Rabbit Redux: A Once-Lowly Fur Finds New Luster

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

According to Rabbit Redux: A Once-Lowly Fur Finds New Luster, fur is making a come-back with help from a special breed of rabbit:

Much of rabbit’s new higher status is due to a special breed of rabbit known as the ‘Rex,’ whose fur is denser and silkier than regular rabbit fur. The Rex’s growing popularity, especially among designers not normally known for working with fur, is helping democratize the once elite fur market. Now, instead of spending $20,000 and up on a floor-length mink status symbol, fur fans are buying a rabbit vest, shawl or poncho for just $150 to $2,500.
[...]
It has been a long journey back from fashion oblivion for the rabbit. For decades, rabbit pelts were considered declasse — cheap, scraggly and prone to shedding. Fur fans scorned rabbit, confining its audience to teenagers or those who couldn’t afford anything better. “Traditional furriers always pooh-poohed rabbit as something the maids wore,” says Ms. Cassin, the designer.

Nearly driven out of business by the early 1990s by antifur activists, the fur industry has rebounded. A new generation of women who don’t remember the heated animal-rights battles of the ’70s and ’80s is embracing fur. “The whole morality issue about furs seems to have gone away,” says David Wolfe, creative director of Doneger Group, a fashion forecasting firm.
[...]
Rabbit’s transition from poor relation to star performer got a big boost from the Rex. According to the National Rex Rabbit Club, the breed was the product of a recessive gene first spotted in France in 1919 by a parish priest. Unlike garden-variety rabbits, the Rex has no prominent “guard hair” — the rougher top coat that characterizes traditional rabbit fur. The result is a silky, dense fur that furriers say most resembles chinchilla or sheered mink.

Rex rabbits were imported into the U.S. in the 1920s, where their luxurious fur quickly made them popular at livestock shows, says Rex rabbit judge Cathy Szychulda. But after the antifur movement began in the 1960s, fur fell out of fashion and Rex rabbit breeders retreated to backyard sheds, where they raised small batches to show in demanding Rex rabbit competitions. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t give them away,” says Tom James, a Rex rabbit breeder in American Fork, Utah.

The rigorous show culture created steady improvements in Rex rabbit quality, including even more lustrous coats and much larger rabbits, whose pelts measure as long as 25 inches — or nearly three times the length of a traditional rabbit.

By the mid-1990s, U.S.-bred Rex rabbits became coveted for their champion bloodlines, attracting commercial rabbit farmers from as far away as China and Argentina.

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For India’s Youth, New Money Fuels A Revolution

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

A little over a decade ago, India liberalized its formerly socialist economy. With the influx of foreign investment came foreign attitudes and culture. From For India’s Youth, New Money Fuels A Revolution:

Frederick Hamilton, a manager at Wipro Spectramind, India’s largest call-center company, says the father of a young female employee recently came to him with suspicions that she was secretly dating someone at the office. “He said, ‘Her values have changed, and I blame it on this business,’ ” recalls Mr. Hamilton. “Parents think they’ve brought up their children well, with conservative values — and a year later they come back hip.”

Nikesh Soares, who worked at Wipro last year, was a “little gentleman” before he got into the call-center business a little over three years ago, according to his mother, Alisha. He wore button-down shirts and refused to wear sandals, even in Bombay’s sultry weather. He wouldn’t watch Hollywood movies because of all the “sex and smooching,” he says. He knew exactly the kind of woman he was going to marry: demure and old-fashioned.

Today, the 29-year-old Mr. Soares says, “The only thing that hasn’t changed is my haircut.”

His outlook began to change when he joined eFunds, a Bombay call center, in 2000. Each night, he answered calls from Americans responding to infomercials, selling them tummy crunchers, diet pills, miniature rotisseries and orthopedic insoles. The $220-a-month salary — more than double his wages at previous jobs — was a revelation, as was the company of fun-loving colleagues his own age.

Telling his mother he had to work late, he and his friends headed for all-night bars and drank until dawn before stumbling home for a few hours’ sleep. “Girls do it also,” he says. “They say they’re working when they’re actually out with their boyfriends.”

