Stanford's "autonomous" helicopters teach themselves to fly

Stanford's "autonomous" helicopters teach themselves to fly via "apprenticeship learning"

So the researchers had Oku and other pilots fly entire airshow routines while every movement of the helicopter was recorded. As Oku repeated a maneuver several times, the trajectory of the helicopter inevitably varied slightly with each flight. But the learning algorithms created by Ng's team were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was seeking. Thus the autonomous helicopter learned to fly the routine better — and more consistently — than Oku himself.

During a flight, some of the necessary instrumentation is mounted on the helicopter, some on the ground. Together, they continuously monitor the position, direction, orientation, velocity, acceleration and spin of the helicopter in several dimensions. A ground-based computer crunches the data, makes quick calculations and beams new flight directions to the helicopter via radio 20 times per second.

The helicopter carries accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, the latter of which use the Earth's magnetic field to figure out which way the helicopter is pointed. The exact location of the craft is tracked either by a GPS receiver on the helicopter or by cameras on the ground. (With a larger helicopter, the entire navigation package could be airborne.)

Just right for the garden: a mini-cow

Dexter cattle are an ancient dual-purpose Irish breed, the smallest of the British breeds:

They originated as a hardy breed of small mountain cattle run on small family holdings. At the turn of the 20th century, Dexters became the show cattle of the English gentry.

As the 20th century progressed, Dexter numbers declined. In the 1970s, they were designated as rare and endangered. More recently, their attractiveness to small landholders has seen a significant increase in their numbers globally.

Now the Times says they're just right for the garden:

Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

(Hat tip to Al Fin.)

Earthbound

In Earthbound, The Economist argues that gravity is not the main obstacle for America’s space business — government is:

The controls governing America’s export of satellites are part of the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) and they are handled in the Department of State. At one time the Department of Commerce had the job. But in the mid-90s a great controversy arose when information was shared between American satellite makers and the Chinese. Politicians reacted to fears that secrets had been passed to China by moving control of space exports to the State Department.

Michael Beavin, a programme analyst at the Office of Space Commercialisation in America’s Commerce Department, says that the wording of the legislation is open to broader interpretation than Congress intended. An international GPS ground station may have to get export approval to buy a new screen for its Dell laptop, because it is part of a system that is controlled. Pierre Chao, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank in Washington, DC, says that as soon as satellites were put on the munitions list “the little screw and the commodity wiring became a munition”. Furthermore, anything modified for a munition is a munition. This clause, he says, captures all the little “doodads”. In fact, he explains, it’s the extremely sophisticated “part X” that you want to keep out of the enemy’s hands, not the whole box. “You are using an extremely blunt instrument for sophisticated policy needs.”

You may think that is the price of security, but Lon Rains, the editor of Space News, says that ITAR has “sped up the inevitable proliferation of advanced technology, by forcing other countries to find other means of obtaining satellite components that had previously been manufactured only in the United States.” Joe Rouge, the director of the National Space Security Office at the Pentagon, thinks that ITAR probably made sense a decade ago but agrees that it is now a blunt instrument. “The problem is that today you can buy international equivalents that are as good as what American industry is producing.”

The result is a system that is too successful in keeping American technology out of foreign hands. Before 1999, when the State Department took over the export regulation of satellites, America dominated commercial satellite-making with an average market share of 83%. Since then, this share has declined to 50%, according to Space Review. ITAR’s critics blame the change in export controls. As bidding opened in July this year for the €3.4 billion ($5 billion) of contracts for Galileo, a constellation of 30 positioning satellites being built by the European Union and the European Space Agency, European officials cited export controls as a reason for avoiding anything to do with America wherever possible.

At the start of the decade, Alcatel Alenia Space (now Thales Alenia) announced that it would create an “ITAR-free” spacecraft, purged of all American components. Between 1998 and 2004 the company doubled its market share to over 20%, becoming perhaps the greatest beneficiary of export policies. Export controls also prompted the European Space Agency to pay to develop a European supplier of solenoid valves, so that European space-propulsion systems do not depend on this American part. Similarly, Telesat, Canada’s satellite-fleet operator, has said that ITAR is one of the reasons it has selected European satellite builders in recent competitions. And in 2005 EADS Sodern, a French maker of satellites’ control and positioning systems and subsidiary of the Franco-German company EADS, said it would start to phase out its American supplier base.

Meanwhile, American components and satellites are suffering because of the cost and delays in doing business with the firms that make them. International companies cannot access an inventory of vital American satellite components and place orders as the need develops because each component must run the gauntlet of export controls. Whether the component is a motor, a control valve, a star tracker, an antenna or a chip, it is simpler to look for non-American alternatives.

Night Vision Goggles for Kids

GeekDad John Baichtal notes that Jakks Pacific has introduced true Night Vision Goggles for Kids for just $80:

Needless to say, the goggles were designed to present a delightfully Borg-like appearance, however, a lot of the look is cosmetic. Here's how it's set up. There are two eyepieces, one covered in LEDs and the other unadorned. Positioned over the forehead is a big central sphere I call a "bulb" which contains the camera and is surrounded by more LEDs. I'm not sure why this bulb had to be so prominent, maybe to stay with the cyclopean theme of the product line. The 5-AA battery pack ends up at the back of the head.

As mentioned, the goggles work by projecting IR light. There are two levels of brightness, the lower uses the LEDs on the right eyepiece, the higher uses the LEDs on the central bulb. Interestingly, the latter are so powerful that when emitting, you can see a dull red glow. (As I said, to the naked eye the IR LEDs don't normally emit visible light, but digital cameras are able to sense the infrared light. That's what you see in the photo.)

The camera feeds to a tiny (0.5"x0.75") LCD screen positioned in front of the right eye. Since there is only one screen you get only monocular vision, if it matters. The smallness of the screen doesn't really hurt because it's right in front of the eye. One concern I had was the feasibility of using the goggles with my big nerd glasses. It turned out to be a non-issue, as the miniature screen falls well within my close-in vision. However, someone relying on reading glasses may find themselves unable to see much of anything. As far as the left eyepiece, it is merely cosmetic, and flips up to allow the user to look through a hole.

