrifice "if I could keep my torso and head intact".

He dived onto the floor, rolled over and used his backpack — containing a 66mm rocket, a large lithium battery and medical kit — to cover the lethal shrapnel fragments from the coming blast.

When the bang went off he was thrown through the air and suffered just a nose bleed.

"It took 30 seconds before I realised I was definitely not dead," he said.

The astonished Marines looked on as L/Cpl Croucher's body armour and backpack shielded everyone from the blast which caused a few cuts and bruises.

L/Cpl Croucher was examined by a medic who recommended he should be evacuated but the Marine, who has completed three tours of Iraq, was determined to stay to fight the Taliban and within an hour had shot an insurgent approaching their position.

On Board Energy Storage

Rod Adams explains how on-board energy storage is the reason why automobile engineers chose fossil fuel so many years ago — and why we still use fossil fuel today:

When you look at the products of the reaction in a balanced equation — where all of the input elements are accounted for in the outputs — you will discover that the products weigh about 4.5–5 times as much as the hydrogen and carbon input.

The rest of the weight comes from oxygen. Here is the chemical equation often used to describe gasoline combustion (gasoline is actually a complex combination of various hydrocarbons each with different numbers of carbon and hydrogen atoms, but C₈H₁₈ is representative of them all.)

C₈H₁₈ + 12.5 O₂ → 8 CO₂ + 9 H₂O

By mass, only 114 units out of 514 units are in the gasoline, while the rest is in the oxygen. This is important for vehicles because oxygen does not need to be carried — it can be sucked in as needed. There is also no technical requirement — in the absence of new regulations — to capture and store the waste products and carry them around.

The people who developed the internal combustion engines were seeking a way to eliminate the weight of the water, piping and pressure vessels that limited the portability of steam engines. They figured out that they could use the hot products from combustion to directly move pistons and turbines as long as the input fuel did not have too many contaminants that could damage the engine parts. Coal and wood contain a lot of contaminants and both of those solid materials cannot be moved with pumps.

Batteries have to contain all of the chemicals on both sides of their energy releasing equation. The very best batteries available today can store about 0.4 MJ/kg (0.05 kw-hr/lb) including the cases and safety systems. In contrast, gasoline carries about 46 MJ/kg (5.7 kw-hrs/lb).

Even with a 20% efficient IC engine, a gasoline tank stores 20 times as much energy as a battery of equal weight. As the vehicle is moving it gets rid of some of that weight. Battery powered vehicles must carry the full weight of their energy source.

The energy density difference also plays a key role in the time that it takes to put more energy back on the vehicle once a fuel load is consumed. A two minute fill-up of a 12 gallon tank puts the equivalent of 87 kilowatt-hours into the vehicle, again, taking into account the 20% thermal efficiency.

87 kilowatt-hours in 2 minutes works out to 2.6 MegaWatts. Even with a 220 volt connection, that would require about 11,800 amperes of current. Just imagine the size of the electric cables for that current.

Soy foods 'reduce sperm numbers'

Soy foods 'reduce sperm numbers' — or lesser men eat soy:

The Harvard School of Public Health study looked at the diets of 99 men who had attended a fertility clinic with their partners and provided a semen sample.

The men were divided into four groups depending on how much soy they ate, and when the sperm concentration of men eating the most soy was compared with those eating the least, there was a significant difference.

The "normal" sperm concentration for a man is between 80 and 120 million per millilitre, and the average of men who ate on average a portion of soy-based food every other day was 41 million fewer.

Dr Jorge Chavarro, who led the study, said that chemicals called isoflavones in the soy might be affecting sperm production.

These chemicals can have similar effects to the human hormone oestrogen.

Dr Chavarro noticed that overweight or obese men seemed even more prone to this effect, which may reflect the fact that higher levels of body fat can also lead to increased oestrogen production in men.

Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo-Organisms

Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo-Organisms:

Deep below the sea floor live massive colonies of primitive microbes.

Almost like one-celled zombies, these microbes use so little energy that it might be more accurate to call them undead rather than alive.

Yet scientists think that the species might provide a model for life on other planets. Even on this planet, such microbes might account for a whopping 10 percent of the Earth's biomass.

"In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards," said Christopher House, a geosciences professor at Penn State University, and the lead author of the paper, in a release. "They metabolize a little, but not much."

The cold, lightless and energy-poor conditions under the seafloor provide a promising research analog for the harsh conditions in subsurface Martian soil or near hydrothermal vents on Europa, Jupiter's second moon.

"We do not expect the microbes in other places to be these microbes exactly," said House. "But, they could be living at a similar slow rate."

Subseafloor microbes, according to a metagenomic analysis to be published Thursday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , are genetically distinct from life on Earth's surface and oceans. The Archaea the Penn State researchers found might look like bacteria, but they don't eat or work like them. While E. coli might double its numbers in 30 minutes, Archaea could take hundreds or even thousands of years to accomplish the same amount of growth.

The researchers conducted their work off the coast of South America in a region known as the Peru Margin. They sampled genetic material from the biomes at varying depths. Below 160 feet, the researcher said Archaea account for 90 percent of the life present, and represent the most unique environment thus far revealed by metagenomic analysis.

The Archaea represent a thus-far untapped genetic repository for scientists looking for novel genes for changing metabolism, withstanding cold or synthesizing chemicals.

Drug for deadly prostate cancer

Researchers have developed a new drug for deadly prostate cancer:

It had been assumed that the cancer was driven by sex hormones such as testosterone produced in the testicles.

Current treatments work by stopping the testicles from producing testosterone.

However, experts have now discovered that the cancer can feed on sex hormones from all sources, including supplies of the hormone produced by the tumour itself.

Abiraterone works by blocking production of the hormones throughout the body.

The latest study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is based on just 21 patients with advanced, aggressive prostate cancer treated with the drug — but data has been collected on a total of 250 worldwide.

It found significant tumour shrinkage, and a drop in tell-tale levels of a key protein produced by the cancer called prostate specific antigen in the majority of patients.

Many of the patients have reported a significant improvement in the quality of their lives.

Some were able to stop taking morphine for the relief of pain caused by the spread of the disease to their bones.

California adopts innovative solar loan law

California adopts innovative solar loan law:

The law, sponsored by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D- Van Nuys), allows cities and counties to make low-interest loans to homeowners and businesses to install solar panels, high-efficiency air conditioners and other improvements to save energy. Participants can pay back the loans as part of their property taxes. If they move, the improvements and loan balance are transferred to the next owner.

The financing scheme, if adopted by cities, is likely to give a statewide boost to the installation of solar panels to generate electricity. Solar power systems can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 — more than many homeowners can afford, although state rebates cover much of the cost. But with the loans, and the guarantee that the investment will not be lost when people sell their homes, the risk is dramatically reduced.

This might work for "green" technologies that actually make financial sense, like geothermal heat pumps, but which require big up-front investment — especially because consumers don't yet know they make financial sense.

The Mystery of “b := (b = false)”

Stuart Reges explains The Mystery of “b := (b = false)” — and a few other "powerhouse questions" on the computer science advanced placement exam:

Most multiple-choice questions on the exam had few significant correlations with other parts of the exam. But a small set of five questions had a nontrivial correlation with many parts of the test. One question in particular demonstrated such correlations. It asked about the effect of the assignment statement “b := (b = false)” for a boolean variable b. One interpretation of this data is that these questions are testing general programming aptitude.
[...]
Computer Science educators have for years complained that introductory courses seem to be divided between a group of students who “get it” and a group of students who do not. Donald Knuth has written about this phenomenon:

“Educators of computer science have repeatedly observed that only about 2 out of every 100 students enrolling in introductory programming classes really resonate with the subject and seem to be natural-born computer scientists…I conclude that roughly 2% of all people ‘think algorithmically,’ in the sense that they can reason rapidly about algorithmic processes.”

[...]
It was an unpublished study conducted by Gerrit DeYoung in which he found that a measure of quantitative reasoning was not a predictor of success in a course for CS majors but was a reasonable predictor of success in a course for nonmajors. Knuth’s tentative conclusion was that there is some kind of CS aptitude that is not measured by standard tests of quantitative reasoning and that students who lacked that ability were instead relying on general quantitative aptitude.
[...]
What exactly do the powerhouse questions look like? Let’s explore question 23 in depth because it had the most nontrivial correlations. The exact text of the question is reproduced below:

23. If b is a Boolean variable, then the statement b := (b = false) has what effect?
(A) It causes a compile-time error message.
(B) It causes a run-time error message.
(C) It causes b to have value false regardless of its value just before the statement was executed.
(D) It always changes the value of b.
(E) It changes the value of b if and only if b had value true just before the statement was executed.

Only 5.4% of the students skipped the question. Of those who answered, 60% got it right. And getting this question right turned out to be a predictor of success on most of the rest of the exam, including solving complex problems like reversing a linked list.

To answer this question correctly, a student has to be able to read the code and simulate its execution. They also have to be able to identify the correct answer among the given choices.
[...]
So what do the powerhouse questions have in common? They all involve reading and understanding code. They all test whether students have a proper mental model of program execution. And they involve some of the most central concepts from the first year programming course: logic, recursion and two-dimensional arrays.

The author had the opportunity to present these results to a group of Stanford faculty, including the late Bob Floyd. Floyd, who had taught introductory programming many times, commented that the greatest single predictor he had noticed for success was whether students had a mental model of program execution, whether they could “play computer” in their head. He commented that these questions seemed to be very good at measuring that ability.
[...]
Knuth provides an intriguing intuition about this in talking about the difference between mathematical reasoning and algorithmic thinking:

“The other missing concept that seems to separate mathematicians from computer scientists is related to the ‘assignment operation’ :=, which changes values of quantities. More precisely, I would say that the missing concept is the dynamic notion of the state of a process. ‘How did I get here? What is true now? What should happen next if I’m going to get to the end?’ Changing states of affairs, or snapshots of a computation, seem to be intimately related to algorithms and algorithmic thinking.”

Question 23 is about assignment for a boolean variable that requires thinking about its value before the assignment statement and what value it will have afterwards.

Photographing thugs 'is assault', police tell householder snapping proof of anti-social behaviour

If this is true, the UK is self-destructing even faster than I realized. Photographing thugs 'is assault', police tell householder snapping proof of anti-social behaviour:

David Green, 64, and his neighbours had been plagued by the youths from a nearby comprehensive school for months, and was advised by their headmaster to identify them so action could be taken.

But when Mr Green left his £1million London flat to take photographs of the gang, who were aged around 17, he said one threatened to kill him while another called the police on his mobile.

And he claimed that a Police Community Support Officer sent to the scene promptly issued a warning that taking pictures of youths without permission was illegal, and could lead to a charge of assault.

Start-Up May Aid Telecoms' Reach

A new start-up may aid telecoms' reach into developing nations with its low-energy base stations:

Some two billion new subscribers are projected to start using mobile phones in the next five years, and 80% of them live in developing-world markets, according to analyst estimates. Yet wiring villages without reliable electricity, and where residents have little money to spend, requires a technological rethink.

To power mobile networks in remote areas today, telecommunications operators pair base stations — the tower-top radio transmitters that form the backbone of mobile networks — with diesel-powered generators and batteries. These are impractical and expensive: Fuel accounts for 65% of the cost of operating a typical base station.

VNL, which has headquarters in New Delhi and Stockholm, has spent the past four years developing a simplified base station that is powered by solar panels and requires just a fraction of the electricity of typical base stations.
[...]
VNL's base station will cost $3,500 and require 100 watts to run, about the same as a light bulb. By contrast, the GSM stations most widely used today can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000. The most energy-efficient models require around 600 watts; others may need several thousand watts.

"We started with a clean sheet of paper, and told ourselves that we needed to design technology perfectly suited for the rural environment," says VNL Chief Executive Anil Raj, a former executive at Ericsson.

The tower is designed to make it easy for people with little professional training to install. The equipment comes with a pictorial instruction manual similar to those for Ikea's do-it-yourself furniture. It has just one button, used to turn it on. Once the pole is erected, the base station beeps intermittently until the radio antenna is rotated manually to face the direction of the mobile network. When the antenna is perfectly aligned, the sound steadies.

Toy rocket inspires variable-speed bullets

Toy rocket inspires variable-speed bullets:

Lund and Company Invention, a toy design studio based near Chicago, makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolysing water. Now the company is being funded by the US army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead.

The US Army are interested in arming soldiers with weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes. They asked Company Invention to make a rifle that can fire bullets at various speeds.

The new weapon, called the Variable Velocity Weapon System or VWS, lets the soldier to use the same rifle for crowd control and combat, by altering the muzzle velocity. It could be loaded with "rubber bullets" designed only to deliver blunt impacts on a person, full-speed lethal rounds or projectiles somewhere between the two.

Bruce Lund, the company's CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet. This determines the explosive capability of the propellant and consequently the velocity of the bullet as it leaves the gun. "Projectile velocity varies from non-lethal at 10 metres, to lethal at 100 metres or more, as desired," says Lund.

The company says that the weapon produces less heat and light than traditional guns. It can also be made lighter and could have a high power setting for long-range sniping.

Police already fire non-lethal projectiles from standard shotguns. These are known as "beanbag" rounds, bags of lead shot which will knock down a suspect at ranges of up to 10 metres. They are termed "non-lethal", but can cause bruising or even broken ribs.

Some Athletes’ Genes Help Outwit Doping Test

In a Swedish study, 55 men were given testosterone injections and then given the standard drug test. Most of the men tested positive, but 17 did not.

Some Athletes’ Genes Help Outwit Doping Test:

Those 17 men can build muscles with testosterone, they respond normally to the hormone, but they are missing both copies of a gene used to convert the testosterone into a form that dissolves in urine. The result is that they may be able to take testosterone with impunity.

The gene deletion is especially common in Asian men, notes Jenny Jakobsson Schulze, a molecular geneticist at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm. Dr. Schulze is the first author of the testosterone study, published recently in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Dr. Schulze learned from an earlier study that about two-thirds of Asian men are missing both copies of the gene, as are nearly 10 percent of Caucasians. The prevalence in other groups is not known.
[...]
The gene in question adds a chemical, glucuronide, to testosterone. That converts it from a substance that dissolves in oil into one that dissolves in water and urine.
[...]
The men with two normal copies of the gene had T [testosterone] to E [epitestosterone] ratios that soared to 100; those with one copy of the gene had ratios that reached 50; those with no copies had almost no rise in their ratios and 40 percent of them had a ratio that never reached 4.

So the gold medal goes to the guy who's genetically untestable? Great.

(Hat tip to Educated Guesswork.)

Drug restores speech in Alzheimer's; experts worry

An anti-inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis drug restores speech in Alzheimer's patients, but experts worry that the small, not-so-rigorous study may give people false hope:

The study, reported on Sunday in the journal BioMed Central BMC Neurology, involved 12 patients who had greatly improved language recall shortly after treatment with Enbrel, or etanercept, an anti-inflammatory drug co-marketed by Amgen and Wyeth.
[...]
Tobinick believes the drug may work in the brain by blocking an excess of tumor necrosis factor-alpha or TNF-alpha, which may affect communication in the brain.
[...]
Tobinick acknowledged the study is limited because people knew they were getting the drug. Alzheimer's patients in such open-label studies often show improvement.

"Placebo effect is an enormous problem in open-label studies," said Dr. Scott Turner, incoming director of the Memory Disorders Program at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington.

Turner said the true test must come from a more scientifically rigorous double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial. In such studies, patients receive either a dummy treatment or an active agent, and neither the doctor nor the patient knows which.

Forecasting Oil Prices: It’s Easy to Beat the Experts

When it comes to forecasting oil prices, it’s easy to beat the experts — because the market's already done the work for you:

At least this is what I learned from a recent working paper, “What Do We Learn From the Price of Crude Oil Futures?” by Michigan economists Ron Alquist and Lutz Kilian.

The authors compare a whole range of different ways of forecasting oil prices: they look up the Consensus Forecast (from a survey of expert economic forecasters), oil futures, the difference between the oil price in futures and spot markets, and also a range of more or less complicated econometric models that take account of recent trends, as well as variables like the interest rate.

And it turns out that they all do worse than one simple forecast: the current oil price. That’s right: the most accurate forecast of oil prices over the next month, year, or quarter is the current oil price. We call this the no-change forecast.

Give me your tired, your poor...doctoral candidates

If you are a PhD student in America, The Economist notes, there's a good chance that your undergraduate degree came from Tsinghua University in China. "That's because Tsinghua and Peking Universities are now the top feeder schools for American PhD programmes":

American students who do have the skills necessary for a quantitative PhD might also be less likely to pursue graduate work, because these skills are in high demand. A clever graduate with strong quantitative skills can fetch a high salary right out of university. The alternative of seven years of indentured servitude to your adviser probably sounds less appealing to many recent graduates.

Students from China do not face such high-paying alternatives at home. Also, now that the number of H2 visas for skilled labour has decreased, PhD programmes provide a path to America for some. This helps explain why the number of foreign students in PhD programmes increased remarkably between 2001 and 2006. After completing their studies, most foreign-born students hope to stay in America.

