Al Q. has collected some beautiful Engravings from St. Nicholas Magazine, a children’s magazine created in 1873.
(Hat tip to Drawn!)
Engravings from St. Nicholas Magazine
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007In The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged, Joseph Giglio explains that congestion pricing — charging to use roads at rush hour, when they’re busiest — is not a liberal policy but a conservative one:
This [Communist] approach is the way we’ve always allocated access to most roadways in capitalist America — access is “free,” just like for a public park. But our real cost skyrockets when we consider the time we spend crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and with no option to pay extra for a faster trip.And even without factoring in the cost of time frittered away listening to satellite radio, highways have never really been “free,” but subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Congestion pricing is not a tax increase, but a user fee, which, conservatives agree, is a better way to divide costs. Indeed, economists across the political spectrum have long waxed enthusiastic about the superior logic of levying market-based prices for access to roadways; but until recently it remained little more than an interesting classroom concept since there was no practical way to charge motorists directly.
The advent of Electronic Toll Collection technology changed all this. Now we can charge motorists for using roadways without forcing them to stop at toll-booths, or even slow down.
Fight Artillery Duels in Fascinating War Games
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007
The December, 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine showed kids how to Fight Artillery Duels in Fascinating War Games — if they assembled all the extremely complex components:
The “explosive” targets, which fly to pieces when hit, are shown in Figs. 4 and 7, and the photographs. The construction can be easily understood from the photo, Fig. 3. They “explode” when a shot strikes from above and causes them to bend down slightly at the canvas hinge. The rubber band snaps the two sides up into a “V” shape throwing the turrets, fort, cannon, etc., into the air.The sensitivity of the exploding mechanism may be adjusted by changing the angle which the two sides make at the hinge. Leather, cloth or canvas may be used for the hinge. The bottoms of the battleships are smoothed so they may be pulled over the carpet or floor if desired by the small clock works tractor to be described below. The parts of the ship and fort are not fastened together except where indicated, in order that they may fly to pieces when struck by a shell.
Stick-to-it-iveness
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007Americans lack Stick-to-it-iveness:
Currently, about 10 percent of new cars in the United States have manual transmissions, and this market share has been declining for decades. By contrast, some 85 percent of cars sold in Europe are manual, and throughout much of the world what was traditionally called the “standard” transmission remains in fact the standard.
When I first heard that stat years ago, I was shocked that the US percentage was so low.
California Split
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
In California Split, Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, asserts that America must divide or die:
Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale.
Showtime’s Reality Check
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007In Showtime’s Reality Check, Jake Rossen discusses the controversial ending to the Frank Shamrock–Renzo Gracie fight — but he starts with a point on the game theory of fight rules:
Here’s the thing about real fights: they can be a real pain in the ass to promote.A hundred years ago, legitimate wrestlers would roll and twist on a mat for hours in an attempt to snag a submission. When organizers realized the stalemates were driving away spectators, they started choreographing bouts. Evolution of that particular strategy eventually brought us Hulk Hogan and folded steel chairs to the cranium. (Lucky us.)
In 2007, there seems to be equal fretting over the grappling component of mixed martial arts.
Leave two men on the mat for too long without any action, and the crowd begins to get restless, their jeers fueled by high ticket prices and cheap beer. The referee, pressured by the mob, the athletic commission, and the promoters, stands up the athletes to resume their C-level kickboxing contest. This is likely beneficial to the fighter who was on the bottom, since he knows that by simply hanging on instead of engaging, he’s destined to get back to where he feels most comfortable.
Believe it: the rule designed to discourage apathy on the ground actually encourages it.
There is clearly something wrong with the system here.
Dumbing down evolution to kill it
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007I didn’t realize that yesterday was Darwin’s birthday, but Edward Humes did, and he wrote Dumbing down evolution to kill it to discuss the theory of evolution — or the two theories of evolution:
There are really two theories of evolution. There is the genuine scientific theory, and there is the talk-radio pretend version, designed not to enlighten but to deceive and enrage.The talk-radio version had a packed town hall up in arms at the “Why Evolution Is Stupid” lecture. In this version of the theory, scientists supposedly believe that all life is accidental, a random crash of molecules that magically produced flowers, horses and humans — a scenario as unlikely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747. Humans come from monkeys in this theory, just popping into existence one day. The evidence against Darwin is overwhelming, the purveyors of talk-radio evolution rail, yet scientists embrace his ideas because they want to promote atheism.