MIT Team Quietly Builds Virus-Based Batteries

MIT Team Quietly Builds Virus-Based Batteries, Popular Mechanics reports:

In a surprise development that could have implications for powering electronics, cars and even the military, researchers at MIT have created the world's first batteries constructed at the nano scale by microscopic viruses.

A much-buzzed-about paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month details the team's success in creating two of the three parts of a working battery — the positively charged anode and the electrolyte. But team leader Angela Belcher told PM Wednesday that the team has been seriously working on cathode technology for the past year, creating several complete prototypes.

"We haven't published those yet, actually. We're just getting ready to write them up and send them off," says Belcher, who won a MacArthur genius grant for her work in 2004 and a Breakthrough Award from PM in 2006. "The cathode material has been a little more difficult, but we have several different candidates, and we have made full, working batteries."

Instead of physically arranging the component parts, researchers genetically engineer viruses to attract individual molecules of materials they're interested in, like cobalt oxide, from a solution, autonomously forming wires 17,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper that pack themselves together to form electrodes smaller than a human cell.

"Once you do the genetic engineering with the viruses themselves, you pour in the solution and they grow the right combination of these materials on them," Belcher says.

Whoa.

Father's arrest ignites debate over child abandonment

Father's arrest ignites debate over child abandonment:

Two weeks ago, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram got into a rapidly escalating argument with his 11-year-old son in a McDonald's.

The confrontation made for a poignant Aug. 15 column by Dave Lieber, who wrote about angrily jumping into his car after telling the boy to walk home, a distance of "a few blocks." After cooling off, Lieber returned a short time later to find police officers interviewing his son.

Father and son apologized to each other and, after a stern lecture from a police officer, were allowed to drive home together.

Lieber's confessional column about his "stupid and quite serious mistake" sparked a flurry of mostly supportive comments — many from parents who had done the same or were treated similarly by their own parents — on the newspaper's Web site.

But the story wasn't over. After additional investigation by detectives in suburban Watauga, Lieber was arrested Tuesday on charges of child abandonment and endangerment — reigniting a debate over proper parenting and the role of police in family matters.
[...]
Lieber, 51, was charged with two felonies, child abandonment with intent to return and child abandonment/endangering a child, Detective Tiffany Ward said. Lieber turned himself in to the Tarrant County Jail and was released on $4,000 bail.

Police will refer the case to the Tarrant County district attorney, who will determine whether to pursue charges. State law defines abandonment as intentionally leaving a child younger than 15 "in any place under circumstances that expose the child to an unreasonable risk of harm."

Welcome to the Jungle

A female journalism student from London decided to investigate conditions at an immigrant camp known as the Jungle in Calais — at night, alone:

Mr Muller said Tuesday's rape in a hut in the Calais ghetto known as 'the Jungle', where hundreds of would-be immigrants to Britain sleep rough, was particularly brutal.

The woman was taking photographs of a gang of immigrants outside one of the shelters around twilight, despite being warned by police not to approach the camp alone.

'One of them asked her to look at something else,' said Mr Muller. 'She followed him inside one of the huts, and that's where it happened.

'The victim was raped and brutally attacked. She has very severe wounds around the mouth and scratch marks on her face.
[...]
The student, who was born in Canada but who has lived in England most of her life, travelled to France “to highlight problems surrounding clandestine immigration”, said police.

A spokesman added: 'She was working alone, and admits that going into the Jungle during the evening by herself was immensely naive.

'She has been through a terrible ordeal and is determined to bring those responsible to justice.'

Although most of the migrants in Calais claim to be asylum seekers from war-torn areas like Afghanistan and Iraq, police believe many are economic migrants from Africa and the Balkans drawn to Britain’s generous social security system and black economy.

They are supported by charities, with the newly elected Right-wing council in Calais refusing to provide them with permanent accommodation.

Calais became a magnet for asylum seekers in the late 1990s after the opening of the Sangatte Red Cross Centre, which housed 67,000 over three years.

Before its closure in 2002, following an agreement between the French and British governments, many tried to jump on to slow-moving trains at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, or hide inside lorries crossing to Britain.

The jungle was supposed to be burned down — "its reputation as a no-go area was allowing serious crimes, including drug abuse and stolen property dealing, to carry on unhindered" — but the razing was called off, because immigrants were putting their lives at risk by breaking into the nearby chemical plant to create shelters.

Study says eyes evolved for X-Ray vision

Study says eyes evolved for X-Ray vision — where "X-ray vision" is a colorful way of saying "seeing through clutter":

Demonstrating our X-ray ability is fairly simple: hold a pen vertically and look at something far beyond it. If you first close one eye, and then the other, you'll see that in each case the pen blocks your view. If you open both eyes, however, you can see through the pen to the world behind it.

To demonstrate how our eyes allow us to see through clutter, hold up all of your fingers in random directions, and note how much of the world you can see beyond them when only one eye is open compared to both. You miss out on a lot with only one eye open, but can see nearly everything behind the clutter with both.

"Our binocular region is a kind of 'spotlight' shining through the clutter, allowing us to visually sweep out a cluttered region to recognize the objects beyond it," says Changizi, who is principal investigator on the project. "As long as the separation between our eyes is wider than the width of the objects causing clutter — as is the case with our fingers, or would be the case with the leaves in the forest — then we can tend to see through it."

To identify which animals have this impressive power, Changizi studied 319 species across 17 mammalian orders and discovered that eye position depends on two variables: the clutter, or lack thereof in an animal's environment, and the animal's body size relative to the objects creating the clutter.

Changizi discovered that animals in non-cluttered environments — which he described as either "non-leafy surroundings, or surroundings where the cluttering objects are bigger in size than the separation between the animal's eyes" (think a tiny mouse trying to see through 6-inch wide leaves in the forest) — tended to have sideways-facing eyes.

Arnold Kling's Campaign-Season Pledge

Arnold Kling has been a bit bitter recently:

One possible reason is that the election campaign is heating up.

To me, political campaigns are not sacred events, to be eagerly anticipated and avidly followed. They are brutal assaults on reason. I look forward to election season about as much as a gulf coast resident looks forward to hurricane season.

That deserves to be repeated. Political campaigns are not sacred events. They are brutal assaults on reason.

