Overstocking in Afghanistan

Friday, June 25th, 2004

A Salt Lake City-based Internet retailer — actually, the retailer’s handmade-goods division — is Afghanistan’s largest private employer. From Overstocking in Afghanistan:

These days, Worldstock employs more than 1,500 Afghan artisans among a worldwide network of craft workers. It’s an accomplishment that Overstock’s CEO, Patrick Byrne, attributes to both an upswing in online retail spending and reliable demand for inexpensive handmade rugs.

That confluence of factors culminated this week in a confirmation by the Afghan Ministry of Commerce that Overstock is currently the largest provider of private employment in Afghanistan. According to Mariam Nawabi, commercial attach? for the Afghan Embassy in the United States, Overstock is currently believed to provide employment, directly or indirectly, for about 1,700 people living in Afghanistan.

Prior to Overstock’s arrival, Byrne was told that the country’s largest employer was a brick factory in the Western city of Herat, which had about 400 workers.

Posted in Business, War | No Comments »

You Always Get to be the Terrorist!

Friday, June 25th, 2004

The Northeast Intelligence Network shares a creepy story:

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. A video located today on Sheik Abu Hamza’s website, www.shareeah.org, features four children, doing what as children the world over do: pretending. But what is completely unnerving about this video is what they are pretending.

One young boy kneels in front of three other children, in the same manner of the condemned man; Three other children stand behind him in the same way that the terrorists stood over the men prior to their beheading. The three standing children are armed with pretend weapons. One of the three children is a girl. The tallest of the three standing children pretends he is Zarqawi, and reads a list of demands.

The film clip ends with the pretend beheading of the kneeling child.

Chilling.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Badmash – The Singhsons

Friday, June 25th, 2004

Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish pointed me to Badmash‘s South Asian (Indian) version of The Simpsons — The Singhsons.

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An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests And Rising Hunger

Friday, June 25th, 2004

WSJ.com – An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests And Rising Hunger describes how international agencies are (finally) embracing some fairly simple economic principles:

The world is producing more food than ever before as countries such as India, China and Brazil emerge as forces in global agriculture. But at the same time, the number of the world’s hungry is on the rise — including in India — after falling for decades. Despite its overflowing granaries, India has more hungry people than any other country, as many as 214 million according to United Nations estimates, or one-fifth of its population.

The paradox is propelling a shift in strategy among the world’s hunger fighters. International agencies that once encouraged countries to solve starvation crises by growing more food are now tackling the more fundamental problem of rural poverty as well. The old development mantra — produce more food, feed more people — is giving way to a new call: Create more jobs, provide income to buy food.

It looks like we’ve moved one step past “teach a man to fish” to “teach a man to drive a taxi so he can buy fish”…

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

Jeans Makers Launch New Styles To Flatter the Male Figure

Friday, June 25th, 2004

Manufacturers are producing “figure-enhancing” jeans for men now. From WSJ.com – Jeans Makers Launch New Styles To Flatter the Male Figure:

The new styles feature many of the same touches that designers have brought to women’s jeans: low-rise cuts, stretchy fabrics, bleached-out colors — and, of course, higher price tags.

I can’t be the first person to point out that men and women have different figures, so what enhances a female figure might not enhance a male figure. For example:

Chip and Pepper, a Los Angeles label, lowered the back pockets on one men’s style by several inches — it’s supposed to help the pear-shaped fellow — and left the zipper fly exposed on another. Seven for All Mankind put Lycra in some styles when it launched men’s jeans in the fall last year, offering both stretch and relaxed-stretch styles for $256. Adriano Goldschmied, known as AG, also sells stretch jeans for men. “Men have fat days and skinny days too,” says NPD’s Mr. Cohen.

Last I checked, men don’t have fat days and skinny days.

Here’s how to guarantee that I won’t buy your jeans:

To encourage men to try on the new styles, Diesel stores stock most of the jeans on high shelves behind the sales counter — so guys can’t buy them without consulting a salesperson first.

I find this…amusing:

British designer Andrew Buckler, who founded his label in 2001 and gave his first runway show this spring, says his fledgling company is already profitable largely because of the success of jeans “designed, cut and styled specifically for men.”

Jeans have always been “designed, cut and styled specifically for men” — that’s why designer jeans for women were such a hit 25 years ago; no one had made jeans designed, cut and styled specifically for women before.

