The Victory of September 11, 1565

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

Paul Cella tells the story of The Victory of September 11, 1565, which starts with the Knights of Malta:

By the middle of the 16th century, the Knights of Malta had been for decades a particular irritation to the Sultan of the Empire of the Ottoman Turks, then the world’s premier superpower and the imperial power of the Jihad. The Knights were skilled and cunning seamen: the Christian answer to the Barbary pirates whose razzias or jihadist raids had, literally for centuries, terrorized the coastal lands of southern Europe. These pirates were slavers and pillagers, terrors of the sea. How many “sick and sunless” captives were made by them, consigned to the filth and misery of the life of a galley oarsman, can only be conjectured. They made prisons of great oared ships; and the fate of their prisoners was one of wretchedness beyond reckoning. Athwart this menace stood the ancient Noble Order of St. John of Jerusalem. One historian (voicing a consensus of historians) gives them this honor: “in skill, seamanship, and fighting ability there was no single vessel in the Mediterranean that could compare with a galley commanded by one of the Knights from Malta.”

The Knights had been founded during the First Crusade, and were for a long while known primarily as the Knights Hospitaller: their first ambition had been to aid the sick and weary among pilgrims to the Holy Land. And indeed much of the meaning of our word hospital derives from their tradition, which accomplished great advances in medical science, particularly on the problem of transmission of disease. By the 16th century the Knights had a solid understanding of the value of quarantines: their own galleys were among the cleanest in the world, owing in part to their practice of deliberately sinking and then retrieving them. But it was only later, well after the Crusading Age, that the order became an emphatically military one; and after the fall of the remnants of the Crusader Kingdoms, the order was forced to the sea, where it would thrive.

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Wearing helmets ‘more dangerous’

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

Dr. Ian Walker has found that wearing a helmet is more dangerous for cyclists, because “drivers tend to pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than those who are bare-headed”:

To carry out the research, Dr Walker used a bike fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to find drivers were twice as likely to get close to the bicycle, at an average of 8.5cm, when he wore a helmet.

The experiment, which recorded 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol, was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Dr Walker, a traffic psychologist from the University’s Department of Psychology, said: “This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist’s appearance.

“By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgements.

“We know helmets are useful in low-speed falls, and so definitely good for children, but whether they offer any real protection to somebody struck by a car is very controversial.

“Either way, this study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place,” he added.

Dr Walker thinks the reason drivers give less room to cyclists wearing helmets is because they see them as “Lycra-clad street warriors” and believe they are more predictable than those without.

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What Have the Pythons Ever Done For Us?

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

According to the Times, Monty Python member Terry Jones has written a book painting the Celts in a positive light and downplaying Roman civilization.

Jim McCormick can’t help but cite this famous passage from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

In What Have the Pythons Ever Done For Us? McCormick goes on to note just how much the Romans contributed — if only to make their own villas more livable, and defensible, on English soil:

Roman military expansion in northwest Europe had an impact very much like our own few centuries of European economic globalization. By establishing continental economic networks, the peripheral parts of the Empire (like Britain) experienced a substantial distortion of local economies (e.g. growing corn & barley to feed distant Romans rather than grains and livestock for the locals).

There was also the importation of substantial technological, artistic, administrative, and military skills (think intellectual property) from Mediterranean Roman culture. Those peripheral cultures could not afford to implement huge capital developments (aka foreign direct investment).

Anyone who can look at the 70 miles of Hadrian’s Wall, complete with elaborate ditches, stone walls, mile-forts, sectional fortresses, river bridges composed of solid multi-ton stone blocks, military roads, and shipping depots (in Newcastle) — and claim that the Celts were somehow on par — is flogging an agenda not a technological argument.

The Brits spent 1500 years just poaching the cut stone, brick and tile from Roman construction — literally ‘free money’ to them. British roads weren’t built to Roman standards til after 1750 (when British military engineers responded to the Rebellion of the 1740′s by excavating Roman roads for technical details and then proceeded with a road-building frenzy — often simply on top of the old Roman roadbeds in Scotland!).

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A Place for MexAmerica: Between the Border and the Wall

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

In A Place for MexAmerica: Between the Border and the Wall, Jim Bennet (The Anglosphere Challenge) makes an unusual recommendation — don’t build a fence at the border; fence off a portion of the US near the border:

In short, if we want a reformed Mexico, perhaps the best way to get it is to let it be built on our own soil — or at least a Zone that would have an extremely powerful demonstration effect for Mexico proper. We have seen that Mexicans working within Anglo-American legal systems, and in the American economy, have worked hard and enjoyed substantial success. Those who say we need a large supply of Mexican workers can move to the Zone and enjoy an almost unlimited supply thereof. Labor-intensive facilities such as nursing homes might find it a good place to locate — lots of sunshine, too. Want affordable domestic help? Move to the Zone. In the meantime, Mexicans working in the Zone have the full protection of American employment and labor law, which would apply in the Zone just as anywhere else.