He goes on to make his own multi-part campaign-season pledge:

1. That no politician will end America's consumption of foreign oil. Ever.


2. That no politician will figure out a way to bring the bottom half of America's children up to the level where they can benefit from a college education.


3. That no politician will figure out a way to make American health care — meaning virtually unlimited access to specialists and technology — affordable for everyone.


4. That no politician will alter the trends in technology and family structure that are driving the distribution of income and wealth.


5. That no politician will produce a sustainable fiscal outlook without trimming future Social Security and Medicare benefits. (I might have ended the previous sentence simply by putting a period after "outlook")


6. That no politician needs to create jobs. There is always too much work to be done. The problem is never to create jobs. The problem is for individuals to adapt their abilities to ever-changing job opportunities.


7. That no politician will be able to articulate an economic difference between moving labor or goods from country X to country Y and moving labor or goods from Maryland to Virginia.

QinetiQ says it has broken unmanned flight record

QinetiQ says it has broken the unmanned flight record with its ultra-lightweight Zephyr, which is built from carbon fiber and powered using paper-thin solar panels:

QinetiQ Group PLC said its propeller-driven "Zephyr" aircraft flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's "Global Hawk" in 2001.
[...]
The 66 pound- (30 kilogram-) plane was launched by hand on July 28 in the Arizona desert in the United States and flown by autopilot and via satellite to an altitude of more 60,000 feet (18,000 meters), QinetiQ said.

Drawing on the power of the sun during the day, the plane stayed aloft at night using rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries. Its more than three-day flight began on July 28 and was witnessed by U.S. and British defense officials, the company said.

QinetiQ said the Zephyr, which is funded by a host of U.S. and British military agencies, had potential in the fields of reconnaissance and communications.

The Problem With the Corporate Tax

Back when McCain was proposing his "laughable" gas-tax holiday, Greg Mankiw decided to write about McCain's much more sensible idea to cut the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 25 percent. Here Mankiw explains The Problem With the Corporate Tax:

Cutting corporate taxes is not the kind of idea that normally pops up in presidential campaigns. After all, voters aren’t corporations. Why promise goodies for those who can’t put you in office?

In fact, a corporate rate cut would help a lot of voters, though they might not know it. The most basic lesson about corporate taxes is this: A corporation is not really a taxpayer at all. It is more like a tax collector.

The ultimate payers of the corporate tax are those individuals who have some stake in the company on which the tax is levied. If you own corporate equities, if you work for a corporation or if you buy goods and services from a corporation, you pay part of the corporate income tax. The corporate tax leads to lower returns on capital, lower wages or higher prices — and, most likely, a combination of all three.

A cut in the corporate tax as Mr. McCain proposes would initially give a boost to after-tax profits and stock prices, but the results would not end there. A stronger stock market would lead to more capital investment. More investment would lead to greater productivity. Greater productivity would lead to higher wages for workers and lower prices for customers.

Populist critics deride this train of logic as “trickle-down economics.” But it is more accurate to call it textbook economics. Students in introductory economics courses learn that the burden of a tax does not necessarily stay where the Congress chooses to put it. That lesson is especially relevant when thinking about the corporate tax.

In a 2006 study, the economist William C. Randolph of the Congressional Budget Office estimated who wins and who loses from this tax. He concluded that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden.”

Mr. Randolph’s analysis stresses the role of international capital mobility. With savings sloshing around the world in search of the highest returns, he says, “the domestic owners of capital can escape most of the corporate income tax burden when capital is reallocated abroad in response to the tax.” When capital leaves a country, the workers left behind suffer. (According to Mr. Randolph, however, some workers do benefit from the American corporate tax: those abroad who earn higher wages from the inflow of capital.)

A similar result was found in a recent Oxford University study by Wiji Arulampalam, Michael P. Devereux and Giorgia Maffini. After examining data on more than 50,000 companies in nine European countries, they concluded that “a substantial part of the corporation income tax is passed on to the labor force in the form of lower wages,” adding that “in the long-run a $1 increase in the tax bill tends to reduce real wages at the median by 92 cents.”

(Emphasis mine. Hat tip to Philip Greenspun.)

Cattle shown to align north-south

Only after thousands of years has anyone noticed that cattle align north-south:

The researchers surveyed Google Earth images of 8,510 grazing and resting cattle in 308 pasture plains across the globe.

"Sometimes it took hours and hours to find some pictures with good resolution," said Dr Begall.

The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south.

Their study ruled out the possibility that the Sun position or wind direction were major influences on the orientation of the cattle.

Dr Begall said: "In Africa and South America, the cattle (were) shifted slightly to a more north-eastern-south-western direction.

"But it is known that the Earth's magnetic field is much weaker there," she explained.

The researchers also recorded the body positions of 2,974 wild deer in 277 locations across the Czech Republic.

Their fieldwork revealed that the majority of grazing and resting deer face northward. About one-third of the deer faced southward.

"That might be some kind of anti-predatory behaviour," speculated Dr Begall.

I'm guessing the accompanying image was taken in Scotland? Because the cattle seem to be facing directly into the sun, which wouldn't be almost directly north or south in most cattle country.

X2 Technology

Helicopter-maker Sikorsky has just demonstrated its new X2 technology — but what does X2 mean?

The press release lists a number of X2 technologies, but the key technology is counter-rotating coaxial rotors.

Philip Greenspun explains why that's important:

Typical helicopters, however expensive, are limited to about 165 knots of cruise speed. When the helicopter is moving faster than that, the “retreating blade” is not getting enough airflow, i.e., the blade is going backward about as fast as the helicopter is going forward. This results in a loss of lift on half of the disk. With two rotor systems rotating in opposite directions you still get retreating blade stall but it happens to both rotors at the same time and on opposite sides of the helicopter. Instead of the helicopter pitching and rolling it should just keep flying. The goal with this style of helicopter is to achieve cruise speeds closer to 250 knots, albeit probably at Sikorsky prices starting at $20 million.

How new is this idea? The U.S. military tried this around 1970 and gave up due to uncontrollable vibrations. The Russians built and flew some helicopters like this, also around 1970, but never went into large scale production.

What makes it practical today when it wasn’t practical in 1970? Better computer systems that can run active vibration dampening (like noise-canceling headsets but for vibration).