Kim's Game

I didn't realize that the jewel game from Kipling's Kim had been dubbed Kim's Game and popularized in real life:

Kim, a teenager being trained in secret as a spy, spends a month in Simla, India at the home of Mr. Lurgan, who ostensibly runs a jewel shop but in truth is engaged in espionage for the British against the Russians. Lurgan brings out a copper tray and tosses a handful of jewels onto it; his boy servant explains to Kim:

Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for me. When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib. I will write mine.

They contest the game many times, sometimes with jewels, sometimes with odd objects, and sometimes with photographs of people. It is considered a vital part of training in observation; Lurgan says:

[Do] it many times over till it is done perfectly — for it is worth doing.

In his book Scouting Games, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting, names the exercise Kim's Game and describes it as follows:

The Scoutmaster should collect on a tray a number of articles — knives, spoons, pencil, pen, stones, book and so on — not more than about fifteen for the first few games, and cover the whole over with a cloth. He then makes the others sit round, where they can see the tray, and uncovers it for one minute. Then each of them must make a list on a piece of paper of all the articles he can remember… The one who remembers most wins the game.

Preferring a Pound of Cure

Voters prefer a pound of cure to an ounce of prevention, Bryan Caplan notes, citing Andrew Healy's recent paper:

Using comprehensive data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, I show that voters reward disaster relief spending but not disaster prevention spending. This aspect of voter behavior creates a large distortion in the incentives that governments face, since the data show that prevention spending substantially reduces future damage.
[...]
Given mean annual prevention spending of $195 million and mean disaster damage of $16.5 billion, the regression estimates that a $1 increase in prevention spending resulted in a $8.30 decrease in disaster damage, and this estimate captures only benefits that occur in the five years from 2000-2004.

Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS

Irish write Kevin Myers speaks the unspeakable, and says that Africa is giving nothing to anyone — apart from AIDS:

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country?
[...]
Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
[...]
Within 20 years of the [Irish] Famine, the Irish population was down by 30 [percent]. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.
[...]
How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?

(Hat tip to Dennis Mangan.)

The Depressive Realism Economy

Arnold Kling calls it The Depressive Realism Economy:

There are psychologists who argue that healthy people tend to have an inflated view of their abilities and how they are regarded by peers. In contrast, these psychologists contend, there is a tendency for depressed people to accurately assess where they stand. This hypothesis is called “depressive realism.” It explains our current economic gloom.
[...]
It now appears that we were living in a dream world a few years ago, with oil prices unsustainably low and house price inflation unsustainably high. Reality is less pleasant.

In theory, a student who suffers a blow to his or her self-esteem can continue to work hard and learn. In practice, educators worry that this will not happen.

Similarly, the asset revaluations that represent blows to our economic self-esteem could be shrugged off by workers and businesses. We still have all of the capital equipment and know-how for the U.S. economy to continue growing.

However, a significant reallocation of resources is required. For example, we need fewer construction workers. During the boom, the housing stock grew faster than the rate of family formation. It will take several years for this excess housing inventory, which some economists estimate may be as much 3 million units above its normal level, to be occupied.

Educational credentials that seemed useful four years ago may not be as valuable during the current transition phase.

Kling sees the problem through the unorthodox lens of macro without aggregate demand:

Orthodox Keynesian macroeconomics says that the cure for economic pessimism is for government to create an illusion. Congress can cut taxes or the Federal Reserve can print money in order to make people feel more prosperous.

What government cannot do, however, is figure out how to reallocate workers to new industries in a way that reflects long-term reality. Government does not know whether the journalism graduate should wait patiently for a relevant job or whether he needs to find a different career path.

Adapting to the reality of higher energy costs and an excess housing stock requires myriad complex adjustments, some of which may be obvious but many of which are subtle. Chances are, it will take several years to complete the transition. Meanwhile, there is little, if anything, that policymakers can do to hasten that process.

Rampage on the Rampage

Apparently Quinton "Rampage" Jackson went on a second-rate rampage outside the cage, in his "lifted" Ford F-250 truck, emblazoned with his photo:

Rampage was on the 55 Freeway in the O.C., hit two cars and got off the freeway. The chase was on.

Rampage then began driving on the center divider. But it gets worse. According to the police report, Jackson then drove on the sidewalk, "causing pedestrians to flee for their lives." He started driving the wrong way on a crowded street, colliding with yet another car in an intersection. As he continued on, running several red lights, his tire disintegrated and he began driving on the rim.

Rampage eventually got to the exclusive Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, where he again drove on the sidewalk, "causing pedestrians to flee in terror."

Eventually, his car came to a stop and he was taken into custody at gunpoint. Cops took him to the Orange County Jail, but they determined he was "medically unfit" to be booked. Cops won't say if he was high.

Rampage is currently in an O.C. hospital.

Quinton, Quinton, Quinton...

Wii Sports Resort

Nintendo's Wii Sports sequel — Wii Sports Resort — goes tropical with three new games: Sword Play, Power Cruising, and Disc Dog.

I have been waiting for a Wii sword-fighting game for a long time — and it looks like there's a reason:

The newly announced Wii MotionPlus — a new accessory that plugs into the base of the Wiimote to provide better tracking of arm movement — will come packed with the game.

Ah, sweet, sweet, faux-light saber action...

Testing of electric truck for Los Angeles port sparks enthusiasm

Testing of electric truck for Los Angeles port sparks enthusiasm:

Although electric truck tests are still underway, the port has already ordered 20 more of the vehicles at a cost of $208,000 each.
[...]
The electric truck, which takes about three hours to charge, has a range of about 30 miles while pulling a 60,000-pound cargo container, and about 60 miles empty. Although that distance may not sound useful, much of freight hauling within the port complex is from terminals to nearby train yards.

It costs about 20 cents a mile to operate, or about four to nine times less than a diesel truck, depending on fluctuating fuel costs and operating conditions.

You can watch a short puff piece on the truck too.

Despite the fact that Los Angeles Harbor Commission President S. David Freeman says, "With diesel fuel selling for nearly $5 a gallon, this is the cheapest truck on the road," that's not clear at all.

How does the $208,000 price tag compare to the price of an equivalent diesel truck? How long does the battery last, and how much does it cost to replace? Why don't those numbers ever make their way into an article about cost savings?

Anyway, I do believe that an electric truck makes perfect sense for moving cargo containers short distances across port facilities, and I know I'd rather work around electric trucks than diesels.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

The Water Shortage Myth

David Zetland debunks The Water Shortage Myth:

As it stands, Los Angeles households pay $2.80 for the first 885 gallons they use per day. That's enough water to fill 18 bathtubs. The next 18 tubs cost $3.40, which is only 20% more. Most L.A. households don't even see this price increase, since the average household of three uses just 350 gallons — about seven bathtubs — each day. For that water, the household pays only $35 a month. If they use twice the amount, the bill merely doubles.

I propose a system where every person gets the first 75 gallons, or 1.5 bathtubs, per day for free but pays $5.60 for each 75 gallons after that. Under my system, the monthly bill for the average household of three would come to $95.

My system is designed to reduce demand rather than cover costs. Revenue paid by guzzlers would cover the costs of those who use only a small amount of water. Any leftover profits could be refunded to consumers or used to enhance the quality or quantity of the water supply.

Incidentally, his system wouldn't reduce demand — it would reduce the quantity demanded. His system actually reduces supply — the amount provided at a given price — but that doesn't sound good to non-economists.

Ulcer bacteria may protect from asthma

Ulcer bacteria may protect from asthma:

"Among teens and children ages 3 to 19 years, carriers of H. pylori were 25 percent less likely to have asthma."

Children aged 3 to 13 were 59 percent less likely to have asthma if they also had H. pylori, they reported in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The researchers used data on more than 7,000 U.S. children from the National Health and Nutrition Survey conducted from 1999 to 2000 by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The study showed that 5.4 percent of children born in the 1990s tested positive for H. pylori.

"If you look at the people born in 1919, 60 percent are positive. That's a huge change," Blaser said in a telephone interview. "I have referred to this as global warming of the stomach."

During the same time, asthma rates have soared. Among the children aged 3 to 19 in the study, 23 percent had asthma, Blaser said.
[...]
"Maybe the same antibiotics that made H. pylori go away make something else go away." Or perhaps the bacteria somehow protects against asthma directly, perhaps by changing the body's immune response.

Expectant moms who eat nuts boost child asthma risk

Expectant moms who eat nuts boost child asthma risk:

Pregnant women who eat nuts or nut products like peanut butter daily raise the risk their children will develop asthma by 50 percent, Dutch researchers said on Tuesday.

The study also showed that moderate amounts did not seem to have an effect, meaning it is too soon to say whether pregnant women should give up nuts because they contain many important nutrients and healthy fats a developing fetus needs, they said.

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008:

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.

Wii Music

I've been wondering how long it would be until someone came out with a free-form version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, where you could play your own music. Now it looks like Nintendo's leading the way, with its upcoming Wii Music:

Nintendo this morning announced a new addition to the Wii family: Wii Music. Instead of your musical creativity being confined by the limitation of the number of plastic instruments that can fit in your living room, Wii Music uses the Wii Remote, Nunchuck and Balance Board to let the user play more than 60 different instruments.

But don't get confused: Wii Music isn't trying to compete with Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Instead, the game's more like an open jam session where players improvise as they go—there are no notes to follow, no one to boo you off stage, no Star Power to reward you for a 100-note streak. It's a non-judgmental way to rock out through your TV.

We heard a drum and sax solo, and then a few Nintendo executives demonstrated full-band play onstage by gracing us with a calypso rendition of the Mario theme song. But we're still unsure how much skill is actually required to "play" each instrument. In fact, Nintendo’s press release says "the music always sounds great," so we're pretty sure anyone can pick up the controllers and put on an impressive show.

The drums were the most interesting instrument demonstrated. The remote and numchuck are used like drum sticks, so you need to move your arms around like you're air drumming to get your sound. The Wii Balance Board is used like the drum pedals on any drum kit. It manages to seem very realistic without requiring a physical set the way Rock Band does. And the game gives you lessons, so theoretically you should learn how to play an actual drum set in a few weeks.

Wii Music also lets you record multi-track videos, so you can be your own one-man band. Or you can be like indy band The Postal Service and send tracks back and forth with friends through WiiConnect24. Bottom line: Even though it might not be as demanding as the other music-making games out there, Wii Music looks like a lot of fun. It will be in stories in time for the holidays—let's just hope that Nintendo ships enough copies to satisfy all the Wii Fanatics out there.

The Doping Dilemma

Michael Shermer examines The Doping Dilemma, specifically in cycling, and describes the immense advantage from using recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO) to stimulate the production of red blood cells:

One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”

Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data.) The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.

Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine

This is terrifying. Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

A surprising dose of sanity from the Times:

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.

But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests, the researchers found that information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

Economics of a POW Camp

R. A. Radford, writing in Economica in 1945, explains the economics of a POW camp, including the cigarette currency, which arose spontaneously:

Although cigarettes as currency exhibited certain peculiarities, they performed all the functions of a metallic currency as a unit of account, as a measure of value and as a store of value, and shared most of its characteristics. They were homogeneous, reasonably durable, and of convenient size for the smallest or, in packets, for the largest transactions. Incidentally, they could be clipped or sweated by rolling them between the fingers so that tobacco fell out.

Cigarettes were also subject to the working of Gresham's Law. Certain brands were more popular than others as smokes, but for currency purposes a cigarette was a cigarette. Consequently buyers used the poorer qualities and the Shop rarely saw the more popular brands: cigarettes such as Churchman's No. 1 were rarely used for trading. At one time cigarettes hand-rolled from pipe tobacco began to circulate. Pipe tobacco was issued in lieu of cigarettes by the Red Cross at a rate of 25 cigarettes to the ounce and this rate was standard in exchanges, but an ounce would produce 30 home-made cigarettes. Naturally, people with machine-made cigarettes broke them down and rerolled the tobacco, and the real cigarette virtually disappeared from the market. Hand-rolled cigarettes were not homogeneous and prices could no longer be quoted in them with safety: each cigarette was examined before it was accepted and thin ones were rejected, or extra demanded as a make-weight. For a time we suffered all the inconveniences of a debased currency.

Machine-made cigarettes were always universally acceptable, both for what they would buy and for themselves. It was this intrinsic value which gave rise to their principal disadvantage as currency, a disadvantage which exists, but to a far smaller extent in the case of metallic currency; – that is, a strong demand for non-monetary purposes. Consequently our economy was repeatedly subject to deflation and to periods of monetary stringency. While the Red Cross issue of 50 or 25 cigarettes per man per week came in regularly, and while there were fair stocks held, the cigarette currency suited its purpose admirably. But when the issue was interrupted, stocks soon ran out, prices fell, trading declined in volume and became increasingly a matter of barter. This deflationary tendency was periodically offset by the sudden injection of new currency. Private cigarette parcels arrived in a trickle throughout the year, but the big numbers came in quarterly when the Red Cross received its allocation of transport. Several hundred thousand cigarettes might arrive in the space of a fortnight. Prices soared, and then began to fall, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity as stocks ran out, until the next big delivery. Most of our economic troubles could be attributed to this fundamental instability.

Pro Boxer's Punch Carries Heavy Weight

Unsurprisingly a pro boxer's punch carries a heavy weight — just how heavy is pretty surprising though:

Researchers at the University of Manchester in England were curious about just how much force a top boxer can generate with a punch. So they enlisted local boxer Ricky Hatton, an undefeated 28 year old light welterweight and welterweight world champ. And they had him hit a 30 kilogram punching bag with sensors attached.

The results should make any spectators who figure they could last a while in the ring with a pro think again. Because Ricky Hatton, who’s nickname is The Hitman, generated a force of about 400 kilograms. An average person with no boxing training can generate only about one tenth that much force with a punch.

Slow motion video found that Hatton could typically generate punch speeds of 25 miles per hour, with one blow reaching 32 mph. The best punch speed that one of the researchers could achieve was about 15 miles per hour.

I guess there's the question of whether a researcher is in fact average in punching power, or much, much weaker. Anyway, a factor of 10 is a big factor.

By the way, welterweight is between light and medium — just 152 lbs — so Hatton is not a big guy.

And, of course, 400 kilograms is not a measure of force — but we know what they mean.

Hunger Can Make You Happy

Hunger can make you happy — or at least motivated:

When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster.

Researchers manipulated ghrelin levels in mice through a variety of methods, including prolonged calorie restriction, ghrelin injection and a genetic modification rendering the mice numb to ghrelin’s effect.

Mice who had limited ghrelin activity seemed depressed. If pushed into deep water they made no effort to swim. When introduced to a maze, they clung to the entryway. And when placed with other mice, they tended to keep to themselves. (These behaviors were reversed when the mice were given a low-dose antidepressant commonly prescribed to humans.)

In contrast, mice with high levels of ghrelin swam energetically in deep water, looking for escape. They eagerly explored new environments. And they were much more social.

The 100,000 most trustworthy and responsible adults in the country

Mencius Moldbug has been promoting the idea that a government is just a corporation, if a poorly run one, and that we really should declare our current state bankrupt, put it into receivorship, and transfer control to the 100,000 most trustworthy and responsible adults in the country:

By what process will we select these individuals? Who shall recruit the recruiters? It is difficult and expensive to find just one individual with these executive qualifications. Moreover, in a sovereign context, the filtering process itself will serve as a political football — many progressives might decide, for example, that only progressives can be trusted. It is impossible to end a fight by starting a new fight.

This insane recruiting process cannot occur either under [the current government] or under [the new sovereign corporation government]. It cannot occur under [the current government], because it will be subject to [current government] politics and will carry those politics, which are uniformly poisonous, forward into [the sovereign corporation]. At this point the reset is not a reset. But it cannot occur under [the sovereign corporation], because the trustees are needed to select the Receiver. And there can be no intervening period of anarchy.

But there is a hack which can work around this obstacle. You might think it's a cute hack, or you might think it's an ugly hack. It probably depends on your taste. I think it's pretty cute.

The hack is a precise heuristic test to select trustees. The result of the test is one bit for every citizen of [the country]: he or she either is or is not a trustee. The test is precise because its result is not a matter of debate — it can be verified trivially. And it is heuristic because it should produce a good result on average, with only occasional horrifying exceptions.

My favorite [precise heuristic test] defines the trustees as the set of all active, certified, nonstudent pilots who accept the responsibility of trusteeship, as of the termination date of [the current government]. The set does not expand — you cannot become a trustee by taking flying lessons, and any rejection or resignation of the responsibility is irreversible. In other words, to paraphrase Lenin: all power to the pilots. (There are about 500,000 of them.)

Let's look at the advantages of this [precise heuristic test]. I am not myself a pilot — I am neither wealthy enough, nor responsible enough. But everyone I've ever met who was a pilot, whether private, military or commercial, has struck me as not only responsible, but also independent-minded, often even adventurous. This is a particularly rare combination. To be precise, it is an aristocratic combination, and the word aristocracy is after all just Greek for good government. Pilots are a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What's not to like?