If we could move all agriculture to New Mexico, maybe I could begin to take the idea seriously…

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The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Michael C. LaBarbera analyzes The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, starting with scaling:

  • The magnitude of surface tension forces is proportional to the wetted perimeter (a length); a water strider needs long feet, not big feet, to skate on the surface of a pond.
  • Adhesive forces are proportional to contact areas; geckos need broad, flat feet covered with millions of tiny setae to walk on the ceiling.
  • Gravitational or inertial forces are proportional to volume (assuming that density is constant); a bird that flies into a window may break its neck, but a fly that flies into a window will bounce without injury.

More:

The same dependence on different aspects of geometry holds for functional relationships. The forces that can be produced by a muscle or the strength of a bone are in each case proportional to their cross-sectional areas; the weight of an animal is proportional to its volume.

Physiological relationships are not exempt. The rate at which oxygen can be extracted from the air is proportional to the surface area of the lungs; the rate at which food is digested and absorbed to the surface area of the gut; the rate at which heat is lost to the surface area of the body: but the rate at which oxygen or food must be supplied or the rate at which heat is produced is proportional to the mass (i.e., volume) of the animal. If an animal performs well at any given size, size change alone implies that these related functions must change at different rates, since their underlying geometric bases change at different rates; if the animal is to be functional at the changed size, either functional relations must change or shape must change. Monster movies have extensively explored these scaling relationships, albeit usually incorrectly; knowing the true relationships often puts the entire movie into a new light.

It’s a lengthy piece. I’ll leave you with one passage on The Incredible Shrinking Man:

Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he’ll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he’ll have to drink a lot, too. We see him drink once in the movie — he dips his hand into a puddle and sips from his cupped palm. The image is unremarkable and natural, but unfortunately wrong for his dimensions: at his size surface tension becomes a force comparable to gravity. More likely, he’d immerse his hand in the pool and withdraw it coated with a drop of water the size of his head. When he put his lips to the drop, the surface tension would force the drop down his throat whether or not he chooses to swallow.

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Researchers identify "male warrior effect"

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Researchers identify a “male warrior effect” — which doesn’t seem very war-like at first:

In experiments with 300 university men and women students, Van Vugt and his team gave the volunteers small sums of money which they could either keep or invest in a common fund that would be doubled and equally divided. None of the students knew what the others were doing.

Both sexes cooperated in investing in the fund. But when the groups were told they were competing against other universities, the males were more eager to invest rather than keep their money while the number of women contributing remained the same.

“We all know males are more aggressive than females,” Van Vugt said, adding that co-operation is needed to establish institutions and governments and to wage wars.

“Male co-operation is a double-edged sword,” he added.

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Houdini’s Impossible Demonstration

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Massimo Polidoro explains Houdini’s Impossible Demonstration, which he made to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories — who, ironically, was a true believer in Spiritualism:

“Sir Arthur,” continued Houdini, “I want you to go out of the house, walk anywhere you like, as far as you like in any direction; then write a question or sentence on that piece of paper; put it back in your pocket and return to the house.”

Doyle obeyed, walking three blocks and turning a corner before he wrote upon the paper. When he returned Houdini invited him to take a spoon and remove the cork ball, which had been soaking in the white ink, then to touch the ball to the left side of the slate. The ball “stuck” there, seemingly of its own volition. Slowly, it began rolling across the surface of the slate, leaving a white track as it did so. As the ball rolled, it was seen to be spelling the words: “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin,” the very same words that Doyle had written. The guests were speechless.

Houdini then explained that it was all done with trickery, not psychic powers — but Doyle never believed him.

How it was done:

Berol had been performing for years, both in Europe and America, an act in which a ball dipped in ink would spell on an isolated board the words called out by members of the audience:

“Berol did this by switching a solid cork ball for one with an iron core. A magnet at the end of a rod, manipulated by an assistant concealed behind the board, caused the ball to adhere and move — apparently under its own power. After Berol retired, Houdini purchased the equipment. An assistant in the room adjacent to Houdini’s library had opened a small panel in the wall and extended the rod with a magnet through it. The ball on the slate had an iron center, of course.

