Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course

Friday, December 12th, 2003

Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course:

Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5-foot-4-inch bon vivant who was as known for his aerial prowess as he was for his dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque Paris.
[...]
An idealist who believed flight was spiritually soothing, Santos-Dumont financed his lavish lifestyle and aerial experiments in Paris with the inheritance his coffee-farming father had advanced him as a young man. Always impeccably dressed, he regularly took a gourmet lunch with him on his ballooning expeditions.

But it was on Nov. 12, 1906, when Santos-Dumont flew a kite-like contraption with boxy wings called the 14-Bis some 722 feet on the outskirts of Paris. It being the first public flight in the world, he was hailed as the inventor of the airplane all over Europe.

It was only later that the secretive Orville and Wilbur Wright proved they had beaten Santos-Dumont at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, three years earlier on Dec. 17.
[...]
Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist and Santos-Dumont expert, argues that the Wright brothers’ flight did not fulfill the conditions that had been set up at the time to distinguish a true flight from a prolonged hop.

But Santos-Dumont’s flight did meet the criteria, which in essence meant he took off unassisted, publicly flew a predetermined length in front of experts and then landed safely.
[...]
Brazilians also claim that the Wrights in 1903 launched their Flyer with a catapult or at an incline, thereby disqualifying it from being a true airplane because it did not take off on its own.

Even Santos-Dumont experts like Lins de Barros concede this is wrong. But he claims that the strong, steady winds at Kitty Hawk were crucial for the Flyer’s take-off, disqualifying the flight because there is no proof it could lift off on its own.

Peter Jakab, chairman of the aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and a Wright brothers expert, says such claims are preposterous.

By the time Santos-Dumont got around to his maiden flight the Wright brothers had already flown numerous times, including one in which they flew 24 miles in 40 minutes.
[...]
At his summer home in the Brazilian mountain town of Petropolis, tour guides perpetuate myths about Santos-Dumont — such as how he invented the wristwatch.

Santos-Dumont experts deny that assertion, although they concede he was probably the first male civilian to use a watch after asking his friend Louis Cartier to make him a timepiece he could use while flying. Previously, only royalty and soldiers had used watches.

To this day, you can still buy the Santos-model Cartier watch for only a couple thousand dollars.

I may need to pick up Wings of Madness (a biography mentioned in the article).

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Why the Sky Was Red in Munch’s ‘The Scream’

Friday, December 12th, 2003

When I read the title of Why the Sky Was Red in Munch’s ‘The Scream’, I assumed it would be about some obscure neurological condition. I didn’t expect it to report that Munch’s locale actually experienced red skies the year he painted ‘The Scream’:

For those who have ever wondered why the sky was a lurid red in ‘The Scream’ — Edvard Munch’s painting of modern angst — astronomers have an answer. They blame it on a volcanic eruption half a world away.

In the first detailed analysis of what inspired the painting, an article published on Tuesday in Sky and Telescope pinpointed the location in Norway where Munch and his friends were walking when the artist saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, and offered an explanation for why the sky seemed to be aflame.

Donald Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas State University, and his colleagues determined that debris thrown into the atmosphere by the great eruption at the island of Krakatoa, in modern Indonesia, created vivid red twilights in Europe from November 1883 through February 1884.

The local newspaper in what is now Oslo reported that the phenomenon was widely seen, the astronomers said.

“One of the high points of our research trip to Oslo came when we rounded a bend in the road and realized we were standing in the exact spot where Munch had been 120 years ago,” Olson recalled in a statement.

“It was very satisfying to stand in the exact spot where an artist had his experience,” he said. “The real importance of finding the location, though, was to determine the direction of view in the painting. We could see that Munch was looking to the southwest — exactly where the Krakatoa twilights appeared in the winter of 1883-84.”

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Life Can Be Awful

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

Life Can Be Awful gives a few examples of the honest reporting The Economist provides:

  • In the provinces of Afghanistan, where virtually no modern medical care is available, girls usually get engaged at ten, are usually married at 12, and usually start giving birth at 14. These girl/women have the highest rates of maternal mortality ever recorded — 500 times higher than the rate in developed countries. Superstition and bizarre traditions run rampant. Midwives refuse to tie off umbilical cords; babies are born into bowls of dirt; and one way people have of trying to cure a woman’s infections is by placing dead mice in her vagina.