Dark Knight Shift

In Dark Knight Shift, JR Minkel of Scientific American interviews E. Paul Zehr on why Batman could exist — but not for long:

How would Batman get enough rest?
The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep.

Wouldn't fighting Gotham's thugs every night take its toll?
The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured.

Is there any indication in the comics of how long Batman's career lasts?
The comics are really vague on this, of course. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, he deliberately shows an aging Batman coming back after he's retired, and he highlights him being tired and weaker. Somewhere around age 50 to 55, he should probably retire. His performance is going down. He's always facing younger adversaries. That is well at the end of when he's going to be able to defend himself and be able to not have to deal that lethal force. This was actually shown in an animated series called Batman Beyond.

Oh right. It's the future; Batman is old and he trains a kid to replace him.
You're familiar with that one? What we learn is that Batman, when he was older but before he retired, actually picked up a gun against a thug because he had to. His skills had let him down so that he wasn't able to defend himself without harming another person. So that's when he decided to retire.

How would all those beat-downs have affected his longevity?
Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there.

I believe Dr. Zehr has overlooked a key aspect of being the Batman — he doesn't fight fair. Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, and the Dark Knight plays on their fears, while choosing the time and place of his attack.

I can't say I agree with Zehr's training advice either:

What's a realistic training regimen?
I didn't give a training manual in my book, but he'd want to do specialized weight training to build up an ability to work at a really high rate for maybe 30 seconds to a minute (the maximum time period associated with his fights). One of the early comics shows him holding an enormous weight over his head. That's not the right kind of adaptation toward punching and kicking. He's got to make sure he's doing all the skill training at the same time so that he's actually using the (physical) adaptations he's slowly gaining. In conventional martial arts, when people take weapons training, you're doing a kind of power-strength training.

What effects would all that training have on Bruce Wayne's body?
I looked up what DC Comics and some other books said (about Batman's physique). I settled on the estimate that Bruce Wayne started off at about six-foot-two and 185 pounds. I gave him a body fat of 20 percent (slightly below average) and a body mass index of 26. Let's say after 10 or 15 years, after he's become the Batman, he's weighing about 210 pounds and has a body fat of 10 percent. He's probably gained 40 pounds of muscle. His bones will actually be more dense, kind of the opposite of osteoporosis.

Are we talking freakishly dense bones?
The percentage change is actually quite small—maybe 10 percent. In judo, where people do a lot of grappling and throwing, you're going to have more density in the long bones of the trunk. In karate and other martial arts where they're doing a lot of kicking, there's going to be a lot higher density in the legs. Muay Thai (kickboxing) is a great example. They're always doing these low shin kicks. They try to condition the body by kicking progressively harder objects and for longer.

Lifting an enormous weight overhead — i.e. doing a clean & jerk — is excellent training for building up the muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments of the legs and core, which are used extensively in judo — and in jumping from rooftop to rooftop. But Zehr is a Chito-Ryu karate-do practitioner who, I suppose, rarely jumps from rooftop to rooftop.

What Batman needs is a cross-fit routine with an emphasis on judo/jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, and parkour.

Also, I'd hardly say that Bruce Wayne was 185 lbs. at 20 percent body-fat before training. First, he started training as a teen — his parents were killed while he was a child — and, second, even a mildly active young man can be, say, 8 percent body-fat without really trying.

Nobody Lives Past Thirty

Al Fin shares an amusing cartoon. I hope I don't ruin the joke by pointing out that the average age of paleolithic humans might have been quite low, but some early humans lived to be quite old.

Boeing's Blimp-Copter

Behold Boeing's Blimp-Copter:

Boeing has teamed with a Canadian company to enter the blimp market with a combined airship-helicopter. Working with SkyHook International, Boeing says its JHL-40 could take some 80,000 pounds of cargo over 200 miles. "Boeing said the blimp would be environmentally friendly because it would eliminate the need to build roads or rail lines to remote locations, where transportation can be costly, inadequate and unreliable," Reuters reports. "The JHL-40, or Jess Heavy Lifter, is named after Pete Jess, president and chief operating officer of SkyHook International, the Calgary, Alberta-based company that secured the patent for the blimp, which combines elements of a helicopter and a traditional airship."

Writing at Aviation Week's ARES blog, Graham Warwick notes that Boeing is not the first company to push a heli-airship combo. "Piasecki flew the PA-97 Helistat in 1986," he notes. "This combined a 343 ft-long Navy aerostat with four Sikorsky H-34 helicopters. Boeing says the PA-97 was brought down by ground resonance, something it can avoid using the latest computational tools."

I almost expect to see Nick Fury aboard this helicopter airship — once it gets a carrier flight deck added on top.

Democoup

When it comes to reactionary restoration, Mencius Moldbug notes, the only alternative to a military coup is a political coup — or to be catchy a democoup:

In a democoup, the government is overthrown by organizing a critical mass of political opposition to which it surrenders, ideally just as the result of overwhelming peer pressure. Certainly the most salient example is the fall of the Soviet Union, including its puppet states and the wonderfully if inaccurately named Velvet Revolution. (Again, a reaction is not a revolution.) Other examples include the Southern Redemption, the Meiji Restoration, and of course the English Restoration.

In each of these events, a broad political coalition deployed more or less nonviolent, if seldom perfectly legal, tactics to replace a failed administration with a new regime which was dedicated to the restoration of responsible and effective government. Note that all of these are real historical events, which actually happened in the real world. I did not just make them up and edit them into Wikipedia. Yes, dear open-minded progressive, change can happen.

If there is one fact to remember about a restoration via democoup, it's that this program has nothing to do with the traditional 11th-grade civics-class notion of democratic participation. Obviously, we are not trying to replace one or two officials whose role is primarily symbolic. We are trying to replace not the current occupants of the temporary and largely-ceremonial "political" offices of [the government], but [the government] itself — lock, stock and barrel. Indeed, we are using democratic tactics to abolish democracy itself. (There is nothing at all ironic in this. Is it ironic when an absolute monarch decrees a democratic constitution?)

Again, this restoration has nothing to do with the traditional 11th-grade civics-class notion of democratic participation:

Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service. Democracy implies politics, and "political" is a dirty word to the civil-service state. As well it should be. Its job is to resist democracy, and it does it very well.

Therefore, any attempt to defeat the sclerotic Cathedral state by a restoration of representative democracy in the classic sense of the word, in which public policy is actually formulated by elected officials (such as the Leader, Mencius), is a bayonet charge at the Maginot Line. The Mencist Party could go all the way and elect President Mencius, and it would still be shredded into gobbets of meat by presighted bureaucratic machine guns. In short: a total waste of time. Much better to bend over and pretend to enjoy it.

When we think of a democoup instead of a democratic party, all of these problems disappear. (They are replaced by other problems, but we'll deal with those in their turn.)

Why magnesium is like vitamin D and how it cures depression

Dennis Mangan explains why magnesium is like vitamin D and how it cures depression:

In a paper I recently came across, Rapid recovery from major depression using magnesium treatment (pdf), the author writes about several case studies in which magnesium supplements brought about a complete cure from depression, as well as better mental performance in some cases. It seems that magnesium deficiency is widespread; according to this paper, nearly 90% of the American population ingests less than the (already minimal) RDA. Add to that the fact that numerous conditions can cause a significant depletion of body magnesium, conditions such as the drinking of alcohol and catecholamine elevation caused by stress, and you've got the makings of a massively widespread deficiency.

Back to depression. The paper's author found that magnesium supplementation cures major depression in as few as 7 days. There are good reasons why this should be so. Michael Maes, a "highly cited" scientist and physician, has found that pro-inflammatory cytokines may be at the root of depression, which is, in other words, a physical illness. Magnesium deficiency results in a major increase in inflammatory cytokines. For much, much more, try this Google Scholar page on magnesium and inflammation.

So why is magnesium like vitamin D? Mainly because no one thinks about it. When industrialization got going and most people started spending a great deal of their lives indoors, not a lot of thought was given to the absence of direct sunlight on the skin and what it would do to human health; as it turns out, the health consequences are serious. Likewise, it seems that in the past most people obtained dietary magnesium from hard water, which hardly anyone drinks anymore. (By the way, numerous studies have shown a substantial reduction in heart disease rates in places where hard water is drunk; see, e.g., this one from Taiwan, which found a 40% risk reduction from the water with the highest magnesium levels.) While magnesium is plentiful in certain foods, it's not necessarily well absorbed - and in any case most people don't get enough from food to begin with.

Magnesium deficiency is implicated, in addition to depression and heart disease, in migraine, cancer, and a horde of other bad things. Dr. Michael Eades wrote that if he could only take one supplement, it would be magnesium.

Acting Squirrelly

Cringely believes that SAP is acting squirrelly — which gives him an excuse to examine squirrel behavior in a bit too much depth:

You are driving down a street in your car and up ahead there is a squirrel at the side of the road eating a nut. You aren't on an intercept course, there is no way you are going to hit that squirrel. So what does the squirrel do? At the very last possible moment, rather than watching you drive by, THE SQUIRREL DARTS STRAIGHT FOR YOUR CAR, passing inches in front of or behind the front tires.

Why does he do that?

Obviously I'm a guy with too much time on my hands because I've given this quite a bit of thought.

From a purely metabolic perspective, whatever its motivation the physical advantage clearly lies with the squirrel. Sure, my car is bigger and faster, but the squirrel is smaller and quicker, with a heart that beats up to 700 times per minute. To the squirrel I seem to be driving by in slow motion, and whether he goes in front of the tires or behind or in front of one and behind another is strictly a matter of style: once the squirrel has my vector, Victor, he's in command.

But judging by the number of squirrels squished on the road, there must be some risk to this game, so why does he do it?

The answer has nothing to do with cars because squirrel psychology predates both cars and men. For the squirrel, in fact, there may be no difference between my car and an ice age saber-toothed tiger.

The squirrel doesn't trust me. Sure, it looks like I'm not even chasing him, but he's a tasty squirrel and I'm a saber-toothed tiger. By waiting until the last possible moment then running TOWARD me, the squirrel is rushing the net, moving the confrontation effectively forward in time in such a way that the squirrel is pushing his tactical advantage.

As a predator, I'm simply not supposed to expect this squirrel to be running toward me, rather than away. He's using the element of surprise to confuse me. And it works, because I've never hit a squirrel with my car.

So, what does this have to do with ERP giant SAP?

SAP and companies like it do something similar by making powerful software that is quite deliberately difficult to use. They could make it easier. Heck, the capability to make it easier is shipped right with the software, though never pointed out to the customer.
[...]
Unlike standardized financial statements, the most powerful ERP screens and reports will vary dramatically from company to company, so the ability to customize SAP is vital to obtaining the maximum possible benefit from the software.

That's why there are so many SAP consultants. And that's why SAP, itself, makes 40 percent of its revenue from providing consulting services -- revenue that would be significantly less if the software was easier to customize and easier to use.

If SAP software was easier to customize and use, SAP the company might get a few more customers but would have significantly less revenue. Or that's the fear.

There is a product called GuiXT that is an interface builder shipped for free with every copy of SAP R/3. Pronounced "gooey-x-t," this client-server application sits on top of R/3 and can be used with almost no programming to customize and integrate R/3 screens as well as add certain overlay functions that aren't readily available in R/3, itself. The point with GuiXT is to not mess with the underlying R/3 code, which means an SAP installation can be less customized on the back end, installed cheaper, and be up and running quicker.

So when you, as an SAP customer, call up your SAP consultant to ask for customization, that consultant will often show you the next day a GuiXT implementation that does exactly what you asked for but is presented as a mock-up. Once you've signed-off on the look and feel then the SAP consultants can dig into R/3 itself and spend a few weeks implementing what you asked for. OR they could simply run the GuiXT app that took them an hour to build.

Are you starting to see the picture?
[...]
The squirrel dives for your front tires because by ice age rules that's the thing to do, though at an obvious cost today in squished squirrels. Similarly, SAP deliberately hides the power of GuiXT thinking it could hurt consulting revenue when, in fact, it could INCREASE sales revenue by broadening the market and making R/3 less scary for companies to install and run.

Both the squirrel and SAP do what they do because it appears to work, though a safer and easier course was there all along.

The Island in the Wind

Elizabeth Kolbert calls the Danish island of Samsø the island in the wind because of its switch to renewable energy in 1997, after the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy decided it had potential:

They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

Some details:

All told, Samsø has eleven large land-based turbines. (It has about a dozen additional micro-turbines.) This is a lot of turbines for a relatively small number of people, and the ratio is critical to Samsø’s success, as is the fact that the wind off the Kattegat blows pretty much continuously; flags on Samsø, I noticed, do not wave — they stick straight out, as in children’s drawings. Hermansen told us that the land-based turbines are a hundred and fifty feet tall, with rotors that are eighty feet long. Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity. (This is true in an arithmetic sense; as a practical matter, Samsø’s production of electricity and its needs fluctuate, so that sometimes it is feeding power into the grid and sometimes it is drawing power from it.) The offshore turbines, meanwhile, are even taller — a hundred and ninety-five feet high, with rotors that extend a hundred and twenty feet. A single offshore turbine generates roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which, at Danish rates of energy use, is enough to satisfy the needs of some two thousand homes. The offshore turbines — there are ten of them — were erected to compensate for Samsø’s continuing use of fossil fuels in its cars, trucks, and ferries. Their combined output, of around eighty million kilowatt-hours a year, provides the energy equivalent of all the gasoline and diesel oil consumed on the island, and then some; in aggregate, Samsø generates about ten per cent more power than it consumes.

Of course, this all treats the transition as free, which, of course, it isn't:

Each land-based turbine cost the equivalent of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Each offshore turbine cost around three million dollars. Some of Samsø’s turbines were erected by a single investor, like Tranberg; others were purchased collectively. At least four hundred and fifty island residents own shares in the onshore turbines, and a roughly equal number own shares in those offshore. Shareholders, who also include many non-residents, receive annual dividend checks based on the prevailing price of electricity and how much their turbine has generated.

I need more policy details:

Thanks to a policy put in place by Denmark’s government in the late nineteen-nineties, utilities are required to offer ten-year fixed-rate contracts for wind power that they can sell to customers elsewhere. Under the terms of these contracts, a turbine should — barring mishap — repay a shareholder’s initial investment in about eight years.

If the investment pays for itself in eight years, that's a surprisingly good return on investment. To what extent are the Danish tax-payers subsidizing it?

The signature performance of the modern revolution

The signature performance of the modern revolution, Mencius Moldbug notes, is the irregular military parade:

Ie: cars or pickup trucks full of well-armed youths in their colorful native attire, driving up and down your street while (a) honking, (b) waving hand-lettered banners, (c) chanting catchy slogans, and (d) discharging their firearms in a vaguely vertical direction. Occasionally one of the vehicles will pull up in front of a house and discharge its occupants, who enter the building and emerge with an infidel, racist, Jew, spy, polluter, Nazi or other criminal. The offender is either restrained for transportation to an educational facility, or enlightened on the spot as an act of radical social justice. Yes, we can!

He plants his tongue even further in cheek when describing its reactionary counterpart:

Whereas in the ideal restoration, the transfer of power from old to new regime is as predictable and seamless as any electoral transition. With all rites, procedures and rituals correct down to the fringe on the Grand Lama's robe, the Armani suits on his Uzi-toting bodyguards, and the scrimshaw on the yak-butter skull-candle he lights and blows out three times while chanting "Obama! Obama! Llama Alpaca Obama!", the Heavenly Grand Council releases itself from the harsh bonds of existence, identifies its successor, asks all employees to remove their personal belongings from their offices, and instructs senior eunuchs to report for temporary detention.

How to sell your software for $20,000

Bill — he only reveals his first name — has "gone from a one-man micro ISV selling shareware for a few hundred bucks a month on the side, to building up into a 5-employee, $2 million software company."

When he started his company, he saw a choice:

It really comes down to, would you rather make a new widget with 99% chance of making nothing and 1% chance of making $10 million; or a 50% chance of making $1 million for the same amount of time and effort (for a remake of some boring business-to-business product but done better)? The former is what everybody seems to do, but the latter is what I did making my very niche vertical market software. It took me over a decade to build, but the money keeps coming in and last year my sales were just under $2 million of which $800K was profit. Not bad for under 200K lines of code!

Once he had a little success, he quickly became cynical:

For some reason I got inundated with all kinds of companies wanting to be "strategic partners" or form a "strategic alliance." No, they never want to buy anything, in fact they all would in effect be suppliers to me. But they still want to fly out and meet with me, and get my brochures and specs, and see demos, and have telecons, and talk about "joint marketing opportunities," and sign this NDA and that exclusive teaming agreement, and oh yea, could I help pay for some ad or some trade show booth with them, or help them put together a proposal for some bid. Huh? Yet for some reason at first I couldn't say "no" if it was just talking with them or trading information. I was a nice guy. I wasn't about to spend anything or sign anything, but when they'd say "we'll be out there the 22nd, how's 3pm sound?" what was I supposed to say? So there I was giving demos all the time and sitting on telecons about nothing and writing up this and that.