“Ernst had not remembered that when Doyle returned to the room, after writing the words outdoors, Houdini had checked to make sure the slip of paper on which Doyle wrote was folded, then immediately returned it to his friend. Before doing so, the magician had switched slips. While Doyle was busy retrieving the ball from the inkwell and taking it to the board, Houdini read the words. His conversation cued his hidden assistant. Once the message had been written on the slate, Houdini asked Doyle for the folded slip to verify his words. He opened the blank paper, pretended to read from it, then switched it for the original as he returned the paper to his friend. Later, Houdini explained this switching process during his public lectures on fraudulent mediums.”

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How To Survive an EMP Attack

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

David Shenk looks at How To Survive an EMP Attack:

The nightmare scenario is this: A rogue nation like North Korea or a stateless terrorist like Bin Laden gets hold of a nuclear weapon and decides not to drive it into a large city but rather to launch it on a Scud-type missile straight into the atmosphere from a barge off the East Coast. With sufficient megatonnage and sufficient altitude, this single EMP attack could debilitate electrical and computer systems over half the United States, including the entire Eastern Seaboard. No one would be killed by the explosion itself, but tens of thousands could die quickly from electrical malfunctions in hospitals and elsewhere. And while no one can say for sure in advance, many think that the electrical grid could be disabled for months or even years. In an instant, the world’s superpower could become a candle-powered 19th-century museum.

Don’t try to compare this to an ordinary blackout, when an end is always in sight. You have to imagine a s t r e t c h b l a c k o u t—months or years. ATMs, computers, and cars would be parked indefinitely. Cash, bicycles, and bottled water would become the currency of the day. Bloggers would switch to pens and poster board. Families with emergency reserves of cash, food, water, medicine, etc. would be breathing a lot easier than the rest of us. Even when electricity returned, most hard drives would not: Only nonmagnetic backups (paper, CD-R, microfiche, etc.) and specially shielded hard drives would be sure to survive a massive EMP attack.

So, how to you prepare for such an attack?

Short of installing your own ethanol generator and shielding your entire house in lead, what can an individual do to prepare for an EMP or cyberattack? Less than you think. This is a case where we have to rely on the professional paranoids—the software wizards in anonymous Virginia and California office buildings who are devising defenses against all the clever electronic assaults they can imagine. Still, you can take a few precautions. Start with the same disaster kit you should already have handy for other emergencies: nonperishable food, water, flashlight, radio, batteries, medicine, cash (small bills), and so on. Now throw in a regular computer backup—ideally onto a nonmagnetic medium such as CD-R.

I’m not sure his advice is much help.

Posted in Ethanol, Technology, War | No Comments »

Why gigantic screens are the best computer upgrades ever

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Paul Boutin explains why gigantic screens are the best computer upgrades ever:

Prima donna software developers who get anything they want have traditionally awarded themselves second, third, and even fourth monitors. You could cite the industry studies that find increased productivity among multiple monitor users, or you could just accept the formula of computer graphics veteran Jon Peddie: “Can’t have too many pixels.” Besides, flat-panel displays have gotten so big and so cheap that you no longer need to cable together four screens. Just buy one big one. Thirty-inch mega-monitors first appeared two years ago for $3,300. Today, you can get one for $1,800 that puts more than 4 million pixels on one panel, equivalent to three or four 17-inch monitors or two HDTV screens. A 20-inch model with close to 2 million pixels is only $350.

Apple’s Web site flogs a third-party study by Pfeiffer Consulting that concludes 30-inch monitors aren’t a luxury. “When working on a computer, we lose much more time than we realize through user-interface manipulations,” Pfeiffer’s researchers wrote — even if we’re handling only e-mail and Web pages and not Photoshop. I dismissed the report as marketing collateral, but after a few weeks at my own widescreen I’ve reached the same conclusion — it’s surprising how much more work I crank out lately. Co-workers praise my newfound motivation. The truth is, I can finally see what I’m doing.

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Dem’s Middle-Class Problem

Friday, September 8th, 2006

The Dem’s Middle-Class Problem is that they don’t know how to get middle-class votes:

Democrats tell themselves bedtime stories about why this is so, including the thesis advanced by Thomas Frank, author of What’s Wrong With Kansas?, that middle-class voters get lured into voting against their own economic interests by the GOP cultural message; or the argument that Republicans scare the middle class out of voting its bread-and-butter concerns with the issue of national security.

The evidence suggests, to the contrary, that what’s “wrong” with Kansas is that it doesn’t buy the Democrats’ economic message. Kim and Kessler define the middle class as voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000. Kerry lost it by 6 points, and by an astonishing 22 points among the white voters who “represent one-third of the voting population and three-fourths of the middle class.” The tipping point at which a white voter became more likely to vote in a congressional race for a Republican over a Democrat was $23,700 — “not that far above the poverty line.”