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Gene Doping

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

Gene Doping explains the brave new world of ergogenics:

Treatments that regenerate muscle, increase its strength, and protect it from degradation will soon be entering human clinical trials for muscle-wasting disorders. Among these are therapies that give patients a synthetic gene, which can last for years, producing high amounts of naturally occurring muscle-building chemicals. [...] The chemicals are indistinguishable from their natural counterparts and are only generated locally in the muscle tissue. Nothing enters the bloodstream, so officials will have nothing to detect in a blood or urine test.

Recently scientists matched up the harmless AAV virus with a synthetic gene that would produce IGF-I only in skeletal muscle:

After injecting this AAV-IGF-I combination into young mice, we saw that the muscles’ overall size and the rate at which they grew were 15 to 30 percent greater than normal, even though the mice were sedentary. Further, when we injected the gene into the muscles of middle-aged mice and then allowed them to reach old age, their muscles did not get any weaker.

To further evaluate this approach and its safety, Rosenthal created mice genetically engineered to overproduce IGF-I throughout their skeletal muscle. Encouragingly, they developed normally except for having skeletal muscles that ranged from 20 to 50 percent larger than those of regular mice. As these transgenic mice aged, their muscles retained a regenerative capacity typical of younger animals. Equally important, their IGF-I levels were elevated only in the muscles, not in the bloodstream, an important distinction because high circulating levels of IGF-I can cause cardiac problems and increase cancer risk. Subsequent experiments showed that IGF-I overproduction hastens muscle repair, even in mice with a severe form of muscular dystrophy.

This allowed them to “break the close connection between muscle use and its size” — but it certainly seems to work fine with weight training too:

We injected AAV-IGF-I into the muscle in just one leg of each of our lab rats and then subjected the animals to an eight-week weight-training protocol. At the end of the training, the AAV-IGF-I-injected muscles had gained nearly twice as much strength as the uninjected legs in the same animals. After training stopped, the injected muscles lost strength much more slowly than the unenhanced muscle. Even in sedentary rats, AAV-IGF-I provided a 15 percent strength increase, similar to what we saw in the earlier mouse experiments.

And that’s just IGF-1 he’s discussing, not myostatin inhibition.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Myostatin, Belgian Blue, and Flex Wheeler

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

The German toddler is supposedly the first human known to have the myostatin mutation (or, rather, to have two copies of it), but Double muscling in cattle due to mutations in the myostatin gene reports “that the myostatin gene is highly conserved among vertebrate species and that two breeds of cattle that are characterized by increased muscle mass (double muscling), Belgian Blue and Piedmontese, have mutations in the myostatin coding sequence.”

Muscle: The Myostatin Connection discusses the knock-out mice and at least one human case of the mutation:

The ultimate demonstration that myostatin regulates muscle size in humans is the work of a man named Victor Conte of BALCO laboratories. He has shown that champion bodybuilder Flex Wheeler actually possesses a mutation that has resulted in the deletion of his myostatin gene (much like that in Belgian Blue Cattle). This goes on to prove something else that has always been suspected…that champion bodybuilders possess some sort of genetic gift that allows them to become much more muscular than the average person. It seems that champion bodybuilders may owe much more to their genetics than they do to their training, supplement or drug use.

You may have heard of BALCO laboratories. Here’s their statement regarding Flex Wheeler:

Flex was a participant in a study we recently conducted in collaboration with the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh involving 62 men who made unusually large gains in muscle mass in response to strength training (extreme responders). Flex was one of only nine extreme responders that had the very rare “myostatin mutation.” Myostatin is the gene that “limits muscle growth.” Specifically, Flex had the rarest form of myostatin mutation at the “exon 2″ position on the gene. This simply means Flex has a much larger number of muscle fibers compared to the other subjects or the normal population. We believe that these are the very first myostatin mutation findings in humans and the results of this landmark study have already been submitted for publication. Flex was also found to have a very unusual type of the IGF-1 gene. In fact, Flex was the only participant in the study that did not have a “match.” All of the other extreme responders had at least three other subjects with a matching IGF-1 gene. Based upon Flex’s very unique genetic profile, we plan to expeditiously publish a scientific paper that reveals his complete genotype in specific detail. The publication of his remarkable genetic data should generate an enormous amount of media exposure.

(Addendum: Read more about Gene Doping and Fitness.)