Mr. Soares married one of those girls, Sophia D’Souza, who sat in the next cubicle and didn’t hesitate to strike up a conversation. With an independent streak and a preference for jeans, she is neither demure nor old-fashioned. “My friends all say, ‘Nikesh, what happened? We thought you wanted someone traditional,’ ” he laughs.

In a culture where women rarely wear shorts or skirts above the knee, the work itself was an eye-opener. Mr. Soares and his future wife found themselves fielding calls from people who wanted to buy “Girls Gone Wild,” a hit video featuring scantily clad or topless young women frolicking on vacation. One night, a father called from the U.S. to buy the video as a birthday present for his college-age son, something Mr. Soares could never imagine an Indian parent doing.

Outside the office, it was a different world. When Mr. Soares picked up his wife on his motorbike at the end of the shift, sometimes the police stopped them and asked what they were doing out so late.

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How Driving Prices Lower Can Violate Antitrust Statutes

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004

How Driving Prices Lower Can Violate Antitrust Statutes reports on the mirror image of monopoly:

Usually relegated to the back pages of law books, this mirror image of monopoly is known as monopsony or, when more than one company is involved, oligopsony. It arises when one or more companies gain enough buying power to push their suppliers’ prices down.

Frankly, I’m now looking for an opportunity to use “oligopsony” in conversation.

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Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you

Monday, January 26th, 2004

Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you makes some valid points but misses one key point: the most famous performance-enhancing drugs we already have, steroids, are already safe in therapeutic doses — they’re used for male hormone replacement and for mass-gain/retention in AIDS patients — and they’re particularly healthful for athletes trying to recover from tremendous training stresses:

One of the big sports scandals of 2003 was the discovery that athletes were using a designer steroid called THG [*] that was undetectable with the current tests. Subsequently we got to enjoy the usual gnashing of teeth about how drug use was destroying sports.

The standard argument for why performance enhancing drugs are bad looks something like this:

  1. The drugs are bad for you.
  2. People shouldn’t have to take health risks in order to compete.

There’s an obvious problem with this line of argument: training is bad for you. It’s true that getting some exercise is good for you, but the training loads used by elite athlets are well beyond that point. When you’re training 20+ hours a week, you’re at serious risk for overuse injuries. There’s also evidence that overtraining leads to immune system depression [*]. In fact, one of the major limiting factors in the performance of elite athletes is how much they’re able to train before their performance (and health) starts to decline due to overtraining, so athletes already have to take health risks in order to be competitive.

It’s not clear how true the first half of the argument is, either. Not all of the performance enhancing drugs are bad for you in therapeutic doses. Take a look at the International Cycling Union’s list of prohibited substances. All the major stimulants are banned, including Ritalin (methylphenidate), which ADD patients take every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency even bans pseudoephedrine, which is a common decongestant used in a large number of cold medicines. There’s a lot of debate about whether steroids are actually that bad for you, but there’s no serious debate about whether pseudoephedrine is.

Worse yet, it’s only a matter of time before some doping agent comes out that’s actually good for you. It’s easy to imagine such an agent, say something that would improve your recovery time from training, build more muscle with less training load (suggested by Kevin Dick) or keep your immune system high even under high training loads. Are those drugs going to be banned too? Based on the situation with pseudoephedrine, I’d say so. If and when that happens we’ll need a new rationale for why we’re doing it, though.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Reproduction and bonding don’t necessarily go together

Monday, January 26th, 2004

Reproduction and bonding don’t necessarily go together cites a passage from Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee (which I’ve been meaning to get, then read) that raises a few eyebrows:

People have many reasons to lie when asked whether they have committed adultery. That’s why it’s notoriously difficult to get accurate scientific information about this important subject. One of the few existing sets of hard facts emerged as a totally unexpected by-product of a medical study, per- formed nearly half a century ago for a different reason. That study’s findings have never been revealed until now.