60 Minutes on Dungeons & Dragons

Oddly enough, I never saw the original 60 Minutes piece on Dungeons & Dragons — and the game's tenuous link to teen suicide — back when it aired back in 1985:





That second video goes into a piece on Thomas Radecki:

Founder of NCTV (National Coalition for Television Violence) and board member on Tipper Gore's PMRC group who once used quoted material from Rona Jaffe's novel Mazes & Monsters as if it was real and factual. Radecki, a psychologist, lost his license to practice for five years for engaging in immoral conduct with a patient. He has since returned to his practice.

Is H.L. Mencken Alive and Well at the NYT?

David Friedman cites the New York Times on corporate taxes:

Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Perhaps you've heard that stat bandied about recently. Friedman also cites the Reuters story on the same report:

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

Hmm...

The GAO study itself says this:

As figure 2 shows, about 72 percent of FCDCs and 55 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability for at least 1 year during the 8 years. About 57 percent of FCDCs and 42 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability in multiple years — 2 or more years — and about 34 percent of FCDCs and 24 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability for at least half the study period — 4 or more years.

This leads Friedman to ask, Is H.L. Mencken Alive and Well at the NYT?

Mencken's famous bathtub hoax was an invented history of the bathtub, designed to appeal to what readers wanted to believe about the ignorance and irrationality of people in the past. He published it as a demonstration of human credulity, reported with glee on how many people repeated it as gospel despite its obvious inconsistency with easily established historical facts, published multiple retractions pointing out how obviously false it was — and, by his account, never managed to kill the story.

My previous post pointed to a modern equivalent. The NYT (and, I think, the AP, but not Reuters, which got it right) misread a GAO report in a way that drastically altered its meaning, converting it from a plausible but boring result (a substantial majority of corporations reported no taxable income in at least one year out of an eight year period) to a wildly implausible result that nicely fitted what a lot of people wanted to believe (two-thirds of corporations reported no taxable income over that eight year period). They simultaneously made another mistake almost as bad, calculating what the corporations "should" have owed on the basis of their revenue, not their profit. The Times discovered the latter mistake and corrected it; so far as I can tell, they have not yet noticed the former mistake.

Googling around, I found an enormous numbers of online references to the story. So far, I have not found a single one, other than my piece on this blog, that spotted the mistake. I've posted the actual facts on a fair number of them, but it's like a teacup in a tempest. I have no doubt that, years from now, millions of people will still remember the scandalous, and wholly imaginary, fact from the Times article.

For your enjoyment, I append “A Neglected Anniversary” by H. L. Mencken, first published in the New York Evening Mail, December 28, 1917.

On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.

True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before the plan was perfected Washington went dry,* and so the banquet had to be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the capital of the nation. (*This was war-time Prohibition, preliminary to the main catastrophe. — HLM)

Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly everyone in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may still be in existence and in use.

Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his grain by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the '30s, he acquired the habit of bathing.

The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance — little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan — and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every day.

Thompson, who was of inventive fancy — he later devised the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon — conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home — a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Orleans streets.

There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to the house. This pump, which was operated by six Negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.

The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all the bathtubs of today. Thompson had it made by James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.

In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20, 1842 — a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all Cincinnati — then a town of about 100,000 people — had heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns to violent discussions of it.

The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there was bitter and double- headed opposition to the new invention, which had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians. On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of "phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases." (I quote from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)

The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.

This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save the wealthy; indeed, the common price for installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady progress.

The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a writer in the Christian Register for July 17, 1857, the first one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.

After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston. The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.

But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentlemen who had bought his house from the estate. Fillmore was entertained in this house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to the Presidency at Taylor's death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the White House.

This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York Herald, charged that Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper & Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.

This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the Army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.

So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.

Mencken's introduction (from A Mencken Chrestomathy, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1949):

The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity... Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.

The Taliban Strikes Back

In The Taliban Strikes Back, Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) describes how insurgency works:

So overall, Afghanistan has rotten living conditions — not a promising market if you’re selling the new iPhone, but perfect conditions, lab-level perfect, for selling rebellion. In the early stages, successful rural insurgencies don’t even worry about combat much. They focus on quietly setting up a local government that replaces the occupiers’ puppet government. If you’ve read much about how the Viet Cong worked in South Vietnam, you’ll recognize the pattern: The puppet government runs around looking busy in the daytime, but when the sun goes down the guerrillas go into action, collecting taxes and settling local disputes, even holding court proceedings in caves, barns or somebody’s hut. The idea is to keep the locals from contacting the occupiers, denying them basic intelligence about what’s going on in the villages, and at the same time making your group indispensable by helping to handle the local feuds, even helping them in the fields. The Taliban has spent the last six years doing all that, to the point that most of Afghanistan now has Sharia-based Taliban courts settling criminal cases.
[...]
To make up for the big gaping hole where our military intelligence should be, we’ve been using William Westmoreland’s failed formula: massive firepower. Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of doing counterinsurgency warfare on the cheap, with very few troops and lots of air strikes, means that the ISAF has very little local intelligence and has to depend on air power, which worked well enough in the initial defeat of the Taliban in 2002, but just plain doesn’t work in counterinsurgency warfare, because that kind of warfare is about not firing until you know exactly who you’re shooting at. To gain that sort of local knowledge, you need troops settling in to the villages, getting to know people. What you don’t need is F-18s orbiting at medium altitude looking for targets. Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve been using to suppress the Taliban.

Those fighter jets can’t tell the difference between a wedding party carrying the bride to her husband’s village and a Taliban column moving to the attack. And when in doubt, they tend to assume all large groups on the move are Taliban. For six years, ISAF warplanes have been bombing Pashtun wedding parties and processions. It seems to happen over and over again. I’m not sure why. Maybe weddings are the only time that Pashtuns get together in big numbers, big enough to draw fighter pilots’ attention. Maybe it’s their habit of firing rifles to celebrate. But for whatever reason, we have bombed and strafed enough wedding parties to rouse centuries of hatred from the Pashtuns.