Posted in Animals, Fitness, Science | No Comments »

A New Treatment To Prevent Asthma Is Only Skin-Deep

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

A New Treatment To Prevent Asthma Is Only Skin-Deep notes the connection between skin reactions and other allergic reactions:

In the long search for the cause of asthma — a fast-growing disease that affects some nine million American children under 18 — scientists have variously blamed pollution, exposure to irritants in food and even excessive hygiene. But a new theory focuses on the kind of rashes Ryan has had as a baby. It suggests that infant eczema is the trigger of an allergic chain reaction that can lead to a childhood full of wheezing.
[...]
The Elidel study represents another approach to asthma: trying to attack the immune system’s overreaction at its origin. Elidel inhibits a molecule called calcineurin, which is a key early activator of the allergic response. Doctors hope this will keep in check the antibody IgE, which is found at high levels in 80% of kids with eczema. IgE is seen as a master switch that turns on inflammation-producing immune cells. According to the new theory, these cells at first cluster around the skin, producing eczema in infants, and later migrate to the lymph nodes and lungs, where they cause asthma. That could explain why asthmatics tend to have high IgE levels.

Evidence to support this theory came from some wheezing mice in the lab of Jonathan Spergel, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Spergel, who is a consultant to Novartis, induced eczema by smearing egg white protein — a common cause of allergies — onto the skin of young lab mice. The mice developed eczema. Next he gave these mice and healthy control animals a whiff of egg-white protein through their airways. Mice without eczema breathed normally. “But mice who had had pre-exposure to the skin would wheeze,” he says. “The mouse work really showed things went from the skin to the lungs.” Through skin irritation, he says, “we were inducing asthma.”

When scientists tried other parts of the body instead of the skin, they couldn’t induce asthma. “So the hypothesis is there’s something special about the skin,” says Thomas Hultsch, who heads dermatology research at Novartis. “The skin is the portal.”

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Form and Function: Disguising Security As Something Artful

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

While visiting DC recently, I couldn’t help but notice the ubiquitous planters — concrete planters, heavy and solid enough to stop a suicide bomber in a truck. Disguising Security As Something Artful discusses other examples:

In Seattle, a new 20-story federal courthouse scheduled to open this summer comes with a thicket of cleverly hidden protection. A perimeter of sweet gum trees, concrete benches and stainless-steel bollards forms the first line of defense. Should a suicide car bomber smash through those, he would face two options: Try to ford a ‘waterlily pond’ that doubles as a security moat, or navigate through a grove of 80 trees carefully staggered to prevent a vehicle from getting a clear shot at the main entrance.

Then there’s the sunken sculpture garden, designed both to please the eye and trap a vehicle in the soft grass. Even the building’s sign is part of the security system: Twenty feet long and made of stone, it forms part of the western perimeter.

“If something does happen and they’re able to break through all that, they have to figure out how to get up 18 feet of steps,” says Rick Thomas, the building’s project manager.

A good point:

The intertwining of security and architecture is a throwback to antiquity. From medieval English castles to the Great Wall of China, structures throughout history have been built with defense in mind. Only in relatively recent times have cities and buildings been constructed on the assumption that they were safe from attack.

Bomb blasts follow the inverse-cube law, so keeping them at a safe “standoff distance” pays off:

Many new building perimeters are designed to keep vehicles at what security types call a safe “standoff distance” — preventing the nightmare scenario of a truck bomb penetrating into a modern tower’s vulnerable core, where an explosion could trigger a catastrophic collapse.

Curt Betts, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blast expert, says a large vehicle bomb produces just one-eighth as much blast force on a building from 50 feet away as it does from 25 feet. Moving to 100 feet cuts that to just 2%.

So, what’s a bollard?

Commonly the strong posts on a pier or wharf for holding fast a ship’s mooring line, the term bollard now also refers to the waist-high pillars that have become the barrier of choice around many buildings. Anchored as much as five feet into the ground, with a steel core, the toughest bollards meet U.S. government standards requiring them to halt a truck going 50 miles per hour.

Bollard makers now report a lot of demand for better-looking bollards. “Bollards can be beautiful,” asserts the Web site of Delta Scientific Corp., a Valencia, Calif., manufacturer of security barriers. The company, which says business has grown three-fold since Sept. 11, has added a line of “designer bollards,” including fluted ones that mimic ancient Greek columns, and others with a vaguely Victorian touch. Delta’s bollard customers include the State Department and the National Archive building in Washington and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

A rival firm, SecureUSA Inc., in Atlanta, designed bollards shaped like giant golf balls for an 18-hole course at a military base. Then there’s the gorilla bollard, a crouching fiberglass simian with four steel pillars hidden inside its arms and legs, installed at a theme park that the company declines to name. “To a kid, it just looks like a fun thing to climb on,” says Bevan Clark, SecureUSA’s president. “But it could stop a Ringling Brothers truck carrying a real gorilla going 30 miles an hour.”