Soon all the overhead phone calls and emails and visits and demos with these wanna-be "strategic partners" I realized were a complete waste. None of them would bring me any new business — they all just wanted a piece of my action.

He also became cynical about his friends who said they wanted to work with him on his new project:

So when it came down to it, no, my coworker couldn't quit and work with me for free for a year for a big chunk of the company if we hit it off, because he didn't want to spend his savings and 401K until we had income. Too risky for him and that was totally understandable.

What wasn't so understandable and was disappointing to me, was over the next several years as I took all the risk, finished the product, hit the road selling it, fretted over meeting delivery schedules, took out loans to pay for the equipment and hoped the customer would pay on time, after all that he finally wanted to join. [...] He seemed disappointed and finally said he expected he'd get a share of the company "since I'm one of the first employees." I asked how much were you thinking? He replied "I don't know, 30, 40 percent maybe."

Wow.

Anyway, Bill goes on to explain how to sell your software for $20,000:

1. Find software out there that sells for $20,000 a copy
2. Pick the products that are supporting a handful of million-dollar companies.
3. Build the product but only with the core features
4. Get your name out in the industry
5. Present yourself as consultingware — it won't matter that it's you against big companies

Manhattanhenge

Media-savvy astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about Manhattanhenge:

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rose in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Thursday, May 29h this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is Saturday, July 12th. These two days give you a photogenic view with half the Sun above and half the Sun below the horizon — on the grid. The day after May 29th (Friday, May 30th), and the day before July 12 (Friday, July 11) will also give you Manhattanhenge moments, but instead you will see the entire ball of the Sun on the horizon — on the grid. My personal preference is the half-Sun.

As you may know, had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then the days of Manhattanhenge would be the spring and autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due-east and sets due-west. But Manhattan's street grid is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar.

How Many of You Expect to Die?

How Many of You Expect to Die?, Dr. Joanne Lynn asked:

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

On the screen above the dais, she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario. Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline, according to Dr. Lynn’s data. The 20 percent of Americans who die this way need excellent medical care during the long period of high functioning, she said, and then hospice support for both patient and family during the sprint to death.

Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course. These patients’ lives are punctuated by bouts of severe illness alternating with periods of relative stability. At some point rescue attempts fail, and then death is sudden. What these patients and families need, Dr. Lynn said, is consistent disease management to head off crises, aggressive intervention at the first hint of trouble and advance planning for how to manage the final emergency.

The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone’s worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course, said Dr. Lynn, and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.

These are the elderly who for years on end must depend on the care of loved ones, usually adult daughters, or the kindness of strangers, the aides who care for them at home or in nursing facilities. This was my mother’s fate, and she articulated it with mordant humor: The reward for living past age 85 and avoiding all the killer diseases, she said, is that you get to rot to death instead.

You can see why people don't want to think about this.

Hitler's Democracy

Anyone interested in overthrowing democracy, Mencius Moldbug notes, desperately needs to read the great memoir of Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, published in English as The Answers but better translated as The Questionnaire. (The title is a reference to the denazification questionnaires which all Germans seeking any responsible postwar position had to complete.)

Salomon, a strident nationalist but not a Nazi, shares some thoughts on the Nazis:

At that time — it was high summer of 1922 and the Oberammergau Passion Play was being acted — Munich was filled with foreigners. Even the natives had not the time to attend big political rallies. Thus I did not even have a chance to hear Hitler — and now I shall go to my grave without ever having once attended a meeting where I could hear this most remarkable figure of the first half of the twentieth century speak in person.

"What does he actually say?" I asked the Kapitän's adjutant.

"He says more or less this," the adjutant began, and it was significant that he could not help mimicking the throaty voice with the vengeful undertones, "he says, quite calmly: 'My enemies have sneered at me, saying that you can't attack a tank with a walking stick...' Then his voice gets louder and he says: 'But I tell you...' And then he shouts with the utmost intensity: '... that a man who hasn't the guts to attack a tank with a walking stick will achieve nothing!' And then there's tremendous, senseless applause."

The Kapitän said: "Tanks I know nothing about. But I do know that a man who tries to ram an iron-clad with a fishing smack isn't a hero. He's an idiot."

I know not whether the Kapitän, lacking in powers of oratory as he was, found Hitler's methods of influencing the masses as repugnant as I did, but I assumed this to be the case. I also obscurely felt that for the Kapitän, deeply involved in his political concept, to be carried forward on the tide of a mass movement must seem unclean. Policy could only be laid down from 'above,' not from 'below.' The state must always think for the people, never through the people. Again I obscurely felt that there could be no compromise here, that all compromise would mean falsification.

But it was precisely his effect on the masses that led to Hitler's success in Munich. He employed new methods of propaganda, hitherto unthought of. The banners of his party were everywhere to be seen, as was the gesture of recognition, the raised right arm, used by his supporters; the deliberate effort involved in this gesture was in itself indicative of faith. And everywhere was to be heard the greeting, the slogan Heil Hitler! Never before had a man dared to include his essentially private name in an essentially public phrase. It implied among his followers a degree of self-alienation that was perhaps significant; no longer could the individual establish direct contact with his neighbour — this third party was needed as intermediary.

This portion, from ten pages later, may lack colorful anecdotes, but it makes a jarring point:

The word 'democracy' is one that I have only very rarely, and with great reluctance, employed. I do not know what it is and I have never yet met anyone who could explain its meaning to me in terms that I am capable of understanding. But I fear that Hitler's assertion — that his ideological concept was the democratic concept — will prove a hard one to refute. The enlightenment of the world from a single, central position, the winning of mass support through convincing arguments, the legitimate road to power by way of the ballot-box, the legitimisation by the people itself of power achieved — I fear it is hard to deny that these are democratic stigmata, revelatory perhaps of democracy in a decadent and feverish form, but democratic none the less. I further fear that the contrary assertion — that the totalitarian system as set up by Hitler was not democratic — will prove a hard one to justify. The totalitarian state is the exact opposite of the authoritarian state, which latter, of course, bears no democratic stigmata but hierarchical ones instead. Some people seem to believe that forms of government are estimable in accordance with their progressive development; since totalitarianism is certainly more modern than the authoritarian state system, they must logically give Hitler the advantage in the political field.

In case Salomon isn't quite clear, Mencius paraphrases his theory of Hitler and the State:

Salomon, and his hero Kapitän Ehrhardt, were essentially militarists and monarchists, believers in the old Prussian system of government. In 1849 when Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to "accept a crown from the gutter" (in other words, to become constitutional monarch of Germany under an English-style liberal system created by the Revolutions of 1848), he was expressing much the same philosophy.

While there is more mysticism to it, and anyone raised in a democratic society must cringe instinctively at the militaristic tone, Salomon's philosophy is more or less the same as neocameralism. (Understandably, since after all it was Frederick the Great who gave us cameralism.) Salomon's view of public opinion is mine: that it simply has nothing to do with the difficult craft of state administration, any more than the passengers' views on aerodynamics are relevant to the pilot of a 747. In particular, most Americans today know next to nothing about the reality of Washington, and frankly I don't see why they should have to learn.

In the totalitarian system as practiced by Hitler and the Bolsheviks, public opinion is not irrelevant at all. Oh, no. It is the cement that holds the regime together. Most people do not know, for example, of the frequent plebiscites by which the Nazis validated their power. But they do have a sense that Nazism was broadly popular, at least until the war, and they are right. Moreover, even a totalitarian regime that does not elicit genuine popularity can, like the Bolsheviks, elicit the pretense of popularity, and this has much the same power.

When describing any political design, a good principle to follow is that the weak are never the masters of the strong. If the design presents itself as one in which the weak control the strong, try erasing the arrowhead on the strong end and redrawing it on the weak end. Odds are you will end up with a more realistic picture. Popular sovereignty was a basic precept of both the Nazi and Bolshevik designs, and in both the official story was that the Party expressed the views of the masses. In reality, of course, the Party controlled those views. Thus the link which Salomon draws between democracy and the Orwellian mind-control state, two tropes which we children of progress were raised to imagine as the ultimate opposites.

Salomon is obviously not a libertarian, or at least not as much of a libertarian as me, and I suspect that what disturbs him is less the corruption of public opinion by the German state, than the corruption of the German state by public opinion. Regardless of the direction, the phenomenon was a feedback loop that, in the case of Nazism, led straight to perdition.

Project Management with Niel Robertson

The folks at the Devver Blog have posted a piece, called Project Management with Niel Robertson, summarizing Robertson's recent presentation on product management for start-ups:

In fact, he went as far as saying the number one thing that goes wrong at startups might be PM. Niel described PM as a process for delivering Kstrong>the right features at the right time. He went on to discuss why PM can become stale, be ignored, and is often hated because it is associated with excessive documentation, which it shouldn’t be. Mentioning more than once that the best feature requests, requirements, and specs are often just one sentence.
[...]
His basic points about why every project can benefit from PM are:

• It takes 30 secs to write a requirement
• 2 minutes to clarify in discussion
• 5 min to for an engineer to spec
• Hours or days to prototype, write code, integrate, or deploy it

[...]
As my notes are often just a list of key points that caught my attention, I will do as I often do and share some favorites.

• How to write a good requirement… “The user should be able to…”
• How to respond with a good spec… “The user can do that by… doing X… List the exceptions”
• A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.
• Doesn’t encourage people to shotgun tons of things to market. “When I make spaghetti, I try not to throw all of it against the wall.”
• On gathering data, go out and talk to people getting more data points about the problem you are solving until you start hearing the same things and can’t learn more from talking. Then go work on it, knowing all this data.
• Niel doesn’t recommend a developer also taking on the role of PM, as there needs to be a tension between who represents the user and who implements the product.
• “The PM should be the most empowered employee in your company… Yes, even more than the CEO”

I've uploaded the actual presentation to Google Docs:

Scientists Uncover Deadly Ebola Virus's "Achilles' Heel"

Scientists Uncover Deadly Ebola Virus's "Achilles' Heel":

The so-called Ebola virus glycoprotein, or "spike protein," was first discovered a decade ago and has been a target for scientists attempting to design vaccines and therapies to prevent it from infecting cells. But, until now, researchers did not understand the protein's structure — and thus, the best way to attack it.

The so-called Ebola virus glycoprotein, or "spike protein," was first discovered a decade ago and has been a target for scientists attempting to design vaccines and therapies to prevent it from infecting cells. But, until now, researchers did not understand the protein's structure — and thus, the best way to attack it.

Researchers discovered that the compound is wrapped in benign carbohydrates that mask the virus's deadliness, allowing it to elude immune system scouts. (The human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, that causes AIDS also has this trait.) The good news: the discovery could pave the way for drugs designed to see through that protective coating — and trigger the immune system to attack.

"The structure of the glycoprotein shows us the very few sites on its surface that are not cloaked by carbohydrate," Ollmann Saphire explains. "These [sites] are the chink in the armor, or the Achilles' heel, that we can target antibodies against."
[...]
Researchers made their latest finding by studying the bone marrow of a lucky survivor of a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, a city in the southwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They found the glycoprotein attached to an antibody (a protein unleashed by the immune system to fight viruses) in the marrow, the soft core of bones where red blood cells are manufactured.

According to Ollmann Saphire, there is a receptor located deep in the bowl-shaped structure of Ebola's glycoprotein that latches onto the surface of host cells and tricks a protein there into granting the virus entry. Once inside the cells, the fast-acting Ebola co-opts their machinery to make millions of copies of itself and floods the person's bloodstream.

Our Electric Future

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, argues for Our Electric Future — with illustrations by John Hersey:









I find his history more compelling than his proposed future:

In the early 1970s, President Nixon kicked off Project Independence, defining a national goal in his State of the Union address: “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

The failure to meet that goal was dramatic.

After Nixon, president after president set similar goals. Every target was missed. We became more and more dependent on imported petroleum. Net energy imports doubled between 1970 and 1980, and then again by 1990.

Extravagant Pensions Are Killing General Motors

Roger Lowenstein, writing in the New York Times, argues that extravagant pensions are killing General Motors — which is fairly uncontentious — before veering into brazenly political and self-contradictory territory:

The sorry decline of General Motors has proved Reuther right: the government is the better provider of social insurance. Let industry worry about selling products.

Unhappily, however, the fate of many public-sector pension plans is even worse than G.M.’s. Responding to the same temptation to offload expenses into the future, public employers have committed to trillions of dollars in future liabilities. In New Jersey, a huge pension liability has created a budgetary nightmare for the state. The city of Vallejo, Calif., burdened by police pensions, recently filed for bankruptcy.

Just as G.M.’s shareholders bore the burdens of its pensions, states and cities will have to force taxpayers to sacrifice in the form of service cuts, tax increases or both.

(Emphasis mine.)

Amazon Kindle Sales on the Rise?

Are Amazon Kindle sales on the rise?

According to a source at Amazon, "on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles." Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.
[...]
A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month.

Supremacy by Stealth

Robert Kaplan offers his rules for Supremacy by Stealth:

1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission Is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan

The last of those rules became one of the sub-titles of the Coming Anarchy blog:

Imperialism in antiquity was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in his comment about protecting “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan.” Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren’t, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of “democracy,” “economic development,” and “human rights,” by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone’s vision was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli, who kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay and retook Sudan from Islamic extremists.

By sustaining ourselves first, we will be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands of NGOs represent a chaos of interests. Without the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole…

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

John Derbyshire adds this:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.

John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read "assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy."

Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:

Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They've exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:

1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
2. Officials make work for one another.

Like most generalizations, these are not always true...but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[...]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people's money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to "spend on others" in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.

To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:

Von Clausewitz and others have termed war "a continuation of politics by other means," but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation's interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It's in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.

It's not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary's list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.

Both Pills Claim To Be Red

Mencius Moldbug summarizes the problem of bad government — and progress:

The leading cause of violent death and misery galore in the modern era is bad government. Most of us grew up thinking we live in a time and place in which Science and Democracy, which put a man on the moon and brought him back with Tang, have either cured this ill or reduced it to a manageable and improving condition. That is, most of us grew up believing — and most Americans, whatever their party registration, still believe — in progress.

Both these statements are facts. But there are two ways to interpret the second. Either (a), blue pill, the belief in progress is an accurate assessment of reality, or (b), red pill, it isn't. Our pills correspond to visions of the future, and neither is my invention. The blue pill is marked millennium. The red pill is marked anakyklosis.

To choose (b), we have to believe that hundreds of millions of people living in a more or less free society, many of whom are literate and even reasonably knowledgeable, completely misunderstand reality — and more specifically, history. A hard pill to swallow? Not at all, because the blue pill tastes just as big going down. To believe in progress, you have to believe that similar numbers of our ancestors were just as misguided — enthralled by racism, classism, and other nefarious "ideologies," from which humanity is in the progress of cleansing itself.

Both pills, in other words, claim to be red. But when we note that progressive ideas flow freely through the most influential circles in our society, whereas reactionary ideas are scorned, marginalized and often even criminalized, we can tell the difference.

In case you're not familiar with his red- and blue-pill explanations, I've discussed them before.

Anyway, here's a thought experiment on progress:

Imagine that there had been no scientific or technical progress at all during the 20th century. That the government of 2008 had to function with the technical base of 1908. Surely, if the quality of government has increased or even just remained constant, its performance with the same tools should be just as good. And with better technology, it should do even better.

But without computers, cell phones or even motor vehicles, 19th-century America could rebuild destroyed cities instantly — at least, instantly by today's standards. Imagine what this vanished society, which if we could see it with our own eyes would strike us as no less foreign than any country in the world today, could accomplish if it got its hands on 21st-century gadgets — without any of the intervening social and political progress.

When we think of progress we tend to think of two curves summed. X, the change in our understanding and control of nature, slopes upward except in the most dire circumstances — the fall of Rome, for example. But X is a confounding variable. Y, the change in our quality of government, is the matter at hand. Extracting Y from X+Y is not a trivial exercise.

But broad thought-experiments — like imagining what would become of 1908 America, if said continent magically popped up in the mid-Atlantic in 2008, and had to modernize and compete in the global economy — tell a different story. I am very confident that Old America would be the world's leading industrial power within the decade, and I suspect it would attract a lot of immigration from New America. The seeds of decay were there, certainly, but they had hardly begun to sprout. At least by today's standards.

Surely a healthy, stable society should be able to thrive in a steady state without any technical improvements at all. But if we imagine the 20th century without technical progress, we see an almost pure century of disaster. Even when we restrict our imagination to the second half of the twentieth century, to imagine the America of 2008 reduced to the technology of 1950 is a bleak, bleak thought. If you are still taking the blue pills, to what force do you ascribe this anomalous decay?