I recently learned these facts from the distinguished medical scientist who ran the study. (Since he does not wish to be identified in this connection, I shall refer to him as Dr. X.) In the 1940s Dr. X. was studying the genetics of human blood groups, which are molecules that we acquire only by inertness. Each of us has dozens of blood-group substances on our red blood cells, and we inherit each substance either from our mother or from our father. The study’s research plan was straightforward: go to the obstetrics ward of a highly respectable U.S. hospital; collect blood samples from one thousand newborn babies and their mothers and fathers; identify the blood groups in all the samples; and then use standard genetic reasoning to deduce the inheritance patterns.

To Dr. X’s shock, the blood groups revealed nearly 10 percent of these babies to be the fruits of adultery! Proof of the babies’ illegitimate origin was that they had one or more blood groups lacking in both alleged parents. There could be no question of mistaken maternity: the blood samples were drawn from an infant and its mother soon after the infant emerged from the mother. A blood group present in a baby but absent in its undoubted mother could only have come from its father. Absence of the blood group from the mother’s husband as well showed conclusively that the baby had been sired by some other man, extramaritally. The true incidence of extramarital sex must have been considerably higher than 10 percent, since many other blood-group substances now being used in paternity tests were not yet known in the 1940s, and since most bouts of intercourse do not result in conception.

At the time that Dr.X made his discovery, research on American sexual habits was virtually taboo. He decided to maintain a prudent silence, never published his findings, and it was only with difficulty that I got his permission to mention his results without betraying his name. However, his results were later confirmed by several similar genetic studies whose results did get published. Those studies variously showed between about 5 and 30 percent of American and British babies to have been adulterously conceived. Again, the proportion of the tested couples of whom at least the wife had practiced adultery must have been higher, for the same two reasons as in Dr. X’s study.

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Ricardo’s Difficult Idea

Monday, January 26th, 2004

The introduction to Ricardo’s Difficult Idea strikes me as very, very true:

The idea of comparative advantage — with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both — is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.

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Putin’s Trap

Sunday, January 25th, 2004

In Putin’s Trap, Robert Cotrell reviews Volkov’s Violent Entrepreneurs (and two other books on Russian organized crime). In his review, Cotrell cites a passage describing “Roman,” a mid-ranking member of a Petersburg crime gang and “a good man to know”:

At the age of seventeen he received the highest title in boxing, master of sports. After completing his schooling, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in Afghanistan. On his return in 1989, Roman began to cooperate with various groups of swindlers and shadow businessmen, providing them physical protection and participating in violent disputes. At the same time, he never missed an opportunity to take part in local wars as a mercenary and fought in Abkhasia, the Transdniester Republic, and even Bosnia. His current major business is managing the illegal production of vodka from cheap ethyl alcohol imported from Belorussia.

Interesting:

The bandits come from all sorts of backgrounds in which group loyalties are formed and can be depended on: criminal networks in Soviet prisons, sports teams, organizations of Afghan war veterans, Cossack unions, even the state security services. The professional criminals carry out the same basic activities. They intimidate, protect, gather information, settle disputes, give guarantees, enforce contracts, and impose taxes. They have the same resource at their disposal, organized violence. The better they manage its use, the stronger they become. Hence Volkov’s name for them, “violent entrepreneurs.”

He distinguishes these bandits of the 1990s, whose techniques he traces back to the street markets and small-scale protection rackets of the late 1980s, from the more traditional type of Russian thief*. The thief produces nothing, and does not claim to do so. The bandit, by contrast, claims to offer services based on the use or threat of force, and wants to advertise this fact. Hence, says Volkov, you could, in any known city during the 1990s, identify the bandits by their gold jewelry, crew-cut hair, leather jackets, big black cars, and assertive behavior. The thief aims to pass unnoticed in public places; the bandit wants to be recognized.

I particularly enjoyed this footnote on his use of “thief”:

I say “Russian thief” here as shorthand for what Russians would call a vor v zakone, or a “thief professing the code,” a professional thief honored by his peers and steeped in prison traditions.

I’m going to have to pick up a fun, true-crime book on the Russian maffiya.