Bollards are the main perimeter security at the new Oklahoma City federal building, officially dedicated in May to replace the one bombed in 1995. Those by the front entrance are hidden inside much larger cylinders of perforated metal. At night, lights inside the devices make them glow like luminaria, the popular Mexican and Southwestern Christmas decoration of candle-lit paper bags weighted with sand.

Posted in Urbanism, War | No Comments »

Boche

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

While reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land that Time Forgot last night, I came across a term I’d never seen before: boche. From MSN Encarta – Dictionary – Boche:

Boche [ bosh, bawsh ] (plural Boches, Boche) or boche [ bosh, bawsh ] (plural boches, boche)

noun

U.K. an offensive term for Germans considered collectively, especially German soldiers of World War I (dated)

[Early 20th century. Shortening of French alboche, a blend of allemand "German" and caboche "cabbage, blockhead."]

Posted in War | No Comments »

Cream Made from Breast Milk Reduces Warts

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

I couldn’t make this up. From Cream Made from Breast Milk Reduces Warts:

A cream made from human breast milk and nicknamed Hamlet can dramatically reduce, and often eliminate, stubborn common warts, Swedish doctors reported.

Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells, which the researchers refer to by the whimsical acronym HAMLET, is the active ingredient that forces the wart cell to self-destruct by accumulating in each cell’s nucleus and interfering with its control process.

The results, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, may extend well beyond wart treatment because the same class of viruses that cause those growths are also responsible for cervical cancer, genital warts, and some types of skin cancer.

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Mutation Found in ‘Muscle Man’ Toddler

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

Mutation Found in ‘Muscle Man’ Toddler reports on a recent NEJM paper:

Somewhere in Germany is a baby Superman, born in Berlin with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet 5, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat. DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth.
[...]
The boy’s mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth. The news comes seven years after researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created buff “mighty mice” by “turning off” the gene that directs cells to produce myostatin.
[...]
Researchers would not disclose the German boy’s identity but said he was born to a somewhat muscular mother, a 24-year-old former professional sprinter. Her brother and three other close male relatives all were unusually strong, with one of them a construction worker able to unload heavy curbstones by hand.

In the mother, one copy of the gene is mutated and the other is normal; the boy has two mutated copies. One almost definitely came from his father, but no information about him has been disclosed. The mutation is very rare in people.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Gorilla Runs Amok in Zoo

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

I was hoping for more story from Gorilla Runs Amok in Zoo:

A male gorilla escaped from his cage in the Berlin zoo and sent terrified visitors running for cover, the zoo said on Wednesday.

Eight-year-old Bokito, who weighs 286 pounds and stands more than six feet, six inches tall, climbed over the top of the glass wall surrounding his outside enclosure and roamed the zoo on Tuesday.

Berlin newspapers showed shaky photos of the gorilla taken by an 18-year-old visitor who recorded how Bokito was grabbed by two burly zookeepers and marched back to his enclosure.

‘Suddenly hysterical children and grown-ups came running toward us. They were all running toward the exit. Behind them we saw the huge ape leaping toward us on all fours,’ the visitor, Husam Shawabkeh, said.

So two “burly” zookeepers were able to grab 6’6″, 286-lb gorilla and march him back to his enclosure? (By the way, I love the false precision of round numbers translated from the metric system. The gorilla is two meters tall and 130 kilos.)

Posted in Animals | No Comments »

RPG vs. M1

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

War Nerd (Gary Brecher), in RPG vs. M1, draws an analogy between tanks and knights:

Fact is, no tank in the world is totally invulnerable to RPGs, any more than any knight was totally invulnerable to arrows.

If you think of a tank as an internal-combustion knight, you get a better sense of how it’s meant to work. The armor is concentrated up front, so the knight/tank can attack without having to hold back. The idea is that he has to be able to shrug off what they throw at him while he’s spurring the warhorse full-speed over the battlefield — then hit hard.

If he’s unhorsed — if the tank is forced to stop and deal with lots of dismounted enemy — then it’s all over. It’s as easy as knifing a turtle

Posted in War | No Comments »

Black Tea May Help Get Blood Circulating

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

I may have to learn to like tea. From Black Tea May Help Get Blood Circulating:

In an experiment with 10 healthy men, Japanese researchers found that blood-flow in the coronary arteries improved two hours after the men drank black tea. The same was not true of a caffeinated drink used for comparison.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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