The End Of Aviation

Bradford Plumer looks at The End Of Aviation, as envisioned by Anthony Perl and Richard Gilbert, two Canadian transportation experts, in their new book Transport Revolutions:

[They] envision a world in which rising oil prices have reduced domestic flying in the United States roughly 40 percent by 2025 — even assuming that airlines improve fuel efficiency by about 50 percent. In such a scenario, the United States could go from having nearly 400 primary airports down to 50 or so; instead of dozens of flights each day between New York and San Francisco carrying 200 people apiece, there might be only a handful carrying 800 or more in new extra-jumbo jets.

Transportation Hack 2.0

PC World calls it Transportation Hack 2.0, but the flaw found in California's FasTrak system is so simple, I'm not sure it's even a "hack" to defeat it:

The hack, exposed at the Black Hat security conference by Root Labs' Nate Lawson, involves overwriting the unique ID number on a car's wireless transponder. The transponder is what communicates with the toll system to electronically pay a driver's fee. By overwriting the number, then, a hacker could use someone else's digits...and thus, someone else's dime.

Lawson says the transponders have no encryption — the same issue raised with Boston's card-based system. In the FasTrak instance, the discovery goes directly against the company's past claims that the data is secure and protected.

How I Learned to Love Middle Managers

Joel Spolsky explains how he learned to love middle managers — but first, of course, he explains why he ever doubted their value, starting with his own first experience as a low-level manager at Juno:

I was proud to start getting those mass e-mails that were circulated among the managers.

Until I noticed about half the company was on that distribution list.

For a company of Juno's size — it had about 150 employees at the time — there seemed to be a disproportional number of managers. I think most of them, like me, had only one or two people reporting to them. But it was hard to know for sure, because the org chart wasn't circulated; apparently, Juno's top brass were afraid it would fall into the hands of headhunters. So you knew your boss and your team, but unless you were a smoker, you didn't know any of the people in the other parts of the company.

Unless you were a smoker. I love that bit.

Here's what really bothered him though:

I noticed too many situations in which members of top management happily issued an executive fiat even though they were the least qualified to make a decision. I'm not saying that they were stupid, mind you. Most of the managers at Juno were quite smart. But they had hired even smarter people to work for them: people with advanced degrees, raw intellectual firepower, and years of experience. And these people would work on a problem for a long time, come up with a pretty good solution, and then watch in surprise as their bosses overruled them. Executives who did not have specific technical knowledge and who had not studied a problem in depth would swoop down and issue some random, uninformed decree, and it would be implemented — often with farcical results. I called it hit-and-run micromanagement, and I suspected that the managers at Juno acted this way only because many of them were young, and that's how bosses seemed to behave on TV.

His experience at Microsoft was better:

A bit of Redmond lore: Two software designers got into a debate over how something should be implemented. The question was highly technical. They couldn't reach agreement, so they went to their boss, a guy named Mike Maples, who was the vice president in charge of the applications division.

"What do I know about this?" he yelled at them. "Of the three people in this room, I'm the one who knows the least. You guys have been hashing this out for hours. I'm the last person who should be deciding. Work it out."

And so they did.

Based on his personal experience, and based on an exciting article about a GE jet engine plant in North Carolina that had 170 employees and just one boss — an article I noted at the time too — he decided to have no middle managers at his new software company.

That worked for a while, but as the company grew the top managers (Joel and his partner) seemed more and more distant, even though they thought they were plugged in and very welcoming. Now everyone's happy with a bit of middle management.

The lesson:

Don't believe everything you read in a business magazine. Not even this one.

Rusting Aluminum

Theodore Gray explains how aluminum can rust with just a dab of its mortal enemy:

Unless you are a representative of a national meteorological bureau licensed to carry a barometer (and odds are you're not), bringing mercury onboard an airplane is strictly forbidden. Why? If it got loose, it could rust the plane to pieces before it had a chance to land. You see, airplanes are made of aluminum, and aluminum is highly unstable.

Wait, isn't one of the great things about aluminum that, unlike iron, it doesn't rust? Am I talking about the same aluminum? Yes! Your aluminum pot is made of a highly reactive chemical. It simply has a trick that lets it disguise itself as a corrosion-resistant metal.

When iron rusts, it forms iron oxide-a reddish, powdery substance that quickly flakes off to expose fresh metal, which immediately begins to rust, and so on until your muffler falls off.

But when aluminum rusts, it forms aluminum oxide, an entirely different animal. In crystal form, aluminum oxide is called corundum, sapphire or ruby (depending on the color), and it is among the hardest substances known. If you wanted to design a strong, scratchproof coating to put on a metal, few things other than diamond would be better than aluminum oxide.

By rusting, aluminum is forming a protective coating that's chemically identical to sapphire-transparent, impervious to air and many chemicals, and able to protect the surface from further rusting: As soon as a microscopically thin layer has formed, the rusting stops. ('Anodized' aluminum has been treated with acid and electricity to force it to grow an extra-thick layer of rust, because the more you have on the surface, the stronger and more scratch-resistant it is.)

This invisible barrier forms so quickly that aluminum seems, even in molten form, to be an inert metal. But this illusion can be shattered with aluminum's archenemy, mercury.

Applied to aluminum's surface, mercury will infiltrate the metal and disrupt its protective coating, allowing it to 'rust' (in the more destructive sense) continuously by preventing a new layer of oxide from forming. The aluminum I-beam below rusted half away in a few hours, something that would have taken an iron beam years.

I've heard that during World War II, commandos were sent deep into German territory to smear mercury paste on aircraft to make them inexplicably fall apart. Whether the story is true or not, the sabotage would have worked. The few-micron-thick layer of aluminum oxide is the only thing holding an airplane together. Think about that the next time you're flying. Or maybe it's better if you don't.

This is Your War on Drugs

Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) argues that war and drugs just go together, no matter what the DEA has to say about it:

Now, those plants, like coca and khat, they’re for primitives, of course. We over here in the developed world, well, we developed some stuff that makes that stuff look like grandma’s chamomile tea. The big breakthrough came when a German chemist synthesized amphetamine in 1887. God. I love the Germans, I mean I love the Germans the way they used to be, pre-1945, when they got gelded (nice pun, huh, “gelded”? Cuz that’s Germans now: Money but no balls.) Back before ’45, German scientists were working night and day to make the world a weirder, faster place, and this discovery was one of their biggest. Unfortunately, nobody realized the possibilities of speed in combat in time for World War I, but by 1919, Japanese chemists had come up with a water-soluble version, good ol’ crystal meth, redneck work ethic in pill or injectable form. So by the time WW II came along, every army was well-stocked with go pills. The British used 72 million speed pills in the war, pretty impressive when you consider how bad they fought. But the serious armies were also bigtime speed dealers.

