Beyond Our Shores

Monday, February 10th, 2003

Beyond Our Shores starts with an irony I’ve enjoyed for years:

There are almost no European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature. Those we label “conservatives” in this country are called “liberals” in Europe, because they are in favor of free markets, individual initiative and a democratic polity based on individual, not collective, rights. In the U.S., conservatives represented by the Republican Party just won majorities in both houses of Congress as well as occupying the presidency. Its closest counterpart in Germany is the Free Democratic Party, which won just a bit over 7% of the vote in Germany’s election last September.

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High Style

Monday, February 10th, 2003

High Style, in reviewing Marcus Boon’s The Road of Excess, covers some interesting drug history:

The hundred and eighty years since De Quincey’s invention [of the discourse of recreational drug use, started by his Confessions of an English Opium Eater] have seen a great expansion in the pharmacopoeia, especially since 1862, when the drug company Merck began to produce cocaine.

I didn’t realize (or remember) that Merck first marketed cocaine.

Diamorphine, also known as heroin, was first synthesized for commercial use in 1897. The men who discovered it, Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun, had also, a couple of weeks earlier, invented aspirin; for some years, heroin could be bought over the counter and aspirin required a prescription. Professional ironists love drug history.

Professional ironists love drug history. So true.

Then we had barbiturates, beginning with Veronal, in 1903, and amphetamines, which Smith, Kline first put on the market under the trade name Benzedrine, in 1932.

So Merck marketed cocaine, and Smith-Kline marketed speed. Interesting. At least now I know why Sartre never made much sense:

When he wrote the “Critique,” Sartre, a lifelong caffeine fiend and serious drinker, was also frying his brains on corydrane, a form of amphetamine mixed with, of all things, aspirin. The philosopher was using corydrane on a daily basis, first to cut through the fug of the barbiturates he was taking to help him sleep — and he was having trouble sleeping not least because of all the corydrane he was putting away — but also to keep him at his desk, churning out the “Critique.”

This description made me laugh out loud:

Sartre was therefore a recognizable type of speed freak, the type dedicated to obsessive, unfinishable, and, to the neutral observer, pointless toil — the sort who, several hours after taking the drug, can usually be found sitting on the floor, grinding his teeth and alphabetizing his CDs by the name of the sound engineer.

I already knew about Philip K. Dick’s drug use:

For sheer quantity, Boon notes, it is hard to beat Philip K. Dick, who from 1963 to 1964, under the influence of the methamphetamine Semoxydrine, wrote “eleven science fiction novels, along with a number of essays, short stories, and plot treatments in an amphetamine-fuelled frenzy that accompanied or precipitated the end of one of his marriages.”

It was just a few days ago that I quoted W.H. Auden:

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a “labor-saving device” in the “mental kitchen,” with the important proviso that “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”

For an unabashed square, I find this stuff fascinating.

Posted in Philip K. Dick, Policy | No Comments »

1.618 is the magic number

Monday, February 10th, 2003

As 1.618 is the magic number points out, 1.618 is the magic number — or at least the start of the magic number:

Think of any two numbers. Make a third by adding the first and second, a fourth by adding the second and third, and so on. When you have written down about 20 numbers, calculate the ratio of the last to the second from last. The answer should be close to 1.6180339887…

What’s the significance of this number? It’s the “golden ratio” and, arguably, it crops up in more places in art, music and so on than any number except pi. Claude Debussy used it explicitly in his music and Le Corbusier in his architecture. There are claims the number was used by Leonardo da Vinci in the painting of the Mona Lisa, by the Greeks in building the Parthenon and by ancient Egyptians in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

What makes the golden ratio special is the number of mathematical properties it possesses. The golden ratio is the only number whose square can be produced simply by adding 1 and whose reciprocal by subtracting 1. If you take a golden rectangle — one whose length-to-breadth is in the golden ratio — and snip out a square, what remains is another, smaller golden rectangle. The golden ratio is also difficult to pin down: it’s the most difficult to express as any kind of fraction and its digits — 10 million of which were computed in 1996 — never repeat.

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Genetics: why Prince Charles is so wrong

Monday, February 10th, 2003

As a non-Brit, I didn’t get the reference to Prince Charles in Genetics: why Prince Charles is so wrong, but as an amateur bioinformaticist (is there such a thing?), I got Dawkins’ point:

It is hard to exaggerate the sheer intellectual excitement of genetics. What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth. Moreover, unlike computer codes, the genetic code is universal. Modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The genetic code, on the other hand, with a few very minor exceptions, is identical in every living creature on this planet, from sulphur bacteria to giant redwood trees, from mushrooms to men. All living creatures, on this planet at least, are the same “make”.