  • The country of Congo has had a five year war, in which over 3 million people have perished.

  • Canaan Banana, the first president of Zimbabwe, just died. He was a mere figurehead, apparently, with a light workload that left him “plenty of time for his hobby, which was raping his male attendants.”

  • Kenya’s legal system has long been a joke, even to Kenyans. In the late 1980s, a chief justice “took his trousers off, balanced a shoe on his head and goose-stepped around the high-court car park chanting pro-government slogans.” Justice comes at a literal price: “$250 to escape a rape charge, and $500 for murder.” One investigation concluded that “only three of the country’s 310 judges were neither corrupt nor incompetent.”

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A Biological Understanding of Human Nature

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

A Biological Understanding of Human Nature examines Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature:

The main question is: ‘Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?’ This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
[...]
In The Blank Slate, he notes “that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts”.
One is the doctrine of “the blank slate”: that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment?parenting, culture, and society.

“The second is “the noble savage”: that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions.

The third is “the ghost in the machine”, that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can’t be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.

These three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution,” he says, “but they are held as much for their moral and political uplift as for any empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is forbidden territory that we should avoid at all costs”.

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Secrets and Thighs

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

Secrets and Thighs, by Ed Halter, offers “A history of celebrity sex tapes, real and fake, from Joan Crawford to Paris Hilton” — all in a very serious journalistic tone:

The distant seeds of celebrity porn took root in 19th-century literary erotica attributed to famous authors, such as the mock-epic Don Leon, claimed to have been penned by Lord Byron as a record of his notorious exploits, or the explicitly homosexual Victorian novel Teleny, long said to have been written by Oscar Wilde. After Hollywood invented the movie star in the early 20th century, Tijuana Bibles satisfied a new desire to see screen deities stripped bare. These crudely drawn comic-book leaflets depicted stars like Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable in various farcical trysts.

Hardcore porn films have existed at least since the teens, circulated through private clubs and wealthy collectors. Ancient Hollywood gossip has it that Joan Crawford acted in several early stag films, including some with lesbian scenes. But one of the earliest star-attributed films to circulate widely was a nameless one-reel nudie loop purporting to depict a young Marilyn Monroe, who would have shot it around 1948, prior to her posing nude for the inaugural issue of Playboy. In the film, a lone young woman does a striptease, rolls an apple across her chest, and then sips a soda. Later dubbed The Apple Knockers and the Coke, it was distributed to colleges and cinemas in the early ’70s by Grove Films, packaged in a collection of vintage erotic shorts and experimental works like Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses. Today, it’s recognized that Apple Knockers and several other so-called Monroe porn films depict another early Playboy model named Arline Hunter.

One Monroe stag film remains in dispute, however. Also dated from 1948, this unnamed 16mm hardcore short shows a Monroe-ringer screwing a mustached man on a couch. According to a 1980 Penthouse cover story, a print was discovered that year by a Swedish photographer and subsequently publicized in adult magazines and tabloids worldwide. “Here, in grainy celluloid,” Penthouse wrote next to copious frame-enlargements, “may well be the still unglamorized sex goddess the public never knew, before plastic surgeons, stylists, and designers transformed her into the mythical Marilyn Monroe. It’s a thought to fire the imagination of every man who ever dreamed of her, a fantasy come to fruition.” Another print of probably the same film garnered headlines in industry trades when it surfaced at a Spanish festival for film collectors in 1997. Those who argue the actress is Monroe point to declassified FBI files from 1965 detailing that Joe DiMaggio offered $25,000 for a print of a “French-type” movie depicting Monroe “in unnatural acts with an unknown male.” Its authenticity seemed likely enough for Hollywood’s Erotic Museum to purchase a print, now kept in its collection alongside artwork by Picasso and Tom of Finland.

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About Last Night

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

About Last Night makes a sad point:

I see that Master and Commander has tanked. Not in absolute terms: a $67.5 million gross in the first three weeks of release would be perfectly respectable under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, Master and Commander cost $135 million, stars Russell Crowe, and got hysterically enthusiastic reviews. So why isn’t it doing better? A whole lot better? The answer is to be found in The Wall Street Journal‘s post-Thanksgiving report on this year’s holiday films, which declared with blunt finality that ‘the adult-skewing audience it is pitched toward hasn’t responded strongly enough.’