The Japanese, who’d discovered the stuff, started handing out speed (“Shabu”) like candy to the Imperial Forces, which actually explains a lot about why they were good at suicide charges but not so good at thinking through a tactical problem. When the war was over, and lost, there was so much of the stuff left in the Army warehouses that Japanese civilians broke in and started popping speed to keep their minds off the fact that there was no food, no shelter, and the Emperor wasn’t a god any more. It’s taken about 50 years to get them off the habit, and they say the Yakuza, the closest thing to a military elite Japan has these days, still has a soft spot for the ol’ speed.

Drugs make WW II a lot easier to get. How did those huge armies fight so long and so hard, when people these days are so weak? Cuz, among other things, they were high, dude. In fact, I never understood how either side could have stood up to the misery of a battle like Stalingrad until I found out that every damn soldier on both sides was high on speed. Once you know that, Stalingrad is a whole lot easier to understand.

Of course, as he points out, the one time you don’t want to be using "speedy stuff" in wartime is when you’ve got serious strategic thinking to do — like Hitler, who was getting daily Pervitin (amphetamine) injections.

Greatest Movie Line Ever

Jonathan of Chicago Boyz calls it the greatest movie line ever. I'd settle for apropos:

Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera

Michael Behar of Wired says that Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera — but I find the company's founder just as fascinating:

Jim Jannard, 59, is the billionaire founder of Red. In 1975 he spent $300 to make a batch of custom motocross handlebar grips, which he sold from the back of a van. He named his company Oakley, after his English setter, and eventually expanded into sci-fi-style sunglasses, bags, and shoes. In November of last year he sold the business to Luxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, for a reported $2.1 billion.

OK, you're wondering, so what's so cool about this camera?

His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution — "4K" in filmmaker lingo — and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There's also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn't have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K. And that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper — by orders of magnitude — than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete.
[...]
Soderbergh took two prototypes into the Spanish wilderness. "It felt like someone crawled inside my head when they designed the Red," he says. What impressed him most was the cameras' sturdiness. Movie sets are often a flurry of crashes and explosions, which can vibrate sensitive electronics, introducing visual noise known as microphonics into images. "A lot of cameras with electronics in them, if you fired a 50-caliber automatic weapon a few inches away — which we did — you'd get microphonics all over the place," Soderbergh says. "We beat the shit out of the Reds on the Che films, and they never skipped a beat."

Then there's the economics: The Red One sells for $17,500 — almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn't publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot — more than the cost of purchasing a Red. "It's clearly the future of cinematography," Peter Hyams says. "You can buy this camera. You can own it. That's why people are excited."

Protect Our Kids from Preschool

Protect Our Kids from Preschool, Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell implore:

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent — not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Russia's Other Great Victory

Around the anniversary of the Fall of Berlin, Gary Brecher (The War Nerd), decided to discuss Russia's Other Great Victory, its invasion of Manchuria three months later:

What most people don’t know is that the Red Army had another huge triumph still to come: a crushing strategic victory on a front 3000 miles long, with 1.6 million Soviets annihilating a force that, on paper at least, totaled more than a million battle-hardened Axis troops. I’m talking about Operation August Storm, the Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria on August 9, 1945 — exactly three months after the surrender of the Nazis.

That date is no coincidence.

Stalin had made a deal with FDR and Churchill at Yalta in February, 1945:

[I]f the Red Army attacked Japan’s Manchurian colony within three months of the Nazis’ final defeat, the USSR would get permanent occupation of Sakhalin Island, a big long streak of icy forest north of Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands, a string of fog-bound rocks looping from the North end of Hokkaido to the Southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Not exactly Rodeo Drive in terms of valuable real estate, but those places meant a lot to Stalin: they’d been grabbed from the Russians by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. It was one of those old disgraces that world powers tend to get all obsessive and unhealthy about, like Hitler forcing the French to surrender in the same lousy railroad car where they’d made Germany surrender in 1918. That was what pre-Abba Europe used to be like: never learned anything new, and never, ever forgot a grudge.

There was something kind of poetic-justice about the way the Americans were begging the Soviets to open up a second front against the Japs, because the Russians had been begging the Anglos to open a second front against the Germans for years — two-and-a-half years, actually, counting from Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941) to D-Day (June 6, 1944).For all that time, the Soviet armies had fought alone against the Wehrmacht, the finest land army since the Mongols. And all that time they were screeching, “Hey Allies, buddies, ol’ pals, how about a little help here!”

Zhukov had already crushed the Japanese army in Mongolia years earlier — which is why the Japanese navy got its way, and the empire expanded to the south:

What Zhukov did way back in 1939 set the pattern not just for the Red Army’s successes against the Germans but for that final, perfect campaign against Japan in Manchuria in 1945. First, Zhukov dealt with his logistical problems, something the Japanese were too mystical and transcendental to take seriously. Next, he made sure all arms were in total coordination: air force, armor, infantry, artillery. That was another thing the Imperial Japanese were too snotty and quarrelsome to do: from 1919 to 1945, one of the constants in Japanese conduct in Manchuria is that the services hated each other, fought among each other all the time. In 1945 that meant that the Navy refused to lift a hand to help stranded Japanese troops evacuate the Asian mainland; back in 1939, it meant that when the Japanese air force launched a successful attack on Soviet airfields in Mongolia, jealous local commanders ordered their pilots to halt all attacks.

In August 1939 — you Russians must like hot weather, you seem to do a lot of your big attacks in August — Zhukov had all his ducks in a row, and gave the word to attack. Remember, attacking wasn’t something most commanders in 1939 did easily. They’d learned in 1914–1918 that the advantage was with the defenders. Only a few guys like Patton, Rommel, de Gaulle and Zhukov realized that that wasn’t necessarily so any more. Zhukov showed how it was done by encircling and annihilating the Imperial Japanese forces in Eastern Mongolia. And I do mean annihilating, because as usual, Japanese troops just didn’t surrender, so after Zhukov’s pincer attack surrounded them and they’d turned down a trip to the GULAG, Soviet artillery wiped them out.