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The economist versus the terrorist

Monday, February 10th, 2003

The economist versus the terrorist paints a romantic picture of Hernando do Soto, economist:

To be the target of a terrorist campaign is not the usual fate of an economist. But Hernando de Soto is no ordinary practitioner of the dismal science. It was his pro-capitalist intellectual crusade against Shining Path terrorists in his native Peru that made him one of their top targets; he survived at least three attempts on his life. Those ideas, set out in his 1987 bestseller, The Other Path, may even have helped to turn the poor against the Shining Path, ensuring its defeat. What worked in Peru, he says, can work wherever terrorism now thrives.

After the September 11th terrorist attacks, this message gained a new urgency. Mr de Soto was already increasingly influential with international policymakers, thanks to a second book, in 2000, entitled The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Now, he is everywhere.

The best snippet:

Marx and Engels, Mr de Soto’s pet dogs, were so named because “they are German, hairy and have no respect for property”. It is a carefully chosen joke, for respect for property is at the heart of Mr de Soto’s economic creed[...]

The core of his creed:

Yet Mr de Soto is not one of those economists who thinks that the key to capitalism’s success is to protect existing, legally established property rights, come what may. On the contrary, he argues that capitalism will thrive, and overcome threats such as terrorism, only if legal systems change so that most of the people feel that the law is on their side. Creating this sense of inclusion requires many things, including marketing the idea aggressively to the poor. But one of the best symbols of change is a mass programme of giving full legal protection to the de facto property rights that are observed informally by the (typically poor) people now living beyond the formal law.

According to Mr de Soto’s research, based on interaction with extra-legal communities in several countries, such informal property rights cover assets — notably, land and housing — worth many billions of dollars. Informal systems of property rights usually make such assets “dead capital”, meaning that it is hard to use them as collateral for a loan, which might be used to start a business, for example. Bringing these rights into the formal legal system will unleash this capital and spur growth, says Mr de Soto: an efficient, inclusive legal system preceded rapid development in every rich country.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Bark

Monday, February 10th, 2003

In Bark, Larissa Macfarquhar reviews Stanley Coren’s latest dog book, The Pawprints of History, and shares some dog anecdotes — some grisly, some touching:

Take Columbus, for example. Columbus believed that for fighting Indians one dog was worth fifty soldiers, so when he advanced into America he took a pack of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mastiffs with him. In one industrious battle in 1495, these mastiffs leaped upon and disembowelled more than a hundred Indians apiece. (This figure was reported by an observer of the fight, Bartolomé de las Casas, who, realizing that it was difficult to credit, went on to explain that the dogs were used to disembowelling deer and boars, and so found the soft and hairless skin of Indians quite easy to bite into.)
[...]
In the early years of the last century, Hachiko, an Akita with a well-developed sense of time, got into the habit of meeting his master, Professor Eisaburo Ueno, of Tokyo University, every day when he arrived from work at the Shibuya subway station. Ueno died in 1925, but Hachiko continued to meet his train every day for nine years, until he himself died, in 1934. The world’s most famous Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby, remained by his master’s grave in Edinburgh for fourteen years, until his own death, in 1872. There are dogs who have committed voluntary suttee. It goes without saying that a human being who attempted to behave in any of these ways would be urged to stop and, with some hand-wringing, be hospitalized. But dogs are permitted to love unrequited and to excess. Dogs who love too much, codependent dogs, or clingy, pathetic dogs are not reproved. Love and altruism are never pathological in a dog.

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How the Saudis betrayed Islam

Monday, February 10th, 2003

In How the Saudis betrayed Islam, Paul William Roberts reviews The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror by Stephen Schwartz:

Briefly, Schwartz’s thesis is this: The princes of Saudi Arabia share power and the fabulous wealth of their petro-dollars with a hereditary priestly hierarchy overseeing a cultic travesty of Islam known as Wahhabism, after its 18th-century founder. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a poorly educated, narrow-minded, homicidal fanatic whose idiosyncratic, austere and uncharitable vision for his religion flew in the face of its own teachings and those accorded to its Prophet. Schwartz writes:

“The essence…came down to three points. First, ritual is superior to intentions. Second, no reverence of the dead is permitted. Third, there can be no intercessory prayer, addressed to God by means of the Prophet or saints….Prayers to God by means of a pious person or even honours to any individual other than God were condemned as idolatry, despite their acceptance by all previous generations of Muslims and the Prophet himself. At the same time, defying centuries of Islamic theology, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s followers ascribed a human form to God.”
[...]
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was soon ordering the graves of Muslim saints dug up and scattered, or turned into latrines. He also burned many books, arguing that Koran alone would suffice for humanity’s needs. Above all, and perhaps most telling, Wahhabism’s prophet and his followers despised music, viewing it as an incitement to forgetfulness of God and to sin.