Posted in Business, Martial Arts, Policy | No Comments »

Violence and Economy Building

Saturday, January 24th, 2004

Violence and Economy Building discusses Vadim Volkov’s Violent Entrepreneurs, a book on the Russian maffiya:

Vadim Volkov’s ‘Violent Entrepreneurs‘ has an interesting discussion of protection rackets in the Russian economy. An interesting point is that Russian business and oranized crime have become symbiotic. Once a gang provides ‘protection’ to a business, the gang considers the business their ‘turf’ and becomes dependent on the income from the business. Eventually, gangsters come to guarantee transactions of the businesses they protect, a sort of underwriter that facilitates business. Volkov points out that a later wave of ex-army ‘protectors’ came to provide a more legitimate, institutionalized form of protection against these earlier gangsters, which in turn opens the door for the reclaiming of the Russian state’s monopoly over violence. Robert Cottrell has a nice discussion in his New York Review of Books essay.

It sounds like a discussion of the evolution of government in general.

I enjoyed this bit from the Amazon blurb:

Volkov investigates the making of violence-prone groups in sports clubs (particularly martial arts clubs), associations for veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war, ethnic gangs, and regionally based social groups, and he traces the changes in their activities across the decade.

Martial artists? Engaged in protection rackets? Inconceivable! Incidentally, Vladimir Putin is a dedicated judo “player”; he even wrote a book on judo.

Posted in Business, Martial Arts, Policy | No Comments »

Zoo to Take 1st Cloned Endangered Animal

Friday, January 23rd, 2004

While a cloned banteng doesn’t look any different from a normal, non-clone banteng — they both look like mildly unusual cattle — I’d still like to swing by the San Diego Zoo. From Zoo to Take 1st Cloned Endangered Animal:

The world’s first clone of an endangered species is getting ready for his public debut at the San Diego Zoo.

Jahava, an 8-month-old male banteng, was expected to be moved Thursday from the San Diego Wild Animal Park in north San Diego to the zoo, where he will share an area with three banteng females.

Jahava was cloned from skin cells collected from a male banteng born at the zoo in 1974 that never reproduced. A banteng is a form of wild cattle from Southeast Asia.
The cells were cultured by the Zoological Society of San Diego’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species and were stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 328 degrees. Last year, the cells were inserted into the egg of an Iowa cow.

Although Jahava looks like a banteng, he has genetic material from the cow, zoo geneticist Oliver Ryder said. If Jahava mates with another banteng, the offspring is expected to be full banteng, he said.

In his new home from the zoo, Jahava will be the smallest of the banteng group for some time. He will be distinguishable by his thicker and slightly parted horns.

Jahava should have pure, bateng, nuclear DNA. The genetic material that came from the cow was the mitochondrial DNA from the egg — which comes completely from the mother’s side. Since Jahava is a male bateng, his offspring won’t inherit that cow DNA.

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The Savage Savage

Friday, January 23rd, 2004

Many people live under the notion that civilization is corrupt, and that savages aren’t savage at all; they live peaceful, pastoral lives — at least if they can stay away from cruel, war-mongering, imperialists.

The Savage Savage presents a graph “transcribed from Steven Pinker’s excellent book The Blank Slate and based on data from Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization.”

Posted in Economics, War | No Comments »

Gettin’ a MoveOn

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004

Almost a year ago, I stumbled across Evan Coyne Maloney’s Protesting the Protesters videos. He’s added quite a few videos of interviews since then. He introduces his most recent video, Gettin’ a MoveOn with this lead-in:

On January 15th, New Yorkers awoke to single-digit temperatures and a few inches of new snowfall. Al Gore chose the day to give a speech on global warming. The speech — delivered at the Beacon Theatre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a website-turned-political-action-committee that recently gained notoriety by hosting two political ads equating President Bush with Adolf Hitler. Although such comparisons were common at anti-war rallies, I still wasn’t sure whether this mindset was now infecting the Democratic base — the sort of folks who’d brave the cold to hear Al Gore speak. To find out, I spent a few shivering hours outside the Beacon.

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Ice Age Mammoth’s Skull Found in England

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004

Ice Age Mammoth’s Skull Found in England:

The unusually well-preserved skull of an Ice Age mammoth estimated to be 50,000 years old has been discovered in a gravel pit in southern England, an official said Tuesday.

