Isegoria

Thomas Friedman notes an unpopular fact in A Poverty of Dignity and a Wealth of Rage:

There are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry Norwegians. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?

From The End of Europe:

Consider some contrasts with the United States, as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. With high unemployment benefits, almost half of Western Europe’s jobless have been out of work a year or more; the U.S. figure is about 12 percent. Or take early retirement. In 2003 about 60 percent of Americans ages 55 to 64 had jobs. The comparable figures for France, Italy and Germany were 37 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent. The truth is that Europeans like early retirement, high jobless benefits and long vacations.

If you go to Brazil, stick to the areas your Brazilian friends recommend. From Gangster’s birthday party spells panic in Rio:

Rio has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with many of the deaths in slums where drug gangs rule. More than 1,200 people were killed in the first three months of this year, including deaths due to police enforcement, official figures show.

Police killed nearly 1,000 people last year, about the same as in 2003, with human rights groups accusing authorities of excessive violence.

NPR recently replayed an old interview with Actor Vince Vaughn: Everybody’s Buddy, who co-stars in Wedding Crashers, which opened this weekend.

When Bad Chickens Come Home to Roost, Results Can Be Good describes a refuge for ex-cockfighters — the actual roosters. A little bit about the “sport”:

Cockfights are legal only in Louisiana and New Mexico, but illegal combats and betting are common throughout the country, where there are an estimated 100,000 gamecock breeders. The fights, which take place in an enclosed area, end when one of the duelers dies or one of the handlers concedes victory. They can last more than 30 minutes and can generate tens of thousands of dollars in winnings.

To prepare the birds, breeders trim their combs, wattles and earlobes to reduce weight. They inject the roosters with testosterone and methamphetamines and snip their spurs — nails on the back of rooster legs — replacing them with 3-inch steel blades. The roosters fly up into the air and dig the blades into rivals’ flesh.

Freakonomists Dubner and Levitt look at car seats in The Seat-Belt Solution:

They certainly have the hallmarks of an effective piece of safety equipment: big and bulky, federally regulated, hard to install and expensive. (You can easily spend $200 on a car seat.) And NHTSA data seem to show that car seats are indeed a remarkable lifesaver. Although motor-vehicle crashes are still the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have fallen steadily in recent decades — a drop that coincides with the rise of car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ”They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.”

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn’t cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly won’t do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the days of riding shotgun on mom’s lap. But what about older children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts.

You simply can’t make up something like The Computer That Said No To Drugs.

AppleInsider claims that the speed of Apple Intel dev systems impress developers:

The systems started shipping to Mac OS X developers three weeks ago, each equipped with a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 2 MB L2 Cache, 800MHz front-side bus, 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 Dual Channel SDRAM, and an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900.

Developers are renting the $999 hardware from Apple for a period of 18 months in order to get a head start in porting their applications to run on the Intel version of Mac OS X.

‘It’s fast,’ said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel’s Pentium processors. ‘Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5.’ In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes ‘as little as 10 seconds’ to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.

Included with the Mac OS X for Intel distribution is an Applications folder stocked with a mixture of PowerPC and Intel-native applications. Applications that are compiled only for PowerPC processors are of filetype ‘Application (PowerPC)’ whereas Intel-native binaries are labeled of standard type ‘Application’.

Developers sources say the early version of Rosetta, a dynamic binary translator that is designed to run unaltered PowerPC applications on Intel Macs, is also impressive. ‘Rosetta is completely 100 percent seamless and nothing like the Classic environment used to run older Mac OS 8 and 9 applications under Mac OS X,’ one source told AppleInsider.