I was familiar with Wahhabism — I knew it was Saudi, and I knew it was fundamentalist — but I didn’t realize just how much of “Islam” (as we know it in the west) is Wahhabism.

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Evolutionary psychology:

Monday, February 10th, 2003

In Evolutionary psychology: “fashionable ideology” or “new foundation”? Oliver Curry reviews (and counters) Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against evolutionary psychology, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose. Curry starts by giving a brief introduction to evolutionary psychology:

At the end of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation…Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” It took more than 100 years but, in the closing decades of the 20th century, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection began to be applied to minds, brains and behaviour. “Evolutionary psychology” argues that the mind is a collection of special-purpose software designed by natural selection to solve the problems of survival and reproduction that faced our ancestors — problems such as finding food, picking suitable habitats, attracting mates, learning a language and navigating the social world.

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An early flowering of genetics

Monday, February 10th, 2003

An early flowering of genetics reproduces Richard Dawkins’ introduction to a new edition of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man. The article’s own introduction states:

Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution was published long before knowledge of genes was available. But Richard Dawkins reveals that an obscure letter found in a library proves Darwin was already doing research into heredity which anticipated the breakthroughs of the next century.

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The Curse of Pooh

Monday, February 10th, 2003

I knew Pooh Bear made Disney a lot of money, but The Curse of Pooh explains just how much:

Billions of dollars are at stake in the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in March. Pooh videos, teddy bears, and other merchandise generate $1 billion in annual revenues for Disney — the same amount as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto combined.

I find “The Curse of Pooh” fascinating:

Milne, on the other hand, was a world-weary intellectual. The writer, who died in 1956, was known wherever he went as the man who breathed life into Winnie the Pooh. But success as a children’s writer had made him bitter. As a young man Milne was an up-and-coming playwright in London. On a whim he wrote a poem about his 2-year-old son, Christopher Robin, entitled “Vespers” with the now-famous closing lines: “Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” He told his wife she could keep the money if she sold the poem to a magazine.

Daphne promptly sold “Vespers” to Vanity Fair, where it was published in 1923. Other magazines clamored for Milne to write more children’s poems. The most popular were his whimsical verses about Christopher Robin and his teddy bear, who appeared early on as Edward Bear and was soon dubbed Winnie the Pooh. In 1924 the poems were collected in a book called When We Were Very Young. It sold so well that Milne bought a farmhouse on the edge of Ashdown Forest. The forest became the setting for Winnie the Pooh, a book of stories about the unforgettable bear who lived for honey and lazy afternoons doing “Nothing” in the Hundred Acre Wood with Christopher Robin and Piglet. Winnie the Pooh was published in October 1926. In the U.S. alone, it sold 150,000 copies before the end of the year.

Milne could see where Pooh was going — and wanted to stop him. He published a second collection of tales in 1928 entitled The House at Pooh Corner, but tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the book. In the haunting final scene, Christopher Robin tries to explain to an uncomprehending Pooh that he’s growing up and will soon have to bid farewell to his playmate from his nursery days.

‘Pooh?’
‘Yes, Christopher Robin?’
‘I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’
‘Never again?’
‘Well, not so much. They don’t let you.’

Pooh wasn’t so easily done away with. Milne wrote novels, antiwar essays, and more plays. But the public only cared about Pooh.

It’s all pretty sad, really.

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A Soldier’s Tale

Monday, February 10th, 2003

The Wall Street Journal posted Rudy Romero’s original e-mail in A Soldier’s Tale. They left it in its original state, ALL CAPS and riddled with spelling errors:

HOWS EVERYTHING GOING SIR. HOPE YOUR DOING FINE. WE SHOULD GET TO GETHER FOR LUNCH SOMETIME, I KNOW A PRETTY GOOD PLACE IF YOU LIKE MEXICAN.

I found a (partially) cleaned-up version at Squad-Leader.com. As for content, some things haven’t changed since the days of the Roman legions:

I would also recommend wearing the body armor during all training, I doubt if well ever fight without it again. It significantly affects everything that you do.