The skull was found Jan. 11 in a pit in the Cotswold Water Park by Neville Hollingworth, a paleontologist for the Natural Environment Research Council in Swindon.
[...]
“I saw a small piece of bone sticking out at the side of this clay face which had gravel in it. I started to dig and it got bigger and bigger.”

Seven hours later, they unearthed the skull, which was so big it barely fit into the trunk of Hollingworth’s car.

Adrian Lister, an expert on mammoths from University College London, carried out a preliminary analysis of the skull, which weighs between 175 and 220 pounds.

The tusks were missing, and Hollingworth plans to look for them in the quarry, which is flooded with rainwater.

Can you announce where you found a mammoth skull, leave, then come back for the tusks later? I see that mammoth ivory walking away…

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Civet Coffee: Strange Brew With SARS

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004

I don’t even know what to say. From Civet Coffee: Strange Brew With SARS:

SARS fears have stopped the Chinese from eating civet cats. But that hasn’t turned off others from sipping the strangest of brews — one they insist is made from coffee beans eaten, partly digested and then excreted by the weasel-like animals.

The story goes like this: Civets live in the foliage of plantations across Southeast Asia. These fussy foragers pick the best and ripest coffee berries. Enzymes in their digestive system break down the flesh of the fruit before the animals expel the bean.

Workers collect beans from the plantation floor, wash away the dung and roast them to produce a unique drink that devotees might say is good to the last dropping.

Skeptics, though, dismiss it all as a weird and unverifiable marketing gimmick.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Men’s Health Club Owner Aims for Success

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004

When I first heard about Curves for Women, the single-sex gym franchise, I immediately joked that someone would create Angles for Men. It was only a matter of time. From Men’s Health Club Owner Aims for Success:

Gennaro borrowed an idea from Curves International for women, the fastest-growing gym franchise in the world, and created a single-sex exercise franchise for men.

‘I’ve done circuit training for men pretty much as Curves has done it,’ Gennaro said. ‘A lot of my friends’ wives or mothers own a Curves. I said, ‘This is for women. Why not for men?”
[...]
Curves leaped from a standing start in 1992 to about 6,000 facilities today, and claims to open around 200 franchises a month. Cuts Fitness for Men is trying to get rolling, having started in February 2003 with one facility in Clark, N.J. It has 10 open now, with at least two more on the way.

What’s the formula?

As with Curves, Cuts offers a half-hour aerobics-and-strength combination at a low price in a facility that can be tucked into the space of a men’s store in a strip mall. It’s a bare-bones workout shop. There are no coffee bars, no dance floors, not even a shower. It specializes in fast fitness for time-pressured participants.

Doesn’t sound too bad so far.

Like Curves, Cuts programs target beginners, with strength training equipment that does not require anyone to do so much as load a weight onto a bar. The machines work on hydraulics — they resist the pressure of an exerciser pushing just as a car shock absorber resists the pressure of a car hitting a bump. Exercisers who want to work harder push harder, which creates more resistance in the hydraulics.

Ooh, that’s a problem. Without an objective measure of how hard you’re working, you naturally won’t work quite as hard. And without any spandex-clad ladies to impress, you definitely won’t work as hard.

Posted in Business, Fitness | No Comments »

Armed Gangs Threaten Mexican Sea Turtles

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004

I could have guessed that outlawing turtle eggs wouldn’t end the turtle-egg trade, but reality takes the drug-trafficking metaphor further than I ever would have guessed. From Armed Gangs Threaten Mexican Sea Turtles:

Laws barring the killing of protected sea turtles and the sale of their eggs have been as effective as anti-drug trafficking programs: driving the practice underground but failing to stop it.

The latest threat is a horseback-riding gang whose members wield Kalashnikov rifles to drive away police and unarmed environmental activists.

Centuries-old traditions make the turtles, and especially their eggs, highly prized in Mexico, where officials have spent decades trying to protect the sea creatures.

Gangsters on horseback? With AKs? Is this Afghanistan?

Posted in Animals, Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

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