Whereas the red pill gives us an easy explanation: a decaying system of government has been camouflaged and ameliorated by the advance of technology. Of course, X may overcome Y and lead us to the Singularity, in which misgovernment is no more troublesome than acne. Or Y may overcome X, and produce the Antisingularity — a new fall of Rome. It's a little difficult to invent self-inventing AI when you're eating cold beans behind the perimeter of a refugee camp in Redwood Shores, and Palo Alto is RPG squeals, mortar whumps and puffs of black smoke on the horizon, as the Norteños and the Zetas finally have it out over the charred remains of your old office park. Unlikely, sure, but do you understand the X-Y interaction well enough to preclude this outcome? Because I don't.

Swallowing the red pill leads us, like Neo, into a completely different reality. In reality (b), bad government has not been defeated at all. History is not over. Oh, no. We are still living it. Perhaps we are in the positions of the French of 1780 or the Russians of 1914, who had no idea that the worlds they lived in could degenerate so rapidly into misery and terror.

Is the abyss this close? I don't think so, but surely the materials are present.

Hot Airships

I was recently reminded of the SF trope of establishing a parallel universe by sticking a few airships in the sky, and that got me to thinking about everyone's favorite hydrogen- and helium-filled leviathans — and why hot air works so well for balloons, yet we never hear about hot-air dirigibles.

It turns out, they exist. The Airship Alberto, for instance, uses hot air for lift, which means it can deflate and fold for storage, like an ordinary balloon, without a large hangar and ground crew:



The Alberto — named after Alberto Santos-Dumont, of course — has a semi-rigid, umbrella-like skeleton, unlike a balloon, which gives it the structural rigidity to handle higher air speeds and tighter maneuvering — and with vectored thrust from the rear-mounted propeller, it is quite maneuverable.

Of course, the real advantage of the Alberto's hot-air design is that it's one-tenth as expensive as a helium dirigible. (They expect the sale price of the aircraft to be between $100,000 and $200,000, the price of a small airplane or mid-sized sailboat.)

So why use helium at all? Because a given volume of hot air can lift only about one-third as much as the same volume of helium — so a hot-air airship needs to be roughly 1.5 times as tall, wide, and long as a comparable helium-filled airship.

If helium is that much better than hot air, how much better is hydrogen than helium? Not that much better, it turns out. Amateur chemists might note that hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, versus helium's atomic weight of 4, and assume that it would have four times the lift. After a little thought, they might realize that hydrogen (H₂) has a molecular weight of 2, versus helium's 4, implying half the density. The key is that half the density does not mean twice the buoyancy:

The density at sea-level and 0°C for air and each of the gases is:

• Air (ρ_air) = 1.292 (g/L).
• Hydrogen (ρ_H2) = 0.08988 g/L
• Helium (ρ_He) = 0.1786 g/L

Thus helium is almost twice as dense as hydrogen. However, buoyancy depends upon the difference of the densities (ρ_gas) - (ρ_air) rather than upon their ratios. Thus the difference in buoyancies is about 8%, as seen from the buoyancy equation:

• Buoyant mass (or effective mass) = mass × (1 - ρ_air/ρ_gas)
• Therefore the buoyant mass for one liter of hydrogen in air as:
  • 0.08988 g * (1 - (1.292 / 0.08988) ) = -1.202 g
• And the buoyant mass for one liter of helium in air as:
  • 0.1786 g * (1 - (1.292 / 0.1786) ) = -1.113 g

The negative signs indicate that these gases tend to rise in air.

Thus hydrogen's additional buoyancy compared to helium is:

• 1.202 / 1.113 = 1.080, or approximately 8.0%

Bureaucratic Sclerosis

Most observers interpret bureaucratic sclerosis as a sign of a government which is too powerful, Mencius Moldbug notes:

In fact it is a sign of a government which is too weak. If seventeen officials need to provide signoff for you to repaint the fence in your front yard, this is not because George W. Bush, El Maximo Jefe, was so concerned about the toxicity of red paint that he wants to make seventeen-times-sure that no wandering fruit flies are spattered with the nefarious chemical. It is because a lot of people have succeeded in making work for themselves, and that work has been spread wide and well. They are thriving off tiny pinhole leaks through which power leaks out of the State. A strong [sovereign] would plug the leaks, and retire the officials.

Outside the Communist bloc proper, of course, the ultimate in power leakage and resulting bureaucracy was India's infamous Permit Raj, which still to some extent exists. Needless to say, if the subcontinent was run on a profit basis, the Permit Raj would not be good business. In fact, quite amusingly and with no apparent sense of irony, our favorite newspaper recently printed an article in which the following lines appear:

Vietnam’s biggest selling point for many companies is its political stability. Like China, it has a nominally Communist one-party system that crushes dissent, keeps the military under tight control and changes government policies and leaders slowly.

“Communism means more stability,” Mr. Shu, the chief financial officer of Texhong, said, voicing a common view among Asian executives who make investment decisions. At least a few American executives agree, although they never say so on the record.

Democracies like those in Thailand and the Philippines have proved more vulnerable to military coups and instability. A military coup in Thailand in September 2006 was briefly followed by an attempt, never completed, to impose nationalistic legislation penalizing foreign companies.

“That sent the wrong signal that we would not welcome foreign investment — this has ruined the confidence of investors locally and internationally,” the finance minister Surapong Suebwonglee said in an interview in Bangkok.

The ironies! Of course, perhaps it is not so ironic after all, as perhaps the main reason that the old China Hands, the men (such as Owen Lattimore) who by "manipulating procedural outcomes" gave China to Mao, thought the Communists were the shizzle is that they were obviously so strong. America could really do great things in Asia with the ruthlessly indoctrinated divisions of the PLA on its side, as opposed to Chiang Kai-Shek, who looked like his main interests were opium and little boys.

After fifty million deaths and the annihilation of traditional Chinese culture, what still remains is that strength. There is not much antinomianism in China, which has reduced its totalitarian pretensions to one simple and easily-obeyed rule: do not challenge the Party for power. The result, though profoundly flawed, is the most successful capitalist country in the world. All things considered, it is certainly one of the best to do business in — as the article describes.

Hans Reiser: A jailhouse interview

Stephen Elliott discusses his jailhouse interview with murderer — and Linux guru — Hans Reiser:

When told two days later his estranged wife was missing, he refused to talk to the police. They started following him but he engaged in counter-surveillance, driving in circles, pulling over to the side of the road, exiting and entering the freeway. Within two days of being notified Nina was missing, he hired a well-respected criminal defense attorney, William Du Bois. Hans withdrew large sums of money from the bank. When the police found his car -- it was missing the passenger seat and rear assembly -- they uncovered two books on murder, including "Homicide" by David Simon. Simon wrote about the importance of not talking to the police and how a crime is rarely solved without a body. Without a body, you first have to prove the person is dead.
[...]
Everything Hans said reinforced the image I already had of him. He wasn't interested in what was true, only in whether or not he had been treated fairly. There wasn't a shred of remorse in his body. He was a sociopath, incapable of caring about another human being. A narcissist. A manipulator who thinks everybody else is stupid. The strangest thing about this murderer is how he never gets away with anything. Nobody ever believes him but he keeps lying anyway. He's a genius who invented a new way to store information, supervised millions of lines of complex code, and he has no idea how he is being perceived.
[...]
Five days later, Hans took the police to Nina's body. He had buried her less than a mile from his house, not far from the trailhead. He lived close to the Redwood Regional Park, a place where you could hike for days. Search and rescue had scoured the area with ground troops and cadaver dogs, but the body was hidden in a shallow grave more than 100 feet down a steep ravine. She had been strangled. His lawyers stated that Hans was remorseful; that he was trying to make things right. I knew that wasn't true. He had maintained his innocence since being arrested in October 2006. I was the last journalist to interview him before his confession. He wasn't remorseful, he was angry. He still felt the world owed him something.

Reiser had an interesting history:

He grew up in California and dropped out of his junior high school before he was 14, citing disagreements with the conventional schooling system. He was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley at the age of 15, which he attended off and on until he received a BA in Systematizing (an individualized major dealing with physics, math and related topics) in 1992, at the age of 28. Reiser was also one of the founding members of the Open Computing Facility at UC Berkeley. Though preferring higher education, Reiser chose not to pursue a Ph.D., citing the same reasons he had dropped out of junior high school.

In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser selected from a mail-order bride catalogue, and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (Нина Шаранова), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist[9] who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN. They had two children.

The onion conundrum

The onion conundrum is only a conundrum to those who claim that speculators cause volatility:

The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands.

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics' belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings. Since 2006, oil prices have risen 100%, and corn is up 300%. But onion prices soared 400% between October 2006 and April 2007, when weather reduced crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only to crash 96% by March 2008 on overproduction and then rebound 300% by this past April.

The volatility has been so extreme that the son of one of the original onion growers who lobbied Congress for the trading ban now thinks the onion market would operate more smoothly if a futures contract were in place.

How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You Sound Black?

I don't think this headline conveys the right idea, but it describes an interesting study. How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You Sound Black?

As part of a large longitudinal study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow-up validation interviews were conducted over the phone and recorded.

Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.

Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each voice and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.

Then he put this measure of whether a voice sounded black into a regression (the standard statistical tool that economists use for estimating things), and came up with the finding that blacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.

(It turns out you don’t want to sound southern, either. Although pretty imprecisely estimated, it is almost as bad for your wages to sound southern as it is to sound black, even controlling for whether you live in the south.)

The headline implies a certain causality, but that's not necessarily the case at all:

It is possible that there are many other characteristics that differ between blacks who do or do not “sound black” that Grogger cannot control for in his regressions. It does seem likely that the biases at work would make his estimate an upper bound.

The death of the yearbook

The Economist notes the death of the yearbook on American college campuses, as social networks like Facebook take over. Of course, what students really need is a printed archive of the "best of" their Facebook network for those four years:

Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Anyway, a one-size-fits-all yearbook might work for a high school class of a few hundred, but it makes little sense for a state university class in the tens of thousands.

Moebius Redux

Moebius Redux offers a fascinating look at French illustrator Jean Giraud, perhaps best known, under the pseudonym of Moebius, for co-creating the adult comic Métal Hurlant, which spawned an American version, Heavy Metal.



If you know Heavy Metal from the movie, then you might recognize Moebius's work indirectly, from the last sequence, Taarna, which was based on his Arzach stories — but with his protagonist replaced by a hawt chick.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Giraud made a life-changing trip to Mexico when he was in art school — and that he went back and had an even more life-changing trip there that included some hallucinogenic mushrooms. It shows in his art.

I was shocked to find out that Giraud worked on a film adaptation of Dune for Alejandro Jodorowsky. They had funding but couldn't arrange American distribution, so the project got cancelled. Not only did the project have Giraud doing design work, but also H. R. Giger — and he's as creepy as you might expect.

That team went on to do Alien.

Also, Giraud's artwork for the Dan O'Bannon short story comic "The Long Tomorrow" was a key visual reference for Blade Runner.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

FDA issues warning on Cipro, similar antibiotics

Years ago, when I was taking a fairly long course of hardcore antibiotics for a sinus infection, I noticed that my Achilles tendons would pop where they attached to the bone. I wasn't sure what to make of it until I stumbled across a study noting that tendon injuries were higher in athletes who had recently taken antibiotics. When I mentioned this to my doctor, he looked at me like I was delusional.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has ordered makers of fluoroquinolone drugs — like Cipro, Levaquin, and Floxin — to add a "black box" warning that they can cause tendon ruptures.

The Favorite Sport of Young Aristocrats

Why is antinomianism — clamoring for "change" — so popular?

Because people love power, and any movement with the power to destroy anything, or even just "change" it, has just that: power.

Antinomianism allows young aristocrats to engage in the activity that has been the favorite sport of young aristocrats since Alcibiades was a little boy: scheming for power. According to this article, for example, there are "over 7500 nonprofits" in the Bay Area, "3800 of which deal with sustainability issues." These appear to employ approximately half of our fair city's jeunesse dorée, occupying the best years of their lives and paying them squat. Meanwhile, container ships full of empty boxes thunder out the Golden Gate, along with approximately two trillion dollars a year of little green pieces of paper.

The Slow Death of a City Block

The Slow Death of a City Block — 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis — demonstrates just how illiquid cities are:

In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it's ranked 48th.

In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That's out of two and a half million people in the metro area.

In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.

At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They're stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.

Long after the city has lost it's economic raison d'être, buildings still stand, crumbling slowly over the course of decades.

UFC 86 fighter paydays and salaries

I found the UFC 86 fighter paydays and salaries interesting:

Forrest Griffin — $250,000 ($100,000 to show, $150,000 to win)
Quinton “Rampage” Jackson — $225,000
Griffin defeated Jackson via unanimous decision

Patrick Cote — $32,000 ($16,000 to show, $16,000 to win)
Ricardo Almeida — $23,000
Cote defeated Almeida via split decision

Joe Stevenson — $60,000 ($30,000 to show, $30,000 to win)
Gleison Tibau — $11,000
Stevenson defeated Tibau via submission (guillotine choke) in round two

Josh Koscheck — $70,000 ($35,000 to show, $35,000 to win)
Chris Lytle — $14,000
Koscheck defeated Lytle via unanimous decision

Melvin Guillard — $20,000 ($10,000 to show, $10,000 to win)
Dennis Siver — $7,000
Guillard defeated Siver via technical knockout (strikes) in round one

Tyson Griffin — $40,000 ($20,000 to show, $20,000 to win)
Marcus Aurelio — $40,000
Griffin defeated Aurelio via unanimous decision

Cole Miller — $20,000 ($10,000 to show, $10,000 to win)
Jorge Gurgel — $10,000
Miller defeated Gurgel via submission (triangle choke) in round three

Justin Buchholz — $8,000 ($4,000 to show, $4,000 to win)
Corey Hill — $8,000
Buchholz defeated Hill via submission (rear naked choke) in round two

Gabriel Gonzaga — $100,000 ($50,000 to show, $50,000 to win)
Justin McCully — $5,000
Gonzaga defeated McCully via submission (kimura) in round one

Those numbers don't include bonuses:

Fight of the Night: Forrest Griffin vs. Rampage Jackson
Submission of the Night: Cole Miller
Knockout of the Night: Melvin Guillard

Each fighter received $60,000 for their efforts in addition to their respective base salaries.

Interests and Convictions

In Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, H. W. Brands has this to say about interests and convictions:

In politics perhaps more than in most other arenas of human endeavor, interests and convictions tend to coincide. Whether convictions produce interests, or interests convictions, differs from person to person. But whatever their genesis, convictions and interests almost invariably end up pointing in the same direction. Those who can't master the coincidence don't succeed in politics, and they leave the game to those who can.

The Simple Anarchist

Mencius Moldbug notes that the most common species of antinomian — his term for Leftist — is the simple anarchist:

The most bloodthirsty and intrusive states of the 20th century were based on a philosophy — Marxism — which saw itself as fundamentally opposed to government. People really did believe that the socialist paradise would be something other than a state.

Near where I live, on one of the most fashionable shopping streets in the world, is an anarchist bookstore. On its side wall is a mural.

The mural contains two slogans:

History remembers 2 kinds of people, those who kill and those who fight back.

Anarchism strives toward a social organization which will establish well-being for all.

I am flabbergasted by how revealing these slogans are. History, at least when written by honest historians, remembers one kind of people: those who kill. It also notes that those who kill always conceive of themselves as "fighting back." As for "a social organization," it is simply our old friend, the State.

Thus, anarchism defines itself: it is an attempt to capture the state, and its juicy revenues, through extortion, robbery and murder. When it succeeds, it will distribute the loot among its accomplices, and "establish well-being for all." At least in theory.

As we've seen, the one thing an antinomian cannot abide is a formal and immutable distribution of the revenues of state. He must constantly redistribute, he must wash his hands on the stream of cash, giving to Peter and taking from Paul, or his supporters have no reason to support him. In other words, he is basically a criminal.

Ghoti out of Water

English is famous for it poor phonemic orthography — spelling and pronunciation have little to do with each other. This has led to all kinds of reform movements and unusual alphabets.

You may have seen ghoti presented before as an alternative spelling for "fish" — and as evidence of our dire need for spelling reform:

• gh, pronounced /f/ as in tough /tʌf/;
• o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/; and
• ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/.

Although the first known published reference to ghoti credits one William Ollier (born 1824), the clever misspelling is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

Here's where it gets weird. Shaw did indeed consider English spelling a mess, and that led him to hold a competition for a new writing system. The competition took place in 1958, and Kingsley Read's Shavian alphabet was chosen as the winner out of the 467 entries.



Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion was printed in the winning alphabet, but, as you might imagine, not much else was.

Well before Shaw held his competition, Benjamin Franklin toyed with a new phonetic alphabet, which dropped redundant consonants — c, j, q, w, x, and y — and added six new letters:



Frankly — pardon the pun — I find many of his added characters ugly and unintuitive — although the n with a tail for ng works and has found its way into more modern systems.