That rumble you hear in the middle distance is the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined. If a film with all the advantages of Master and Commander can’t do any better than $67.5 million after three weeks, don’t expect any remotely similar project to get the green light. Expensive movies, like Trix, are for kids.

I hope it makes plenty of money on DVD. I definitely agree with this point:

Especially now that large-screen TVs are making it easier to watch films at home under more visually advantageous circumstances, I doubt that over-30 moviegoers will continue to subject themselves to the unpleasantries of trips to the local gigaplex. Intimate films like Lost in Translation and The Station Agent gain little or nothing when you view them in a theater, surrounded by cell-phone addicts and other freaks and morons.

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Navy and Marine Rules for Gun Fighting

Wednesday, December 10th, 2003

I can’t vouch for the authenticiy of these Navy and Marine Rules for Gun Fighting, but I enjoyed them:

USMC Rules For Gun Fighting

  1. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.

  2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.

  3. Only hits count. A close miss is still a miss.

  4. If your shooting stance is good, you’re probably not moving fast enough nor using cover correctly.

  5. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movements are preferred.)

  6. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.

  7. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics.

  8. They will only remember who lived.

  9. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.

  10. Accuracy is relative: most combat shooting standards will be more dependent on “pucker factor” than the inherent accuracy of the gun.

  11. Use a gun that works every time.

  12. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.

  13. Always cheat = always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.

  14. Have a plan.

  15. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won’t work.

  16. Use cover and concealment as much as possible.

  17. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.

  18. Don’t drop your guard.

  19. Always tactically reload and threat scan 360 degrees.

  20. Watch their hands. Hands kill. (In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see them).

  21. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.

  22. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot up you will get.

  23. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

  24. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.

  25. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a “4″.

Navy Rules for Gun Fighting

  1. Go to Sea

  2. Send the Marines

  3. Drink Coffee

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‘Rings’ Director Wants to Bring ‘Hobbit’ to Screen

Wednesday, December 10th, 2003

I can’t imagine he’ll have any trouble getting the money. ‘Rings’ Director Wants to Bring ‘Hobbit’ to Screen:

Despite his exhaustion, Jackson is not resting on his laurels and said if complex rights issues can be resolved he would like to direct ‘The Hobbit,’ J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to the ‘Rings’ trilogy set some 50 years earlier.

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Lessons Identified Versus Lessons Learned

Wednesday, December 10th, 2003

I’m sure there’s a business lesson in here somewhere. From Lessons Identified Versus Lessons Learned:

Afghanistan and Iraq brought out the military historians and survey teams in force. The Department of Defense was determined to avoid the usual wartime pattern and not make the same mistakes twice during the War on Terror. This is not easy to do. As far back as World War II, there were organizations in the U.S. military that looked for “lessons learned” and tried to get the information passed around to everyone as quickly as possible. This was difficult because the training all the troops (be they army, navy or air force) received was laid down in manuals and training courses. It was exceedingly difficult to change training manuals, if only because of the time required to rewrite them and publish new ones. The training courses were based on the manuals and the military, like any bureaucracy, lives to do things “by the book.”

But there are other problems. It’s easier to identify a lesson than to get an organization to act on it and implement a useful solution. For that reason, the British like to use the phrase “lessons identified” to make clear that just noting a problem does not solve it. When you uncover a problem, you are calling into question the wisdom of some earlier decisions. Large organizations do not take kindly to such criticism. Excuses and creative explanations will emerge if a lesson learned threatens some cherished program. For example, before the invasion of Iraq, the attitude in the Department of Defense was that heavy forces (tanks and all their accompanying armored vehicles) were on their way out. But what led the dash to Baghdad? Tanks. Embedded journalists made it pretty obvious how useful the tanks and other armored vehicles were. The Department of Defense is having a hard time absorbing this lesson. Another example occurred when many helicopter gunships got shot up when they flew, according to current doctrine, deep into enemy territory to attack Iraqi tanks and troops. This “lesson learned” has sparked a major debate in the army aviation community, for billions have been spent to build an attack helicopter force that can “go deep.” Now that it’s been tried on a real battlefield, and failed, painful decisions are called for. Such decisions may not be made. It’s happened before.