Another little preview of 1945 during this battle was the way Japanese troops dealt with the inevitable, as in “total denial,” aka: “brave but stupid.” One Japanese officer supposedly led his men on foot in an attack against Soviet tanks, with his Samurai sword on high. That was a pattern you were going to see again and again, in Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, everywhere Japanese troops were defeated: they thought way too much of arranging glorious deaths for themselves, and not nearly enough about arranging the same thing for the enemy.

But this time, in a rare moment of reason, the Imperial Armed Forces learned their lesson: after meeting Zhukov and getting slaughtered next to that frozen Mongolian river, they lost all appetite for a land war against the Soviets. Now, the Japanese were all for headin’ south, to the sea and sun, to those balmy Pacific beaches, starting with Pearl Harbor.

That little shift in Japan’s business expansion plan kept them pretty busy. So now we can fast-forward all the way to 1945 without losing much, because while the whole rest of the world was exploding, in the meantime, the USSR-Japanese borders in Manchuria/Siberia didn’t so much as flicker from 1939 to 1945. Nothing, zip, nada going on for all that time. Stalin kept 40 divisions there (remember, a Soviet division was only 11,000 troops), but thanks to Richard Sorge’s Tokyo spy ring, he knew the Japanese weren’t interested in another big fight in Manchuria, which made planning for the German front a lot easier.

So now it’s May 1945: “Hey Comrade Stalin, you’ve just won the Super Bowl! Where are you going?” Well, it wasn’t Disneyland; “I’m goin’ to Manchuria!”

And like I said earlier, he was in no hurry to get there, because every day the Japanese were weaker. The B-29s ran the Tokyo route more often than commuter flights from SFO to LAX. The last of the island fortresses were falling — and instead of reinforcing the Manchurian Front, the Japanese Imperial Command, in its usual psychotic state of total denial about the Soviet threat, was actually sucking every decent infantry and armor unit away from the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and feeding them into the hopeless war against the US advance toward the Home Islands.
[...]
This was a campaign between two great empires — both gone now, it occurs to me — but one, the Soviet, was at the absolute top of its game, and the other, Imperial Japan, was dying and insane. There were still about 700,000 Japanese and Korean troops holding the line in Manchuria, but they weren’t exactly Samurai-quality. A full 25% of the Kwantung Army’s strength was guys who’d been drafted in the two weeks preceding the Soviet attack. We’re talking about an army that looked like John Bell Hood at Atlanta, missing an arm and a leg and not top-drawer material to start with. The amazing thing is that the Japanese troops knew it themselves. They were the dregs, dragged out of junior-high classrooms and old-age homes and shelters for the hopelessly useless, and they called themselves names that sound like a Heavy Metal amateur night at your local bar: “human bullets,” “Manchurian orphans,” “Victim Units” and “The Pulverized.” (If you don’t believe me, check out Philip Jowett’s book, The Japanese Army 1931–1945, page 22.) Their official strength was 24 divisions, but that translated to about eight divisions of effectives, with only about 1200 light armored vehicles.

Against that was a force that God would have made excuses to avoid facing in the Octagon: 1,600,000 battle-hardened Soviet troops with 28,000 artillery tubes and 5000 tanks — and more than 3000 of those were T-34s, the best tank in the world at that time. (You tank nuts who disagree with that assessment can send me all the King Tiger sites you want; it was a nice blueprint but they tried it against the T-34s and it lost, and I kinda go by success in battle, not bluebook-style stats.)

The Red Army had learned a lot about logistics since 1941, and some of the moves they made to prepare for the assault on Manchuria were pretty amazing. Instead of trying to transfer thousands of tanks across the whole Eurasian landmass from Eastern Europe to Manchuria, the Russian armored units like the 6th Guards Army, one of Zhukov’s best, left their tanks in Czechoslovakia before the engines even had time to cool down, hopped into troop trains and crossed the continent to meet up with fresh new tanks, shipped from factories east of the Urals, when they arrived on the Manchurian front. By August 1945, the Russian supply lines were running so smoothly that they could ship pretty much anything anywhere it was needed. Like Soviet armies always did, they took logistics and surprise both dead seriously, so they ran up to 30 trains a day across Asia, but I should say “a night,” because to keep tactical surprise they ran all those trains at night. (If you want a great detailed account of the prep the Soviets took, read Col. David Glantz’s book The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945.)

The combination of logistical superiority and tactical surprise gave the Red Army commanders a lot of flexibility when they looked at the maps of Japanese-held Manchuria. First, a little geography: Manchuria is sort of like a box, with high mountains and big rivers along the borders, sloping down to flatland in the middle. The middle part of the province was the prize; that’s where the fertile land, the population and the industry was concentrated. Most of the Japanese defensive forces were concentrated on the east side of the box, where they faced off against the Soviets along a north-south line following the Ussuri River from Khabarovsk down to Vladivostok.

The Kwantung Army commanders expected the Russian push to come from the east, so the Russians came from the west — through the Gobi desert and over the Khingan Mountains:

Like all advances that work better than they’re supposed to, this one stalled because it literally ran out of fuel. Those T-34s got so far inside Kwantung Army lines in the first few days that the Soviet Air Force had to use DC-3s to bring in gas. By that time, it was pretty clear that the cannon fodder the Japanese had left to man the trenches had had enough, so the problem wasn’t so much defeating the Axis forces as beating the American naval task forces down to the Korean Peninsula, the one big strategic objective the Red Army hadn’t yet overrun. They made it about halfway down the Peninsula, and then had to stop because a US force had made a landing at Inchon — yup, the same Inchon that MacArthur was going to make famous a few years later.

And that’s how the Korean Peninsula came to be divvied up halfway down.

The Tibetans were never peaceful people at all

Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) notes that The Tibetans were never peaceful people at all:

They were one of the most warlike peoples in Central Asia and even conquered the Chinese capital, Chang’An, in their heyday.

That was in the glory days of the 7th through 9th centuries though. By the time of the Red Chinese invasion the Tibetan army was no challenge for them:

Their army was mostly cavalry, a lot of it still armed with swords. There were about 200 artillery pieces and about that many machine guns to defend the whole country.