Franklin was obviously trying to create a system fairly close to the one in use, just cleaner. I don't think he succeeded, but I understand the aim. In 1867, Alexander Graham Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, went in the opposite direction and devised a physiological alphabet based on the positions of the organs of speech for articulating various sounds. Melville Bell was a teacher of the deaf, and he intended his visible speech system to help deaf students learn spoken language:



You can easily imagine visible speech as some obscure elven written language from Tolkien's Middle Earth, which points to an obvious problem: current English readers can't even guess at what visible-speech text might mean. If we could start from scratch though, it would make sense to go with a physiological alphabet.

Of course, in a sense, we all start from scratch in childhood, and children who start with a language like Spanish, where the spelling is almost perfectly phonetic, pick up reading much, much sooner than children who have to learn all the crazy rules and exceptions of English spelling.

Sir James Pitman, grandson of the inventor of Pitman shorthand, thought it made sense to teach English-speaking children a phonetic writing system, and then to switch them over to real English writing later. His Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) has some elements that really appeal to me — and some that really don't:



I love the ligatures — combined symbols — for ch, sh, and both forms of th. I also love the two symbols for oo. The vowel+e ligatures make a certain sense for English, but I find them jarring, since they match neither English (with the intervening consonant removed) nor most other languages. Anyway, it's a fascinating little alphabet.

Of course, what we really use when we need to know a pronunciation is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Businessman who grabbed a thug for smashing a window is charged with assault

I've heard enough stories like this to find it plausible. Businessman who grabbed a thug for smashing a window is charged with assault:

Mr Kink was sitting in his wife's town centre bar in Weymouth, Dorset, when he heard a security alarm go off.

He went outside and confronted two men stood near to the Phone Zone store which had a smashed window.

Mr Kink, who is registered disabled following a motorcycle accident 20 years ago, said he was met with a volley of abuse from the pair before being hit.

He said: '"I accused one of them of smashing the window and he said "'what the f*** has it got to do with you?"

'He then took a swing at me and punched me just under my left eye. I grabbed hold of him and managed to sweep one of his legs from under him and I held him there by putting the toe of my shoe on his shoulder blade.

'There were lots of other people around at this stage and somebody had hold of the other bloke he was with. When the police arrived I stepped back and he kicked off at them. When he was put in the police car he tried to kick in the windows.'

A few days later police turned up at Mr Kink's home. 'There were three police officers and a dog handler there. They told me I was being arrested for assault,' he said.

Just one more example of Britain slowly destroying itself, I suppose.

Rush Who?

Former-Finn Ilkka at The Fourth Checkraise asks, I wonder how many random people outside America, if you asked them, could tell you who Rush Limbaugh is:

Way less than one percent, I'm sure. Which is pretty amazing when you remember that he is currently the highest-paid media personality in America, having just signed a new contract worth $400 million. (How many other media figures well enough known to be household names would you need to add up to get to that?) Yet the media silence about him is absolutely airtight, almost as if he didn't even exist at all. Every other celebrity or political figure, major and minor, gets at least an occasional nod, but I really have to stretch my memory to remember the last time Rush got anything at all, other than that schadenfreude Oxycontin case. Perhaps this best illustrates the extent that society and media becoming deeply fragmented since those good old times when only the major networks existed and continuously parroted the official party line.

The present state of affairs is unsatisfactory

Antinomians — those seeking Change, in Moldbug's parlance — believe that the present state of affairs is unsatisfactory:

So, of course, do I. The nomos is horribly corroded and encrusted with all sorts of gunk. However, the pronomian's goal is to discern the real structure of order under this heap of garbage, scrape it down to the bare skeleton, replace any missing bones, and let the healthy tissue of reality grow around it.

To the pronomian, this structure is arbitrary. Weirdly-shaped borders? Leave them as they are. High taxes? All that tax revenue is paid to someone, who probably thinks of it as his property. Who am I to say it isn't? There are some property structures, notably patent rights, which I (like most libertarians) find very unproductive. If so, the government needs to print money and buy them back. Fortunately, it has a large, high-speed intaglio press.

The pronomian seeks to restore the nomos, whose outlines are clear under the mountain of byzantine procedure, wholesale makework and vote-buying, criminal miseducation, and other horrors of the liberal-democratic state. The antinomian sees many of the same horrors. But he does not share the pronomian's goal: minimizing the reallocation of property and authority. Where the pronomian simply wants to replace the management, reorganize the staff, and discard the inscrutable volumes of precedent that have absconded with the name of law, the antinomian wants to destroy power structures that he conceives as illegitimate.

And, of course, he wants to rebuild them according to his ideals. Unless he is a complete nihilist, which of course some are. But it is the destructive tendency that makes antinomianism so successful. The utopia is never constructed, or if it is it is not a utopia. Success is a precondition to utopia, and success involves achieving the power to destroy.

Creating Alien Life on Earth

Al Fin notes that Japanese chemists have succeeded in creating alien life on earth — or at least alien DNA:

The researchers used high-tech DNA synthesis equipment to stitch together four entirely new, artificial bases inside the sugar-based framework of a DNA molecule. This resulted in unusually stable, double-stranded structures resembling natural DNA. Like natural DNA, the new structures were right-handed and some easily formed triple-stranded structures. The unique chemistry of these structures and their high stability offer unprecedented possibilities for developing new biotech materials and applications, the researchers say.

Science Writer Jim Holt Explores Why We Laugh

Science Writer Jim Holt Explores Why We Laugh:

V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.

Who invented the joke? We've been joking forever, right?

No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity — seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There's this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.

Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil Suggests

Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil Suggests:

A previous study of anatomical changes in toe bone structure had dated the use of shoes to about 30,000 years ago.

Now the dainty-toed fossil from China suggests that at least some humans were sporting protective footwear 10,000 years further back, during a time when both modern humans and Neandertals occupied portions of Europe and Asia.

The fossils go back further than any sandal remains:

The first forms of protective footwear probably evolved from simple wrappings used to insulate the feet from snow and freezing temperatures, experts say.

The oldest preserved shoe remains, dating to roughly 10,000 years ago from the western United States, are simple sandals woven of plant fibers.
[...]
In a previous study, Trinkaus found that shoe-wearing and barefoot human groups show characteristic differences in the size and strength of their middle toe bones.

Consistent shoe use results in a more delicate bone structure, because footwear reduces the force on middle toes during walking.

In his latest study, this anatomical evidence allowed Trinkaus to date the origin of shoes to a period long before the oldest known shoe remains.

Jefferson Bible

I'm not sure why the LA Times would consider this news, but it just published a piece on the so-called Jefferson Bible:

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible.

The big question, according to Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?'" [...]
In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus' crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.

The tactical error of the libertarian

The tactical error of the libertarian, Mencius Moldbug notes, is to believe that the state can be made smaller and simpler by making it weaker:

Historically, the converse is the case: attempts to weaken [a sovereign] either destroy it, resulting in chaos and death, or force it to compensate by enlarging, resulting in the familiar "red-giant state." The pronomian prefers a state that is small, simple, and very strong. It respects the rights of its clients not because it is forced to respect them, but because it has a financial incentive to respect them, and it obeys that financial incentive because it is managed responsibly and effectively.

Brilliant or a sham? Questions asked over Ingrid Betancourt rescue

Kidnapping is big business and has been for some time, but no one wants to admit that they pay off — and thus encourage — kidnappers.

It didn't take long for some to wonder, Was the Ingrid Betancourt rescue brilliant or a sham?

Swiss public radio cited an unidentified source “close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years" as saying the operation had in fact been staged to cover up the fact that the US and Colombians had paid $20 million for their freedom. [...]
French media have also raised questions about Ms Betancourt’s relatively healthy appearance after her release, compared with the gaunt and haggard look of her last video from captivity. French state radio suggested the hostages may have been given food and medicine to return them to health before their release. There was no suggestion that the hostages knew they were to be released.

Dominique Moisi, one of France's leading foreign policy experts, said that it was “probable” that the Farc had been paid money as part of the "infiltration" of their command. “They were bought in order to turn them around, like Mafia chiefs," he said on French state television, as Ms Betancourt's plane was taxiing up to the terminal in Paris.

This wouldn't be the first time a Latin American regime faked a rescue operation.

Can a freight train really move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel?

American freight trains move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel:

According to our calculations, which match the [Association of American Railroads]'s tally exactly, the nation's seven major railroad companies reported the following for 2007:

• Moving 1,770,545,245,000 ton-miles of freight


• Consuming 4,062,025,082 gallons of diesel fuel (including freight trains and trains in switching yards, but excluding passenger trains)

The average works out to be 435.88 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.
[...]
The rail industry says its fuel efficiency has increased by 85 percent since 1980. It attributes that to factors that include using new and more efficient locomotives, training engineers to conserve fuel, using computers to assemble trains more efficiently in the yard and to plan trips more efficiently to avoid congestion, and reducing the amount of time engines are idling.

Kyklos

According to Polybius, the kyklos, or political cycle, rotates through three forms of government — democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy — and the degenerate forms of each of those three — ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny:

Originally society is in anarchy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who because of their family's power lack virtue, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into mob rule, beginning the cycle anew.

The truth about left and right

Mencius Moldbug reveals the truth about left and right — or, as he refers to them, pronomian and antinomian, meaning for or against the formal promises — property rights and contracts — already in place in a society:

An antinomian is anyone who seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to disrupt or destroy the nomos. He is a breaker of oaths, a burner of deeds, a mocker of laws — at least, from the pronomian perspective. From his own perspective he is a champion of freedom and justice.

I admit it: I am a pronomian. I endorse the nomos without condition.

Mencius is almost a libertarian, and he considers libertarianism the most refined form of modern antinomianism:

Libertarianism is a fine example of the antinomian form, because the elements of the nomos that it attacks are specified with the elegant design sense that one would expect from the founder of modern libertarianism — probably the 20th century's greatest political theorist, Murray Rothbard.

Rothbardian libertarianism rejects two aspects of the nomos. First, it rejects the entire concept of [...] sovereignty. Rothbardians are called anarcho-capitalists for a reason: they deny the legitimacy of the state, unless operated according to strict Rothbardian principles. Note that they do not require, say, Disney to operate Disneyland according to libertarian principles. This is because, to a Rothbardian, Disney's title to Disneyland is legitimate, whereas (say) Iceland's title to Iceland is not.

Rothbard has an intricate system, borrowed originally from Locke, for determining whether or not a title is legitimate. To say that this system is unamenable to objective interpretation is to put it mildly. But the titles of existing [sovereigns] all appear to be illegitimate. This makes libertarianism a revolutionary ideology. Since its antinomianism is so restricted and its lust for blood is minimal, however, it is not an especially dangerous (or effective) one.

Antinomians who reject sovereignty have two main alternatives. Either they support private, amorphous, and even territorially overlapping "protection agencies" (a design whose military plausibility is, to put it kindly, small), or they believe that government is legitimate if and only if it obeys a set of "natural laws." Again here we see the proximity to the pronomian. But the Rothbardian concept of natural law misses the Hobbesian fact that in the true nomos, there is no party that can enforce a state's promises to its clients.

This matters, because legalism without sovereignty has a simple result: the personal rule of judges. The error is to imagine the existence of a superhuman legal authority which can bind a state against itself, enforcing a "government of laws, not men." As the bizarre encrustations of precedent that history builds up around every written constitution demonstrate, this is simply a political perpetual-motion device. All governments are governments of men. If final decisions are taken by a council of nine, these nine are the nine who rule. Whether you call them a court, a junta or a politburo is irrelevant.

(Emphasis mine.)

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways — which it pursued even when energy prices were low:

With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.
[...]
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. But the generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders took off three years ago, after energy prices began rising.

Since then, the company has sold 64 units, mainly through a joint venture in China.

“Japan rushed to embrace these technologies back in the 1980s,” said Katsushi Sorida, head of the waste heat plant department at Kawasaki Plant Systems, a subsidiary that markets and installs the units. “Now the rest of the world is finally catching up.”

I suppose the rest of the world is "catching up" because it finally makes sense to spend massive resources to reduce energy waste.

Japan's forced-conservation regulations led it to use less energy when energy was cheap:

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan’s strides in efficiency are clearest in heavy industries like steel, which are the nation’s biggest consumers of power. From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation.

The results are visible at the Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay, run by Japan’s No. 2 steelmaker, JFE Steel. Massive steel ducts snake from the blast furnaces and surrounding buildings. These capture heat and gases that had previously been released into the air or burned off as waste. Now, they are used to power generators that produce 90 percent of the plant’s electricity. (The plant’s main fuel remains the coal used to heat its huge blast furnaces.)

Such innovations allow the mill to produce a ton of steel using 35 percent less energy than it did three decades ago, said Yoshitsugu Iino, group leader of JFE Steel’s climate change policy group. Mr. Iino calculates that if the global steel industry adopted Japanese conservation measures, it could reduce carbon emissions by some 300 million tons a year.

BrandWeek on TapouT

I've been astonished over the past few years by just how mainstream MMA has become. I can remember seeing the TapouT crew in their buffoonish costumes years ago, at small King of the Cage fighting events on Indian reservations in California. They seemed like a joke. They still do, but BrandWeek looks at their amazing growth:

Sales
2005: $3 million
2006: $12 million
2007: $22.5 million
2008: $100 million (projected)
2009: $225 million (projected)

Oh, and they have negligible competition.

Like I said, I can remember the early days:

By 1997, the pair had quit their jobs to start TapouT, the first such apparel company for the MMA world. A Web-only business, its sales grew from a meager $29,000 to $3 million by 2005. In those days, before the sport had really taken off, the brand made a name for itself by sponsoring athletes with amazing ease. Caldwell remembers being able to outfit some early fighters in head-to-toe TapouT looks for a mere $500. But as the sport grew, so did TapouT, and it was time for the next phase.

Then they brought in marketer Marc Kreiner and got funding from PemGroup.

They now have an almost unwatchable reality show, which, of course, serves as one long commercial for their brand. It's not unwatchable to everybody though; 100 fans have sent in photos of their TapouT tattoos.

(Hat tip to Robert Joyner at MMAPayout.)

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid — well, it used to be secret, a long time ago:

Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

But little is known about the civilization that built the immense city, with its ceremonial architecture and geometric temples, and then torched and abandoned it around 700 AD.

It sounds to me like they summoned an unspeakable evil and did not know how to kill it, so they buried it deep within the earth. Right? Occam's Razor, and all that...

Of sommeliers and stomachs

The Economist speaks of sommeliers and stomachs, exploring the health benefits of red wine, which is high in polyphenols, and how those polyphenols might help, since they don't seem to make the trip from the stomach to the bloodstream in large amounts:

[Dr Kanner] and his colleagues fed a group of rats one of two meals — either red meat from a turkey (a foodstuff shown by previous research to raise malondialdehyde levels in humans) or such meat mixed with red-wine concentrate. An hour and a half after the rats had eaten, they were killed. Dr Kanner then removed their stomachs and analysed the contents. As he reports in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the wine concentrate did indeed reduce the formation of malondialdehyde. It also cut the level of hydroperoxides, another group of oxidising agents that cause cell damage.

Caloric Restriction Comes in a Pill

Caloric Restriction Comes in a Pill:

In 2006, Sinclair and National Institute on Aging gerontologist Rafael de Cabo, also a co-author of the Cell Metabolism study, used resveratrol to improve the health and extend the lives of obese mice on high-calorie diets. The latest study involved both obese and normal mice, fed standard, low- and high-calorie fare.

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

The mitochondria of resveratrol-taking mice also proved healthy. Mitochondrial degeneration has been implicated in a variety of diseases, leading some researchers to believe that heart disease, cancer and dementia — all the so-called diseases of aging — have a common root.

"The mice had tremendous health benefits from taking resveratrol," said de Cabo. "If any of those parameters translate to humans, it will be tremendous."

More Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water

More Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water:

In the recent study, Nilsson and colleagues probed the structure of liquid water using X-ray Emission Spectroscopy and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy. These techniques use powerful X-rays, generated by a synchrotron light source, to excite electrons within a water molecule's single oxygen atom. Tuning the X-rays to a specific range of energies can reveal with tremendous precision the location and arrangement of the water molecules. In this way Nilsson's team found that water is indeed made up of tetrahedral groups, but clear evidence also emerged for the dominance of a second, less defined structure in the mix.

The idea that liquid water is made up of two structures is not new. German physicist Willhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in the late 19th century, published a paper proposing that liquid water comprised two different structures — one tetrahedral "ice-like" structure, and another more loosely arranged structure, which helped explain why water behaves in such unusual ways. Now, more than a century later, the current study is giving new life to Röntgen's "two structure" model.

"It is amazing that the modern usage of X-rays demonstrates that Röntgen, more than 100 years ago, was on the right path," said Nilsson. "Water is still not fully understood, although it is the basis of our existence. I expect more surprises to be discovered in the future."

Virtual fencing

Virtual fencing has existed for dogs for decades. Now the "Ear-a-round" is bringing a higher-tech version to ranching:

The Ear-a-round consists of a small, light box that sits on top of a cow’s head, and a pair of earpieces made of fabric and plastic. The box contains a computer chip, a GPS tracking device and a transceiver that enables it to be programmed remotely. The earpieces serve both to keep the box upright and to supply command signals — either sonic or electric — to the animal wearing the device. For maximum working lifetime, the whole thing is powered by lithium-ion batteries that are topped up by solar cells.

