Isegoria

When the Abu Ghraib “torture” story broke, many people noted that the “torture” (at least some of it) was less severe than a typical fraternity hazing. Here’s the flip side of that argument. Judge: Frat Could Face Torture Charges:

A judge raised the possibility that four fraternity members could be charged with torture in the death of a 21-year-old pledge, comparing the alleged hazing death to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

Butte County Superior Court Judge Robert Glusman said Friday that a summary of facts in the legal motions filed by attorneys appeared to support that charge, which would carry a potential life sentence.

‘U.S. soldiers were charged with torturing Iraqi prisoners for doing far less than what happened in that basement,’ Glusman said.

The four members of the now-defunct Chi Tau house at Chico State University are currently charged with involuntary manslaughter and hazing, which carry a maximum of four years in prison if convicted.

They are accused of forcing Matthew Carrington, 21, to drink large amounts of water while performing calisthenics in the frigid basement as part of initiation rite on Feb. 2. Carrington collapsed and died of heart failure due to water intoxication.

Wow. Gruesome. Praying Mantis Eats Hummingbird:

As you can see from the photographs this hungry mantis captured and killed a hummingbird not much smaller than itself. The hummer measured 2 inches and the mantis was about the same! The mantis used its spiny left foreleg to impale the hummingbird through the chest while leaving his right leg free.

We surmised that the mantis ran the hummer through and dangled its full weight on its foreleg while he consumed the flesh of the hummingbird from the abdomen. After he had his fill, the mantis gave his foreleg several swift jerks and freed his leg.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Orson Scott Card’s novel, Ender’s Game, first appeared in the August 1977 issue of Analog, as a short story. He has posted the original version to his site, Hatrack River.

Polar bears don’t look like amazing swimmers, but they are — and now, thanks to satellite tracking, we know just how amazing. From Polar bear makes huge 74 km one-day Arctic swim:

The female bear, equipped with a satellite tracking device, entered the water on the east of the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen early on July 20, swam northeast and re-emerged on the island of Edgeoya a day later.

A sensor on the bear’s collar sent different signals when it was in salty sea water compared to on land or on ice.

‘This is an astonishing swim,’ Aars said, saying it showed that polar bears could in many ways be classified as marine mammals — a group including whales and dolphins.

Aars said the bear, dubbed ‘Skadi’ after a Norse goddess of snow, had probably swum closer to 100 km (62 miles) since the bear almost certainly did not swim the 74 km (46 miles) between the two points in an exact straight line.

The bear covered the gap in about 24 hours, giving an average speed of 3-4 kmh — about as fast as a person walking.

Doomsayers no longer predict that we’ll run out of oil any time soon; they predict that we’ll reach peak oil. James Hamilton explains how to talk to an economist about peak oil:

Oil is going to become extremely valuable under this scenario in a very short period of time. Let’s say for discussion we’re talking about $200 a barrel two years hence. Then I would like to make the observation that, if the facts were indeed as we just conjectured, oil surely could not continue to sell for $60 a barrel today. Anybody who pumps a barrel out of a reservoir today to sell at $60 could make three times as much money if they just left it in the ground another two years before pumping it out. The same is true for anybody with above-ground storage facilities — they’re throwing away money, and lots of it, for every barrel they sell at $60 that they could have instead stored for two years and sold for $200. If oil producers did respond to these very strong incentives by holding back oil from today’s market, the effect would be to drive today’s price up. This profit-seeking wouldn’t drive the price all the way up to $200, because you have significant interest, storage, and idle capacity expenses from trying to wait around a couple of years before getting your profit. An economist would expect the end result of this profit-seeking to be that the price today is lower than what it will be in two years by an amount that reflects these interest and other expenses, but certainly far less than the difference between $60 and $200 a barrel.

Suppose, again for sake of discussion, that the outcome of this profit-seeking behavior by oil sellers was to drive the price of oil to $180 a barrel today, (that is, supposing that $180 plus two years worth of forgone interest equals $200). What effects would that have? For one thing, it would be a very powerful and effective incentive to force today’s users of oil to reduce their consumption immediately. It would likewise be a very powerful incentive for investing heavily in oil sands and alternative technologies. And, of course, it would leave us more oil in the future to keep the economy going as we make the needed transitions. In other words, the consequence of oil producers trying to sell their oil for the highest price would be to help move society immediately and powerfully in the direction that we earlier determined it ought to move in anticipation of what is going to happen in the future.

In Global Warming: Fighting Off the Ice Age, Orson Scott Card describes modern environmentalism:

It’s the New Calvinism: Humans are evil by nature and should be punished, even if the punishment won’t solve the problem, and even if the problem is actually better than the ‘solution.’