But there are other problems as well. “Lessons learned” often become twisted to support pet projects. The air force has, since 1991, come up with quite different “lessons learned”, than the army, for the very same battles. Air force doctrine sees air power becoming the dominant combat force, while the army sees the primacy of ground forces unchanged. The air force also has a hard time accepting the fact that in Afghanistan and Iraq, their contribution was to have aircraft circling overhead, dropping smart bombs at the command of army troops down below. Air force “lessons learned” play up the traditional air force use of complex combat missions, using highly trained pilots and expensive electronic equipment. The air force does not want to dwell on the valuable contribution of their heavy bombers acting as delivery trucks for smart bombs ordered by combat troops. The new smart bombs (the GPS guided JDAM) put the man on the ground in charge. The army guy selects the target and simply orders the air force bomber circling overhead to drop it on command. This is a “lesson learned” that’s going to have a hard time winning acceptance in the air force. Yet the army is going to conclude that the lesson learned is that the air force needs to put more “trucks” overhead so that the ground troops can make greater use of this new form of firepower.

What no one really wants is a totally dispassionate look at the lessons learned. No one wants the chips to fall where they may. Too much collateral damage that way. Yet, in the end, truth and logic will have their way. The true meaning of each lesson learned will be there on the next battlefield, whether you have come up with the best implementation of the lesson or not.

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Commanding Heights on PBS

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

I never caught Commanding Heights on PBS, but it sounds excellent:

The social and economic catastrophe left in the ashes of World War I ignited an intellectual and political struggle that would last most of the 20th century — a battle between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace over who would control the economies of the world’s great nations.

“The Battle of Ideas” tells the story of how, for half a century, the world moved toward more government control — from the centrally planned economies of the communist world to the “mixed economies” of Europe and the developing world to the United States’ regulated capitalism — and then began to move away.

The ideas of two economists lay at the center of that struggle: John Maynard Keynes, the elegant Englishman who advocated government intervention to control the booms and busts of capitalist economies, and Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian emmigrant who argued that government intervention in the economy would erode human freedom and was doomed to failure.

In western democracies, Keynes’s ideas would dominate for decades, until the economic crises of the 1970s forced political leaders to look for new ideas, and rediscover Von Hayek’s theories. In the 1980s, the simultaneous emergence of the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who both embraced Hayek’s free-market ideas, set the stage for a worldwide capitalist revolution.

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Paying for Disability

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

I loved Alex Tabarrok’s intro to Paying for Disability:

The number of disabled people in the United States is increasing at a shocking rate — from 1984 to 2000 the number of disabled people more than doubled from 3.8 to 7.7 million. Today, over 5% of adults aged 25 to 64 are disabled. Even more worrying is that disability is increasing especially rapidly among the young. What is responsible for this awful increase? Workplace accidents? Chemicals in the environment? Gun violence? Naahh, it’s incentives of course.

By disabled I mean receiving Social Security Disability Insurance or Social Security Income.

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Harry Potter: The new Atlas Shrugged?

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

The Libertarian Party website includes a feature entitled Harry Potter: The new Atlas Shrugged?:

I’m not the first person to point out that the Harry Potter books have a libertarian flavor. The wizarding world in the series has a private banking system and no apparent zoning laws. Wizards have the right to carry a wand — more dangerous than any firearm — at all times for the express purpose of self-defense. The schools are largely independent (until this book). Dumbeldore, the most powerful wizard alive, actively avoids a position in government. Independent action is celebrated. Notably absent is any mention of a system of taxation.

There is a formal government, but its purpose has been primarily to hide the wizarding world from muggles (i.e. you) and to control abuse of magic that could harm others. Until now, the high-ranking government ministers in the tales have generally been either pompous jerks or bumbling fools. With the exception of the time when the Minister of Magic knowingly put an innocent man in prison as a public-relations stunt, the authorities have almost been comic relief.

In this book, they cross the line into being dangerously corrupt.

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Metrics for victory

Monday, December 8th, 2003

In Metrics for victory, Den Beste draws a … peculiar analogy to explain how difficult it will be to declare victory in Iraq:

Let’s consider an analogous case from our own past. When I was a kid in the 1950′s, homosexuality was broadly viewed as perversion, sin, and/or mental illness depending on who you asked. Few were openly homosexual, and many of those were persecuted or prosecuted. (Computer Science demigod Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 while under forced medical treatment to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality.)