One question for Ear-a-round is whether it can be made cheaper than fencing. At $600 a cow, that is not obviously yet so. Dr Rus, however, is working on getting the price of the hardware down to the $100 that farmers will pay. Meanwhile Dr Anderson is about to start working out how many cows actually need to be fitted with Ear-a-rounds to control an entire herd. He hopes that, by identifying a herd’s leaders and fitting out them alone, this number can be reduced to a handful.

The range that an animal is allowed to occupy is recorded by the chip as a set of GPS co-ordinates. The animal’s activity is also recorded. The GPS system gives its location, while an accelerometer and a magnetic compass housed inside the box track its rate and direction of travel. If an animal roams beyond the range specified in the chip, the device responds in a way determined by its wearer’s recent behaviour. The algorithms devised by Dr Rus are able to work out, based on past experience, how strong the message to turn back needs to be. Minor transgressions lead to whispers or tingles. Major ones to shouts or shocks. In both cases the cue is delivered to the ear opposite the direction that the animal is being nudged towards. Four years of research at a ranch in New Mexico have shown that cattle quickly cotton on to what they need to do.

GM mosquito 'could fight malaria'

GM mosquito 'could fight malaria':

In the team's experiments, equal numbers of genetically modified and ordinary "wild-type" mosquitoes were allowed to feed on malaria-infected mice.

As they reproduced, more of the GM, or transgenic, mosquitoes survived. After nine generations, 70% of the insects belonged to the malaria-resistant strain.

A detail seemingly meant to terrify non-scientists:

The scientists also inserted the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the transgenic mosquitoes which made their eyes glow green.

This helped the researchers to easily count the transgenic and non-transgenic insects.

Over on the Freakonomics blog, they seem most concerned about the Ellsberg Paradox, and whether we prefer measurable risk to immeasurable uncertainty, but I'm more concerned that life-saving aid only causes more misery in any impoverished land without enough food to go around.

The cracks are showing

The cracks are showing, The Economist says:

For the past few years it has been hard to ignore America’s crumbling infrastructure, from the devastating breach of New Orleans’s levees after Hurricane Katrina to the collapse of a big bridge in Minneapolis last summer. In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that $1.6 trillion was needed over five years to bring just the existing infrastructure into good repair. This does not account for future needs. By 2020 freight volumes are projected to be 70% greater than in 1998. By 2050 America’s population is expected to reach 420m, 50% more than in 2000. Much of this growth will take place in metropolitan areas, where the infrastructure is already run down.
[...]
America has a grand tradition of national planning, from Thomas Jefferson’s vision for roads and canals in 1808, which influenced policy for the next century (and led to America’s first transcontinental railway) to Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal Highway-Aid Act of 1956, which created the interstate system. Such plans stand in stark contrast to the federal government’s strategy today. America invests a mere 2.4% of GDP in infrastructure, compared with 5% in Europe and 9% in China, and the distribution of that money is misguided. The more roads and drivers a state has, the more federal money it receives, explains Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds infrastructure research. This discourages states from trying to cut traffic. And because the petrol tax pays for transport projects, if America drives less, there is less money for infrastructure.

I'd hardly call it misguided to base interstate highway funding on "petrol" taxes, or to base maintenance funding on how many roads and drivers a state has.

Now basing other transportation funding on "petrol" taxes, sure, that doesn't make much sense — but funding them at all often makes little sense:

Even worse is the influence of the pork-barrel. Only around 20 states use cost-benefit analyses to evaluate transport projects; of these, just six do so regularly. Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” is an infamous result of this sort of planning. But it is not exceptional. Two months after the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, the Senate approved a transport and housing bill that included money for a stadium in Montana and a museum in Las Vegas.

It's not just transportation infrastructure that's crumbling — although that is definitely crumbling:

America’s ageing water infrastructure is sorely underfunded: the Environmental Protection Agency forecasts an $11 billion annual gap in meeting costs over the next 20 years. One heavy storm can cause ageing urban sewerage systems to overflow. Last summer an 83-year-old pipe in Manhattan burst, sending a geyser of steam and debris into the air. Competition for water itself has become vicious. Georgia and Tennessee are in an all-out brawl over it.

America’s transport network is similarly dysfunctional, says a recent Urban Land Institute report. Important gateways, such as the ports in Los Angeles and New York, are choked. Flight delays cost at least $15 billion each year in lost productivity. Commutes are more dismal than ever. Congestion on roads costs $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted petrol, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. Although a growing number of Americans are travelling by train, the railways are old. America’s only “high-speed” train runs between Boston and Washington, DC, on an inadequate track.

How can all this be fixed? In January a national commission on transport policy recommended that the government should invest at least $225 billion each year for the next 50 years. The country is spending less than 40% of that amount today.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that all sorts of groups find that the government should spend more money — generally federal money spent in a few cities or states.

Mikey Burnett Sues The Ultimate Fighter

Mikey Burnett Sues The Ultimate Fighter for — get this — failing to provide a safe environment:

Mikey Burnett, one of the original Lion's Den members, has filed suit in Clark County District Court against TufGuy Productions, Inc. d/b/a Ultimate Fighting Productions, Inc., the company that produces "The Ultimate Fighter" for Spike TV, as well as American International Group, Inc., an accident and health insurance company associated with the TV show.

According to the lawsuit filed on June 9, Burnett claims alleged negligence against the defendants, who "carelessly, recklessly and negligently failed to provide a safe environment for the Ultimate Fighter 4 participants."

Specifically, the 34-year-old Burnett states that he suffered a career-ending spinal injury during the show's tapings.

Burnett served as a competitor on the series' fourth season entitled "The Comeback," where UFC figures of old and not-so-old got a second chance at glory in the Octagon. Burnett's appearance on the show, which aired from August-November 2006, ended years of obscurity the Tulsa, Okla. fighter endured after personal struggles with alcohol abuse, injuries and a horrendous recluse spider bite.

An intriguing character from his 1998 bouts at UFC 16 and 18, Burnett flamed out on the show when he failed to reach the finals.

The punchline:

During his tenure inside the ‘TUF' house, the show aired Burnett running into a wall to stave off boredom.

Perhaps he needs a home with rubber walls.

It is acceptable to discriminate against Roma

Italy's highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Romait is acceptable to discriminate against Roma [Gypsies] on the grounds that they are thieves:

The judgment, made public yesterday, comes amid a nationwide clampdown on the Roma community by Silvio Berlusconi's government. Last week his interior minister, Roberto Maroni, announced plans to fingerprint all of Italy's Roma, including children.

The ruling by the court of cassation, which appears to provide judicial backing for the government's policies, was handed down in March, but reported only yesterday. The judges overthrew the conviction of six defendants who signed a leaflet demanding the expulsion of Verona's Gypsies in 2001.

Among those convicted of racially discriminatory propaganda was Flavio Tosi, an official of the anti-immigrant Northern League, who has since become Verona's mayor. He was quoted by a witness at his trial as having said afterwards: "The Gypsies must be ordered out because, wherever they arrive, there are robberies."

The court of cassation decided this did not show Tosi was a racist, but that he had "a deep aversion [to Roma] that was not determined by the Gypsy nature of the people discriminated against, but by the fact that all the Gypsies were thieves". His dislike of them was "not therefore based on a notion of superiority or racial hatred, but on racial prejudice". The judges scrapped the two-month jail sentences and ordered that the case be reheard.

The Return of Thomas Malthus

Robert Kaplan — himself something of a Malthusian — discusses The Return of Thomas Malthus:

Malthus was born in 1766 with a harelip and a cleft palate. He studied mathematics, history, and philosophy at Cambridge. Partly because of his speech defect, he decided to go into the church and live a somewhat reclusive life in the country. One of the most tranquil and cheerful of men, Malthus never minded interruptions, especially by children, to whom he would give his full attention. But this thoroughly decent man was humiliated by the literary and intellectual grandees of the age. The poet Shelley called him "a eunuch and a tyrant" and the "apostle of the rich," simply because of his matter-of-fact empirical observation that society will always have rich people and poor people. Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all heaped abuse on poor Malthus.

So what did Malthus say that was so terrible? He challenged the conventional view of human perfectibility that was in fashion during the aftermath of the French Revolution and the approach of a new century. He wrote in the realist spirit of Thucydides, Edmund Burke, and America's Founding Fathers. He worried that leisure time and prosperity would produce as much evil as good, and that mass happiness would always elude society. He was a profoundly moral philosopher sensitive to the travails of the human condition. His specific theory — that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically — was eventually proven wrong, because the settlement of the New World and the Industrial Revolution would add significantly to agricultural output. And our current interest in Malthus may, too, prove short-lived if a new green revolution, for example, sweeps Africa.

Al Fin recently emphasized a point that needs plenty of emphasis: We're not all in the same boat. In the first-world countries of North America, Europe, and Asia, technological progress and economic growth far outpace population growth, so standards of living can continue to rise.

In the third-world countries of Africa, on the other hand, extra lives saved are just more mouths to feed. They're caught in a Malthusian Trap, where the marginal benefit of one more unskilled laborer is less than the cost of food.

Sure, a lack of food — or the high price of food — is the proximate cause of their woe, but what they need is not more food so much as greater productivity — and less reproductivity, I suppose.

(Hat tip to Coming Anarchy.)

Rules to Keep Your Skin in a Wall Street Massacre

Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, Moneyball) has written some amusing rules to keep your skin in Wall Street massacre:

The first thing you need to know about recessions is that they don't signal the end of anything on Wall Street.

They're more like a red flag during a Formula One race: The cars coast gently around the track until the wreckage is cleared whereupon they all roar off as if the accident never happened. The difference is that, on Wall Street, it's possible to make the disaster work for you.

You can inch your car quietly forward so, when the race recommences, you're its surprise leader.

Rule No. 1: Betray your employer before your employer betrays you.

Chances are, if you work on Wall Street, you work for some giant corporation. Citigroup Inc., say, or Merrill Lynch & Co. The sheer size of these firms may convince you that they are, essentially, secure, that there is no better place to ride out a storm than among the tens of thousands of fellow employees.

This is a mistake.

No Safety in Numbers

There's seldom any safety in numbers, and the more parlous the situation, the more dangerous it is to be in it with a lot of other people. London during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, the New Jersey suburbs: People are always clustering together precisely where and when they should not.

In World War I, hordes of men charged directly into machine- gun fire, no doubt reassured that they weren't alone.

The hole you should crawl into, he says, is a hedge fund.

Rule No. 2: Remember what you are selling.

No matter what you've told yourself in good times, to justify the huge paychecks you have received, you aren't selling actual money-making expertise. For decades, brokers and money managers as a group have underperformed the market. Yet ordinary investors continue to solicit their advice and pay them for their services. Why?

Greed, contrary to popular belief, isn't what keeps this strange wheel spinning. Greed eventually gropes its way to self- interest. In good times, the dominant psychological impulse can be mistaken for greed but what's really going on is that a lot of people are worried everyone else is getting rich and they aren't.

At the bottom of the Wall Street money machine isn't greed but anxiety. [...] A calm investor is one who might think twice before investing in your hedge fund.

You need to learn to talk to investors in new ways. To frighten them so terribly that they feel compelled to pay someone to hold their sweaty hands.

Rule No. 3: Hide your motives.

Or, specifically, minimize the appearance of financial interest.

Don't tell anyone how well you're doing for yourself, for example, not even women you have just met. Recessions blow in with them a general backlash against worldly pleasures and material obsessions.

You must reckon with this shift in public values, for it will occur even on Wall Street, and threaten to expose your ambition as freakish. A lot of people you thought you knew are about to rediscover what's important in life: wife, kids, the love of one's fellow man. But you are not.

Don't worry: it's temporary. This is still America.

Spain awards apes legal rights

Spain awards apes legal rights:

The Spanish parliament's environment committee last week approved resolutions for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans to gain some statutory rights currently applicable only to humans. It is thought to be the first time a national legislature has taken such action.

The resolutions, which passed with cross-party support and are expected to be approved as laws by the full parliament within a year, are based on the Great Ape Project, a framework designed by scientists and philosophers who believe that humans' closest biological relatives deserve the right to life, liberty and protection from torture.

The laws will ban potentially harmful research, ape trading, profiting from apes, and using apes in performances. Zoos could still legally hold apes, but living conditions must be “optimal”.

Will this appease Grodd?

On the Waterboard

When you read that Christopher Hitchens has volunteered to undergo waterboarding, you expect something far more terrifying than a few portly guys in khakis pouring a few ounces of water — from an ordinary water bottle, no less — onto a hand towel over his face. And you certainly don't expect an adult-contemporary soundtrack.

The black hoods are scary though, I'll admit, and evidently the whole process is so unbearable that Hitchens had to stop almost immediately:

"It doesn't simulate the feeling of drowning. You are being drowned — slowly."

DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding)

I don't have much use for a DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding), but the gamer-geek in me is amused.

(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)

The rise and fall of European and Arab cities

Maarten Bosker, Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten van Zanden look at 1000 years of urban history and examine the rise and fall of European and Arab cities:

There were striking differences between the two urban systems that reveal interesting insights into the socio-political situation in the two regions. Cities in the Arab world were on average much larger than those in Europe, and the size of the “primate” city — the megapolis such as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Istanbul — was much bigger; a fact that is indicative of a predatory state and low trade openness. Europe, on the other hand, developed a very dense urban system, with relatively small principle cities. Big cities in Europe were quite often located near the sea, being able to optimally profit from long-distance trade, whereas the largest cities in the Arab world were almost all inland.

The sociologist Max Weber introduced a distinction between ‘consumer cities’ and ‘producer cities’. Using this classification, Arab cities were — much more than their European counterparts — consumer cities.

The classical consumer city is a centre of government and military protection or occupation, which supplies services — administration, protection — in return for taxes, land rent and non-market transactions. Such cities are intimately linked to the state in which they are embedded. The flowering of the state and the expansion of its territory and population tend to produce urban growth, in particular that of the capital city.

In Europe cities are instead much closer to being producer cities. The primary basis of the producer city is the production and exchange of goods and commercial services with the city’s hinterland and other cities. The links that such cities have with the state are typically much weaker since the cities have their own economic bases. It is this aspect that accounts for the fact that Arab cities suffered heavily with the breakdown of the Abbasid Empire, while European cities continued to flourish despite political turmoil.

As I mentioned to Arnold Kling, predation might be a strong term for providing law and order and being the one who reaps the surplus.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

The secret of the greatest-ever student prank

The secret of the greatest-ever student prank — in British history — has been revealed after 50 years:

At an anniversary dinner this month, ringleader Peter Davey revealed he had hatched the plan while staying in rooms at Gonville and Caius College overlooking the Senate House roof.

He felt the expanse of roof 'cried out' to be made more interesting and decided a car would do the trick, recruiting 11 others to help realise his plan.

The group chose the May Bumps week, when any passers-by were likely to be drunken rowers celebrating after their races.

After finding a clapped-out Austin Seven, the group had to tow it through Cambridge to a parking space near Senate House but hit on the idea of sticking signs on it advertising a May ball to explain its presence.

Mr Davey, now 72, said a ground party manoeuvred the car into position while a lifting party on the Senate House roof hoisted it up using an A-shaped crane constructed from scaffolding poles and steel rope.

A third group, the bridge party, passed a plank across the notorious Senate House Leap - an 8ft gap between the roof and a turret window at Caius - and helped the lifters ferry across lifting gear comprising three types of rope, hooks and pulleys.

Policemen who heard a commotion as the equipment passed above them questioned some of the ground party but were distracted by careless drivers nearby and left them alone.

Three carousing rowers spotted the car swinging about 40ft up, despite the efforts of two girls on the ground team who had been recruited to hitch up their skirts a couple of inches to distract passers-by - a ploy more likely to work in 1958 than now. The rowers were fobbed off with the explanation that it was a tethered balloon.

The stunt almost went awry when the team tried to swing the car through the apex of the A-frame, over the Senate House balustrade and on to the roof.

They had failed to erect a rope check line running from the Caius side which would have steadied the vehicle. It crashed on to the roof from 5ft above it and, fearing they would be discovered, the lifting team hastily pushed it to the apex before grabbing their equipment and fleeing over the plank bridge.

The next day the bizarre sight enthralled crowds of onlookers as attempts by the authorities to construct a crane to hoist it back down failed.

Interestingly, in Philip Wylie's 1930 novel, Gladiator — arguably the inspiration for Superman — the protagonist pulls off a similar prank, placing a cannon from his school quad on the roof of a nearby building — without using any equipment, of course.

Fortified Cassava Could Provide A Day's Nutrition In A Single Meal

Fortified Cassava Could Provide A Day's Nutrition In A Single Meal:

Scientists have determined how to fortify the cassava plant, a staple root crop in many developing countries, with enough vitamins, minerals and protein to provide the poor and malnourished with a day's worth of nutrition in a single meal.