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How One Soldier’s E-Mail Changed Troops Equipment

Monday, February 10th, 2003

How One Soldier’s E-Mail Changed Troops Equipment explains how one soldier’s e-mail got passed up the ladder to the top brass, because it contained pages of useful hints from the front lines:

Last July, a few weeks after he got back from Afghanistan, Master Sgt. Rudy Romero wrote a quick e-mail to one of his old commanding officers. “How’s everything going sir? Let’s get together for lunch. I know a pretty good place if you like Mexican,” he began.

He followed that with three pages of advice from his tour in Afghanistan with the Army’s 101st Airborne division — everything from the best gloves to take (fleece from AutoZone) to the best socks (Gore-Tex, available in camping stores). He also told his former boss to ditch the Army-issue ammunition sacks and instead buy bags from London Bridge Trading Co.

Some of my favorite tidbits:

Although the boots worked just fine on the soft sands of Iraq, they fell to pieces after a couple of months in Afghanistan, where the ground is rocky. The engineers took note, and the Army is buying new boots with special composite soles that should stand up better in Central Asia.

His biggest complaint was that Army gear weighs too much. “We were easily carrying 80 lbs. Throw on the ruck [Army backpack] and you’re sucking,” he wrote.

Master Sgt. Rudy Romero shows Army nutritionists how he stripped a prepackaged Army meal to make it lighter.

To make their point, the three men explained how soldiers in Afghanistan consumed their Meals Ready to Eat, the plastic-wrapped all-in-one food packets that weigh about two pounds and last around three years. Before going into battle they “field stripped” the meals to cut down on their carrying weight. “We kept the high carb stuff for energy and threw out everything else,” Sgt. Romero told the nutritionist responsible for developing the meals.

Based in part on his suggestions, the Army is designing a lightweight Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol Ration.

The three raised another practical concern: Too many of the Army’s new gadgets use different kinds of batteries, further increasing the load. Some soldiers, Sgt. Romero explained, buy commercial GPS locators from camping stores and discard their military-issue devices simply because the civilian ones use the same batteries as their night-vision goggles.
[...]
For example, Sgt. Romero tells his former commander not to bother with Army-issue winter gloves. They are warm and waterproof, but soldiers can’t pull a rifle trigger when wearing them, which is a big problem in combat. Aviator gloves are good, he writes. Even better are the fleece gloves sold at AutoZone.
[...]
Finally, he advises his colleagues to bring iodine tablets to purify water — something U.S. soldiers did for decades, but his unit, unaccustomed to the rigors of war, left behind at Fort Campbell. “We’ve lost a lot of our needed field craft,” he laments in the e-mail.

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And on the 7th day, State Stores opened

Monday, February 10th, 2003

Sometimes I can’t believe just how backward Pennsylvania is. As And on the 7th day, State Stores opened points out, Pennsylvania has state-run liquor stores, and they’re just now — in 2003 — being allowed to sell on Sundays:

Pennsylvania’s age-old blue laws, it seems, are finally fading away.

Yesterday, for the first Sunday ever, state liquor shops were open and doing a fairly brisk business. Not since Prohibition began in 1919 have state residents been legally able to buy vodka for a Sunday Bloody Mary or champagne for a late weekend brunch.

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Early Warning: How to Alert Earthlings of Yucca’s Waste

Monday, February 10th, 2003

I read about this almost a decade ago. How do you design a warning that will still have meaning thousands of years from now? Early Warning: How to Alert Earthlings of Yucca’s Waste explains the issue:

Last summer, Congress approved Yucca Mountain as America’s first permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste. But before the nation’s spent nuclear fuel can be hauled for burial under the 5,000-foot ridge, regulators have ordered the U.S. Department of Energy to design a system of markers and monuments meant to ward off intruders from the site through the year 12,000. Anyone speak Martian?

The world’s oldest stone monument — the Step Pyramid in Egypt — is just 4,000 years old. The oldest known writings — in Sanskrit — date back 5,000 to 7,000 years. Yet to satisfy the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing requirements, Yucca Mountain officials are supposed to devise warnings and safety barriers that will long outlast today’s most ancient relics of civilization.

Would giant skulls with radiation symbols emblazoned on them just attract the teenagers of the 25th century?

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Scientists Gene-Engineer First Human Stem Cells

Monday, February 10th, 2003

According to Scientists Gene-Engineer First Human Stem Cells, scientists deleted a disease gene from human embryonic stem cells:

Scientists said on Sunday they had, for the first time, genetically manipulated human stem cells — a step toward making the body’s so-called master cells into a useful tool.

Using the method that made the laboratory mouse so valuable to genetic researchers, the team at the University of Wisconsin deleted a disease gene from human embryonic stem cells.

I still feel “knockout mouse” sounds much cooler than “knockout human”…

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