In 2000, national security didn’t loom large, but Al Gore still lost the middle class by 2 points and the white middle class by 15 points. In 1996, when Bill Clinton had defused hot-button issues by signing welfare-reform and tough-on-crime initiatives, congressional Democrats still lost middle-class and white-middle-class voters by 3 points and 12 points, respectively. It was in that year that Bill Clinton had the best Democratic performance among middle-class voters in three decades by winning them by a mere one point.

For the Democrats, the Dust Bowl is ever-blowing. Their economic message is perpetually premised on pessimism and decline (John Kerry: “Our great middle class is shrinking.”), together with promises of economic security and the flaying of big business (Al Gore: “Powerful interests stand in your way.”). None of this resonates with a public that knows it lives in a rich, wide-open country.

How does the Democratic message fall flat? Kim and Kessler count the ways. The public doesn’t buy heedless pessimism; 80 percent believe it is “still possible to start out poor in this country, work hard and become rich.” It prefers opportunity over economic security; only about a quarter of Americans say that they prefer a low-income, high-security job. It doesn’t like corporation-bashing; only 27 percent say big business is the biggest threat to America’s future, compared with 61 percent who say big government is.

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Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Donald Boudreaux explains that most Americans are living Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous; they just don’t realize it:

My listeners think me mad. “I’m middle-class, not rich” surely is what most of think to themselves. And they’re right about being middle-class — but they don’t realize that to be middle-class in America today means to be superrich by historical standards.

Here’s a small sample of the many ways in which ordinary Americans today are Bill-Gates-like rich compared to almost all humans who’ve ever lived:

  • None of us has ever starved to death
  • We have indoor plumbing and artificial light
  • We bathe regularly
  • We have solid roofs over our heads, rather than bug-and-vermin-infested thatched roofs
  • We routinely converse in real time to people one mile or one thousand miles away
  • We don’t get smallpox
  • Our life expectancy is decades longer

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Deep thinkers

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

Dolphins can be deep thinkers:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

It gets better:

Dolphins have invented a range of feeding strategies that more than match the diversity of habitats in which they live. In an estuary off the coast of Brazil, tucuxi dolphins are regularly seen capturing fish by “tail whacking”. They flick a fish up to 9 metres with their tail flukes and then pick the stunned prey from the water surface. Peale’s dolphins in the Straits of Magellan off Patagonia forage in kelp beds, use the seaweed to disguise their approach and cut off the fishes’ escape route. In Galveston Bay, Texas, certain female bottlenose dolphins and their young follow shrimp boats. The dolphins swim into the shrimp nets to take live fish and then wriggle out again – a skill requiring expertise to avoid entanglement in the fishing nets.

Dolphins can also use tools to solve problems. Scientists have observed a dolphin coaxing a reluctant moray eel out of its crevice by killing a scorpion fish and using its spiny body to poke at the eel. Off the western coast of Australia, bottlenose dolphins place sponges over their snouts, which protects them from the spines of stonefish and stingrays as they forage over shallow seabeds.

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How to survive a disaster

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

David Shenk explains how to survive a disaster — like a nuclear attack:

You will survive. Get those images of Jason Robards in The Day After out of your head. This is not that. We’re not talking here about multiple-entry 20-megaton warheads wiping whole cities off the map in seconds. A single terrorist nuke, more likely in the 5- to 10-kiloton range (Hiroshima was 12 kilotons), will kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in any big city but spare the rest. In New York, that will leave about 7.5 million of us to sort through the carnage.

He notes that “many survivors of the blast would quickly find themselves in an eerie simulation of every political satirist’s favorite film, Duck and Cover:

What in the 1950s came across as a laughably reassuring response to an overwhelming threat turns out to be surprisingly coherent practical advice for the urban 21st century. Because you are unlikely to be able to outrun the radioactive fallout, the best option in any city would most likely be to immediately find refuge under a thick physical barrier and to remain there for at least a few days. That barrier is your best defense against tiny particles and penetrating rays. Basements are best, followed by interior rooms with no windows. If you are in a tall tower, it’s probably best to be on a midlevel floor, in a room close to the center of the building with no windows. You will need to stay there for several days at least, so your temporary shelter should be prestocked with food, water, radio, flashlights, and a makeshift toilet. Ideally, radio messages would begin soon after the explosion to instruct people about the nature and direction of the fallout and whether and how to evacuate. (Those interested in more thorough preparation can go here.)

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The Supersonic Future

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Outdated visions of the future are always fun. Enjoy this 1975 commercial for Braniff Airways, The Supersonic Future.

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Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

From Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe:

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

And while games stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980’s.

Making money off software in Asia has its own challenges:

One of the main reasons Western software companies of all kinds have had difficulty in Asia is that piracy is still rampant across the region. Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly.

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