The researchers have further engineered the cassava plant so it can resist the crop's most damaging viral threats and are refining methods to reduce cyanogens, substances that yield poisonous cyanide if they are not properly removed from the food before consumption. The reduction of cyanogens also can shorten the time it takes to process the plant into food, which typically requires three to six days to complete.

Studies also are under way to extend the plant's shelf life so it can be stored or shipped.

The international team of scientists hopes to translate the greenhouse research into a product that can be field tested in at least two African nations by 2010. Funded by more than $12.1 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the group of researchers is led by Richard Sayre, a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at Ohio State University.

The history of America since 1980

Tyler Cowen cites Brad DeLong's history of America since 1980:

1. The end of the Cold War
2. Other winner-take-all factors that have, in combination with education, pushed American income polarization back to Gilded Age levels.
3. The failure of American taxpayers to support their state and local governments in expanding funding for public education — and the impact of reduced public education effort in sharpening the distinction between rich and poor.
4. The computer revolution in productivity growth.
5. The rise of China (and soon, we hope, India) as industrial powers.
6. The extraordinary social liberalization of America — if you had told any Republican in 1980 that 2008 would see (a) a Negro with an Arabic-Swahili name beating a veteran fighter pilot in the presidential polls and (b) gay marriage as the big cultural issue of the day, said Republican would have blown several gaskets. And if you had said that this would have been the result of an "Age of Reagan" said Republican would have melted down completely.

Point 6 is the most amusing. Point 3 is the least supportable:

It is notoriously difficult to find a convincing link between educational expenditures and educational quality.

The End-of-the-World Trade

Donald MacKenzie looks at the End-of-the-World Trade — which only really pays off if the economy totally collapses — and explains why it would become popular:

All this activity [in CDOs and credit indices] explains the attractiveness of the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the buying and selling of protection on the safest, super-senior tranches of the investment-grade indices. No one buys protection on these tranches because they are looking for a big pay-out if capitalism crumbles: if nothing else, they have no reason to expect that the institution that sold them protection would survive the carnage and be able to make the pay-out. Instead, they are looking to hedge their exposure to movements in the credit market, especially in correlation. Traders need to demonstrate they’ve done this before they’re allowed to book the profits on their deals, so from their viewpoint it’s worth buying protection, for example from ‘monolines’ (bond insurers), even if the latter would almost certainly be insolvent well before any pay-out on the protection was due.

So many financial decisions are made for less-than-obvious reasons:

Processes of this kind [e.g., unwinding highly levered positions to avoid catastrophic losses] — changes internal to the world of credit derivatives, not in the level of the risks being insured against — have meant that investment-grade indices sometimes move by up to 20 per cent in a single day. At times, the price of end-of-the-world insurance has corresponded to utterly implausible correlation levels in excess of 90 per cent: meaning, in effect, that if one investment-grade corporation were to default, almost all of them would.

Why aren’t such mispricings being corrected by savvy investors, eager to seize the opportunities for profit they create? Why, for example, have people not been selling end-of-the-world insurance when the returns from doing so have jumped ten-fold while the risk of having to pay out remains small? A crucial part of the answer is that, paradoxically, a fact-generating mechanism is blocking the restoration of fact. The mechanism is ‘marking-to-market’, the compulsory revaluation of portfolios as market prices fluctuate. Its motivation is entirely sensible: for example, when regulators insist that banks mark-to-market, it should force them to disclose losses to their investors and creditors.

Unfortunately, however, marking-to-market makes market participants extremely sensitive to short-term price fluctuations. To sell end-of-the-world insurance, for example, is almost certainly an excellent long-term bet, but traders don’t do it because of the fear that in the short run its price may increase even further, causing a mark-to-market loss. Although it would be a paper loss, it would have real consequences, damaging your bank’s balance sheet and profits, threatening your bonus, and typically forcing you to transfer valuable collateral to the custody of the buyer of the insurance.

Surprising fact: Half of gun deaths are suicides

I don't know why this is a surprising fact, but half of gun deaths are suicides:

Suicides accounted for 55 percent of the nation's nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There was nothing unique about that year — gun-related suicides have outnumbered firearm homicides and accidents for 20 of the last 25 years. In 2005, homicides accounted for 40 percent of gun deaths. Accidents accounted for 3 percent. The remaining 2 percent included legal killings, such as when police do the shooting, and cases that involve undetermined intent.

Golden Cow-Nose Ray Migration

Amateur photographer Sandra Critelli has taken some breathtaking photos of thousands of poisonous golden cow-nose rays migrating along the clockwise current from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula to western Florida.

150th Anniversary of Theory of Evolution

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Theory of Evolution — or of its presentation to the scientific world:

1858: The Linnaean Society of London listens to the reading of a composite paper on how natural selection accounts for the evolution and variety of species. The authors are Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Modern biology is born.

Scientists of the time knew that evolution occurred. The fossil record showed evidence of life forms that no longer existed. The question was, how did it occur?

Darwin had been working on his theory since 1837, soon after his epic voyage on the HMS Beagle. The hypermethodical naturalist wanted not only to classify the prodigious variation he had observed, but also to explain how it came to be.

He felt he would need to publish extensive documentation of natural selection to overcome popular resistance to so radical a notion. So he planned a comprehensive, multivolume work to convince scientists and the world.

Darwin was still working on his magnum opus when in June 1858 he received a letter from an English naturalist working in Malaysia. Alfred Russel Wallace was young and brash. When he conceived of natural selection, he didn't plan a 10-volume lifework. He just dashed off a quick paper on the subject and mailed it to the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, asking him to refer it for publication if it seemed good enough.

Darwin was crestfallen. Was he about to lose credit for two decades of work? Wallace had suggested that Darwin forward the paper to Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Along with English botanist Joseph Hooker, Lyell was one of a small handful of people Darwin had shown early drafts of his own work on natural selection.

Darwin wrote to Lyell and Hooker, and they arranged for a joint paper to be read at the forthcoming meeting of the Linnaean Society of London. (Founded in 1788 and named for Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist who devised the binomial system of taxonomy, it is the world’s oldest active biological society.)

Neither Darwin nor Wallace attended the meeting. Wallace was still in Malaysia. Darwin was at home with his wife mourning the death of their 19-month-old son just three days earlier.

The secretary of the society read the 18-page paper, comprising four parts:

1. The readers' own letter of introduction explaining the extraordinary circumstances;
2. An excerpt from Darwin's unpublished draft, part of a chapter titled, "On the Variation of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species";
3. An abstract of Darwin's 1857 letter on the subject to Harvard University botanist Asa Gray;
4. Wallace's manuscript, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type."

The paper and the meeting did not cause an immediate sensation. Other papers were read the same day. The society had routine business to transact. The meeting was long (.pdf). But the paper was accepted for publication in the society's Proceedings later that year.

Was this a remarkable case of simultaneous discovery? Not quite. It was more like simultaneous announcement. What is remarkable is that both Darwin and Wallace credited their central insight to reading Thomas Malthus' essay, Population, first published in 1798.

Darwin read Malthus in 1838 and immediately realized how it applied to his own work. Wallace had read it around 1846, but first saw its import for explaining evolution while he lay recovering from fever in Malaysia a dozen years later.

Malthus observed that population was held in check because not every individual would survive to reproduce. As Wallace wrote, "It suddenly flashed upon me ... in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain -- that is, the fittest would survive."

But the same differences in temperament that had led to Darwin's delay and Wallace's rush to publication now worked to Darwin's advantage ... and ultimately greater fame. Wallace was already on to his next big thing: amassing huge collections of natural specimens in hopes of winning both fame and fortune.

Darwin was on to his next big thing: At the urging of his friends, he published a magnificent one-volume summary of his work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, in 1859.

That produced an intellectual and cultural splash, perhaps the largest of the 19th century. And it is the sesquicentennial of the book next year, along with the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, which will be more widely marked than the 1858 event.

Quartermaster to the Barbarians

John Jay considers the recent arrest of Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”), the Quartermaster to the Barbarians, big news, because the international arms dealer has a long history of working as a convenient contractor for the Russians, with built-in plausible deniability for his Kremlin financiers:

So who is Viktor Bout? My blog partner CW can answer that better than I can, since he had a whole series of posts regarding the missing 727 and the networks of Bout on his old blog. In the absence of that archive, or purchasing Braun and Farah’s book The Merchant of Death, the best places to start are here and here. Other treasure troves of information include TheYorkshire Ranter and Ruud Leeuw.
[...]
So how did Viktor get bagged?

There is some speculation that one reason Bout has evaded capture is the complicit help of certain highly placed parties in the US and EU who would be embarrassed by revelations from Bout concerning their dealings with him.

This may be true. It is certainly curious that Bout was not arrested on money laundering, arms smuggling, or tax evasion charges that are outstanding against him, despite the fact that Bout’s company pulled a fast one on its American employers and made off with over 200,000 Kalashnikov’s that had been paid for by the US in Bosnia for shipment to Iraqi militias.

In fact, the sting that brought him down was an entirely de novo operation of the DEA:

In the end it was an agency of one of those states suspected of turning a blind eye to Bout’s activities that was the engine behind his capture. According to a source with close ties to the DEA, the operation was so sensitive it was kept secret from other members of the US intelligence community, including high-ranking members of the Justice Department, precisely because of the fear that Bout might be tipped off by elements that the DEA agents feared had protected him in the past. A special unit was set up to run the operation due to ‘war on drugs’ legislation and guidelines, allowed to operate outside the normal protocols that require US government-wide notification.

This is probably the first positive dividend I’ve seen coming out of the War on Drugs.

For those people who supported a unified intelligence command in the wake of 9/11, there is some further food for thought in this sordid tale:

Few people, even in the closed world of US intelligence, knew the DEA was tracking Bout, let alone setting him up for an arrest. ‘[The DEA] was laughing at the CIA in their offices,’ because they had arrested someone that was perceived to be working for the agency, said one witness.

The question remains — why did this sting succeed where so many others failed? Why did Viktor wind up in Thailand? Bout allegedly has a penchant for signing deals face to face, which may have led to his downfall. Only a few countries are safe for the fugitive, and a previous meeting in Bulgaria was scratched due to international pressure. Thailand apparently remained a safe haven.

According to the Mother Jones report, Bout agreed to meet the DEA agents despite the fact that their photographs did not appear in his intelligence report on FARC commanders. This appears to be a bit sloppy on the part of the usually ultra-paranoid Bout, but may indicate that the financial pressure brought on by asset seizure is beginning to strain Bout’s finances.

Despite his the evident conspiracy-mongering in some of the articles of former Polish Intelligence officer Daytsh, I tend to agree with his assessment that Viktor has been betrayed in a power struggle in Moscow, in the FSB in particular, and his arrest would have been accomplished even in the absence of doubts surrounding his loyalty to the Russian state. Medvedev wants to clear the slate of Putin’s cronies, and if he can simultaneously win a few PR points in the West, so much the better.

The major piece of evidence supporting Daytsh’s claims that Bout was betrayed is the back and forth in the press concerning Russia’s intent to extradite. In the first days after his arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry. intimated that Russia would extradite Bout. As of today, it seems the Russians are not willing to extradite him despite his direct plea for help. This, to me, indicates that the early overtures in that direction were the remnants of Putin’s network acting in a knee-jerk fashion, and that Medvedev’s new cronies are gradually cutting ties to Bout. More evidence in that regard is the recent arrest of Bout crony and Arbat Prestige Mafia Godfather Semyon Mogilevich in Moscow.

Bout may also have traveled to Thailand under the assumption that his patrons in Moscow would help extricate him from any problems he might encounter. In this he appears to have been mistaken. For now. But I highly doubt that the Russians have begun to put the long term interests of civilization ahead of the short term interests of the kleptocracy in Moscow.

I hope that the US manages to extradite and prosecute Bout, but the real question for me is what becomes of his empire? His older brother Sergei is nowhere near the logistics expert that Viktor has shown himself to be. Hopefully Bout’s network will fall into far less competent hands and slowly rust away. However, I can not help but suspect that Medvedev has someone else in mind to take the title of World’s Greatest Merchant of Death. If so, the threat to civilization from fourth generation warfare will continue to grow.

Some Proof that Marijuana is a Powerful Medicine

Jürg Gertsch, of ETH Zürich, and his collaborators from three other universities have provided some proof that marijuana is a powerful medicine — not because of its supposed active ingredient, THC, but because of another ingredient, beta-caryophyllene:

Gertsch and his team published their findings on June 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.They focused on the anti-inflammatory properties of the impressive substance — testing it on immune cells called monocytes and also in mice.

Since beta-caryophyllene seems to be powerful, occurs naturally in many foods, and does not get people high, it could turn out to be a nearly ideal medication. The organic compound is also phenomenally cheap. Sigma Aldrich sells it, in kosher form, for forty-two dollars per kilogram.

Of course, since it's already cheaply available, it's in no one's interest to spend the money to get it FDA approved.

Fake virus could make safe new vaccines

Fake virus could make safe new vaccines:

The researchers used a unique method to make their virus, relying on a built-in redundancy in DNA, the material that carries genetic instructions in organisms.

DNA's code is written using just four nucleic acids, represented by the letters A, C, T and G. These are combined in various ways to make amino acids, which in turn make proteins.

It is possible to make an amino acid with more than one combination of these letters -- for example, GCC and GCG both code for the amino acid alanine. For unknown reasons, organisms favor certain combinations.

Futcher's team made their polio virus using the less-favored combinations of the virus's genetic code.

They hoped these would stimulate the immune system in the same way as "wild-type" polio, without causing disease, and that is what appears to have happened, they wrote.

Each difference in the genetic code weakened the virus in a different way.

"This 'death by a thousand cuts' strategy could be generally applicable to attenuating many kinds of viruses," they wrote.

"Even for an inactivated rather than live virus approach, these features would allow a vaccine to be made from a safer starting material than the corresponding wild-type virus."

Polio vaccines have virtually eradicated the disease in most countries. But an oral vaccine that uses a weakened version of a live polio virus can sometimes get back into the water supply and mutate into a form that can infect people.

Doctors have been looking for a safer yet effective polio vaccine that is as easy to administer as the drops. Dr. Jonas Salk's original polio vaccine, which effectively rid the United States of the feared virus in the 1950s and 1960s, used a "killed" polio virus but had to be injected.

Long Trip

It looks like "magic mushrooms" send users on a Long Trip — a long, largely pleasant trip:

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."

Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.

Afterward, about two thirds of the group reported having a "full mystical experience," characterized by a feeling of "oneness" with the universe. When Griffiths asked them how they were doing 14 months later, the same proportion gave the experience high marks for transcendental satisfaction, and credited it with increasing their well-being since then.

But is a lasting, false sense of profundity a good thing?

Helminthic Therapy

Helminthic therapy doesn't sound terribly creepy — until you realize what a helminth is:

In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

“The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,” he said. “My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.”

Hookworms kill 65,000 people a year and afflicts hundreds of thousands with anemia, but by suppressing the immune system they can reduce allergy symptoms:

In the late 1980s, the Wellcome Trust issued a grant, and Dr. Pritchard and his Nottingham team set up camp on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea.

“We didn’t speak the language, and we were sparsely equipped,” he recalled. “But we established a rapport with the people. We gave them worm tablets and would ask them politely, in pidgin English, to collect their fecal matter in buckets for us.”

Hookworm infiltrates a victim’s system when the larvae, hatched from eggs in infected people’s excrement, penetrate the skin, often through the soles of the feet. From there, they enter the bloodstream, travel to the heart and lungs, and are swallowed when they reach the pharynx. They mature into adults once they reach the small intestine, where they can subsist for years by latching onto the intestinal wall and siphoning off blood. After sieving the fecal samples to extract hookworms eliminated when the worm treatment pill was given, the team reached an intriguing conclusion: Villagers with the highest levels of allergy-related antibodies in their blood had the smallest and least fertile parasites, indicating that these antibodies conferred a degree of protection against parasite infection.

And the hookworms seemed equipped to retaliate. After colonizing a digestive tract, the host often showed signs of a blunted immune response, leading Dr. Pritchard to suspect that the worms were reducing the potency of the body’s defenses to make their environment more hospitable.

“Sitting in the jungle for long periods gives you time to think,” he noted. “And this led to the idea that worm burdens of tolerable intensity could be beneficial under some circumstances.”

He began considering a left-field possibility. What if he could round up allergy sufferers, give them worms and see whether their wheezing and watery eyes disappeared?

Nearly 20 years later, his musing began to come to fruition. After Dr. Pritchard’s self-infection experiment, the National Health Services ethics committee let him conduct a study in 2006 with 30 participants, 15 of whom received 10 hookworms each. Tests showed that after six weeks, the T-cells of the 15 worm recipients began to produce lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammatory response, indicating that their immune systems were more suppressed than those of the 15 placebo recipients. Despite playing host to small numbers of parasites, worm recipients reported little discomfort.

Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a Yahoo group on “helminthic therapy” sprung up.

“Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,” Dr. Pritchard said.