Nowadays homosexuality is open, widely accepted, and even legally protected to some extent, and indeed almost unremarkable. There are still many who hate homosexuals, but they’re a declining minority. It’s an indication of how much things have changed that the biggest legal question of the day regarding homosexuals is whether they should be permitted to legally marry, rather than how long they should be locked up for. A lot has changed.

When, exactly, did that change happen? What metric would you apply to permit us to determine the day and hour when gays became free?

You can’t. There isn’t one that makes sense. It’s not like that.

He also draws an analogy to our occupation of Japan after WWII — which led me to look up the Constitution of Japan. Here’s the preface:

We, the Japanese people, acting through our duly elected representatives in the National Diet, determined that we shall secure for ourselves and our posterity the fruits of peaceful cooperation with all nations and the blessings of liberty throughout this land, and resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government, do proclaim that sovereign power resides with the people and do firmly establish this Constitution. Government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people. This is a universal principle of mankind upon which this Constitution is founded. We reject and revoke all constitutions, laws ordinances, and rescripts in conflict herewith. We, the Japanese people, desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationship and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world. We desire to occupy an honored place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance for all time from the earth. We recognize that all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want. We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations who would sustain their own sovereignty and justify their sovereign relationship with other nations. We, the Japanese people, pledge our national honor to accomplish these high ideals and purposes with all our resources.

Interestingly, the first few chapters of the constitution are The Emperor, Renunciation of War, then Rights and Duties of the People.

Den Beste also posted an interesting letter from a fellow who’d lived in Japan and could comment on the social change there even over the last decade:

I only have some residual Japanese but I can vouch for some real changes in the last ten years (I passed the “yonkyu” about ten years ago, but lost my Japanese when I started living in a German speaking place).

There are levels of formality even when talking about yourself. In male speech Watakushi is very formal, Watashi less formal, Boku is blokey, Ore is drunken pub talk (at least that was how it was explained to me). I don’t know if there are female equivalents of boku or ore, I was told that if I was ever “close” enough to a Japanese female to hear “that sort of thing” I would figure it out. On my last trip to Japan I overheard young girls on the subway referring to themselves using boku and ore. Ten years ago I was told that a young girl should not even be able to recognise that ore was a Japanese word.

Ten years ago I was taught that, when talking about your OWN wife you would use the word kanai — which is made up of kanji characters meaning inside the home. On my last trip I was told by a young man that kanai is never used except by old fuddy-duddies (using it would provoke a fight with your wife). Modern wives are addressed more respectfully as okasan which is the form used to speak of other men’s wives honourable wife (might be spelt wrong), colloquially as wifu (wife with a Japanese accent) or, intimately as anata (just plain you).

On other matters, I found that a word I had been taught to use as a normal way of referring to Koreans had become a very(!) rude word. When I said it the person I was talking to went white as a sheet and and told me that I should never, NEVER, EVER (!!!) use that word again (and he wasn’t even Korean).

As your many correspondents have said, the times are a changing.

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The Irony of Outsourcing

Monday, December 8th, 2003

The Irony of Outsourcing presents an amusing analogy:

Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways to make a car — you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa. You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and workers shape it into a finished vehicle.

To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as ‘wheat’), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest and put it into a big boat marked ‘to Japan’ and let it sail off. A few months later a brand new car comes back.

As far as the economy is concerned, it has exactly the same effect on workers and consumers if we use a boat marked ‘to Japan’ or a fantastic new technology invented in Silicon Valley called the ‘wheat-to-car-converter’. Either way, if it takes you less effort to grow wheat into a car than it does to make it in Detroit, then you should grow wheat. Either way, jobs in Detroit would be lost, and either way people get cheaper cars. Trade is just another technology.

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Brain-Gain Cities Attract Educated Young

Monday, December 8th, 2003

While some regions experience a brain drain, others experience a brain gain. From Brain-Gain Cities Attract Educated Young:

In a Darwinian fight for survival, American cities are scheming to steal each other’s young. They want ambitious young people with graduate degrees in such fields as genome science, bio-informatics and entrepreneurial management.
[...]
In addition to Seattle, the largest brain-gain cities include Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, and Raleigh and Durham, N.C.
[...]
These cities tend to have a high percentage of residents who are artists, writers and musicians, as well as large and visible gay communities. They often have pedestrian neighborhoods, with good food, live music and theater. The percentage of foreign-born residents is also high in these cities, reflecting a significant population of college-educated imports.

Posted in Science, Urbanism | No Comments »

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