In fact, the Brits had already invaded Tibet a few decades earlier. The Brits, up to the mid-20th-century, were stone killers, the War Nerd likes to point out, and they invaded Tibet in 1904 more-or-less out of boredom:

The guy who ran that invasion, Francis Younghusband, was quite a piece of work himself. One of those India-born Brits, who were generally fiercer and crazier even than the homegrown English. And he had that other feature that makes for a really ruthless conqueror: he was, like his biographers say, “deeply religious.” If you hear that about a guy who’s about to invade your country, go down to the basement, hoard lots of water and canned goods, and try to make yourself invisible for the next few years, because it’s not going to be pretty.

Younghusband marched into Tibet in December 1903 with a force of Sikhs and Gurkhas — pretty scary mix, like rottweiler plus pit bull. And the Gurkhas were definitely the pit bulls in that pair. Sikhs are very tough but not blood-crazy. The Gurkhas were not only devoted lovers of knife-work, especially on POWs, but ancient enemies of the Tibetans. It didn’t take much to push them to a massacre. The Tibetans knew the British were dangerous and tried not to resist at all. But as the British force pushed farther and farther into Tibet, the local commanders decided to resist. That was a mistake. This wasn’t Tony Blair’s cool Britannia they were dealing with. On March 31, 1904, Younghusband encountered a Tibetan militia force of about 2000 guarding a pass near Gyantse. He must have had a hard time keeping a straight face or wiping the drool from his lips, thinking about the medals he’d get for this one, because the Tibetans were armed either with spears and swords or at best with matchlock muskets. That’s right: the kind of 17th-century firearm that won’t fire unless you apply the smouldering wick to the firing pan. Younghusband decided to play with the poor fuckers he was facing. He said, “My friends, my friends, what’s all this hostility? Why dees paranoia? Here, I’ll tell MY soldiers to take the bullets out of their rifles, and you tell YOUR soldiers to put out the flame of their matchlocks.” The Tibetans, who had no idea that Younghusband’s troops had modern repeating rifles, put out their matchlocks. Younghusband then ordered his troops to open fire. 1300 Tibetans were killed, with almost no British casualties.

Ronald Chevalier

Something about Ronald Chevalier just resonates:



(Yes, that's Jemaine Clement. He's playing a role from the upcoming Gentlemen Broncos.)

New Geometric Keyboard

Kevin Kelly has stumbled on a new geometric keyboard from Axis, which uses hexagonal keys in a honeycomb pattern to arrange notes ordered according to a harmonic table.

Why the Megapixel Race Needs to End

Charlie Sorrel explains that megapixels, like megahertz before them, are the big consumer swindle of the camera world.:

Fast ISO

ISO ratings on digital cameras mimic the different sensitivities of film, but they don’t quite work in the same way. The same information falls onto the same sensor, but at higher sensitivity settings the signal is simply amplified to make things brighter. Unfortunately, any noise is also amplified, which is why we normally see noisy images at high ISO settings, despite improving noise-reduction software in cameras.

And the more megapixels on a sensor, the more noise; those pixels are so small and so close together, especially on the tiny sensors in compact cameras, that information bleeds between them, a kind of visual cross-talk. Nikon was the first company to have the cojones to release a flagship DSLR, the D3, with “only” 12.1 megapixels. This relatively low count, coupled with a full-frame sensor, means that the D3 can shoot amazingly low-noise photos at ISO 6400, with pretty good images all the way up to ISO 25600. This has left Canon, still focusing on pixels, scrambling to catch up.

Burst Mode

Almost every compact camera comes with a video mode, and many shoot in high definition. If pixel counts were to top out at, say, 8 million, the camera’s processors will soon be powerful enough to shoot video at full resolution. Why do you care? Because if a camera can grab frames that fast, shutter lag (still a problem on compacts), blinking subjects and forced smiles are all moot: You simply review the burst of images and pick the one you want. Sure, this will fill up your memory cards quicker, but that’s just another reason to keep pixel counts low. Casio already does something similar with its Exilim EX-F1, which shoots 6-megapixel images at 60 fps.

New Push to Lower the Drinking Age Clashes With Teen Driving Safety

Recently, more than 100 college presidents signed the Amethyst Initiative , calling for "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year old drinking age." But this new push to re-lower the drinking age clashes with teen driving safety:

For 24 years, the U.S. government, through its control of road construction money, has enforced a minimum drinking age of 21 years old. States that refused to comply can lose 10% of their federal road money. Since 1988, all 50 states have toed the line, enforcing a prohibition against drinking for people between 18 and 21 who are in nearly every other way legal adults.

During roughly the same period, from 1982 to about 1994, the number of annual alcohol-related traffic fatalities among people ages 16 to 20 began to decline from about 5,200 a year in 1982 to about 2,100 in 1994, according to data from the U.S. government's Fatal Accident Reporting System. Since the mid-1990s, the number of alcohol-related crashes among drivers ages 16 to 20 has leveled out. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, using its own counting methods to tally crashes involving drivers with blood alcohol levels above the current 0.08 legal limit, says that in 1996, 1,359 drivers between ages 16 and 20 died in alcohol-related crashes. In 2006, 1,350 teen drivers died in crashes linked to drinking.

If our actual concern is college-age kids drinking and driving, then it seems like our focus should be on drinking and driving — not one or the other.

For instance, in a city with well-developed mass transit, like New York, how dangerous is it to let 18-year-olds drink (legally)?

If you know college kids are going to drink, and your chief concern is drunk-driving, why not license residence halls to operate pubs? Keep an eye on drinking and know that no one is going to drive home drunk.

But that's assuming our concern really is drunk-driving.

The Fruits of Their Labors

Tim Harford describes an amazing economics experiment and how it got field workers to pick a lot more fruit:

The owner had been paying a piece rate — a rate per kilogram of fruit — but also needed to ensure that whether pickers spent the day on a bountiful field or a sparse one, their wages didn't fall below the legal hourly minimum. Farmer Smith tried to adjust the piece rate each day so that it was always adequate but never generous: The more the work force picked, the lower the piece rate. But his workers were outwitting him by keeping an eye on each other, making sure nobody picked too quickly, and thus collectively slowing down and cranking up the piece rate.

Bandiera and her colleagues proposed a