In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert, as farmers start to nurture, rather than clear, saplings — for a reason any economist would understand:
Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country nearly twice the size of Texas.But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them.
Top Gear
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007Watch Top Gear in Alabama if you’d like to see what happens when three British car show hosts paint up each other’s cars to be as offensive as possible to the locals in the American deep south.
Here’s a hint:
“You all gay, seeing how long it takes to get beat up in a hick town?”
Straight Out of Ong Bak
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007Before fighting in UFC, Anderson Silva fought in the UK in a promotion called Cage Rage, where he defeated Tony Fryklund with a move “straight out of Ong Bak,” as the announcer put it.
Enjoy watching this Unique KO.
(Incidentally, there are a lot of scenes from Ong Bak on YouTube.)
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids
Monday, February 12th, 2007The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids:
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
Mini helicopter masters insect navigation trick
Monday, February 12th, 2007
Mini helicopter masters insect navigation trick:
As insects fly forwards the ground beneath them sweeps backwards through their field of view. This “optical flow” is thought to provide crucial cues about speed and height. For example, the higher an insect’s altitude, the slower the optical flow; the faster it flies, the faster the optical flow.Previous experiments involving bees suggest that optical flow is crucial to landing. Maintaining a constant optical flow while descending should provide a constant height-to-groundspeed ratio, which makes a bee slowdown as it approaches the ground. Distorting this optical flow can cause them to crash land instead.
Now Nicolas Franceschini at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles, France, and colleagues have shown the same technique may explain more general flying behaviours.
They fitted a miniature helicopter with a simple software feedback loop to ensure that optical flow remains constant as it flies along. This allowed the tethered micro-copter to take off gracefully, maintain altitude over varying terrain and land, all without any means of directly measuring its speed or height. A video produced by the researchers shows the micro-copter in action (43.7 MB .avi format, requires DivX).
Who’s Your Go Daddy?
Sunday, February 11th, 2007Who’s Your Go Daddy? looks at Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons:
When Parsons was doing the pre-IPO dance with Wall Street, he was repeatedly asked if his call center would “scale.”“I said, ‘What do you mean, scale?’” Parsons recalls. He disagreed with investment bankers’ suggestions that, among other things, he should keep headcount low even as he grows. “People think that because we’re an Internet company, we should be less people-intensive. I believe the exact opposite. When it comes to the Internet, people like dealing with people.”
Which is why Parsons has worked so hard to give Go Daddy a personality that, like it or not, sells. Parsons alone, for instance, decided to plaster the Go Daddy name on Michelle’s chest in the 2005 Super Bowl ad. And for the 2006 Super Bowl, he recut the commercial, featuring Michelle appealing to an arbiter of TV decency standards, 13 times before winning approval from ABC — each time taming it down, and each time watching business climb after news reports revealed that he was having to pull back to placate censors. Says Tucows’s Noss, “He played that thing like a maestro.”
For proof, consider this: There are now 860 ICANN-accredited domain-name registrars. Other than Go Daddy, how many can you name?
How Not to Do It
Sunday, February 11th, 2007In How Not to Do It, Theodore Dalrymple reviews three books on the incompetence of Britain’s government:
Insight into why expensive failure is so vitally necessary to the British government — or indeed, to any government once it arrogates responsibility for almost everything, from the national diet to the way people think — glimmers out from management consultant David Craig’s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to “modernize” the public administration. For example, not a single large-scale information technology project instituted by the government has worked. The National Health Service has spent $60 billion on a unified information technology system, no part of which actually functions. Projects routinely get canceled after $400–$500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain’s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.How is this to be explained? I learned a very good lesson when, 20 years ago, I worked in Tanzania. This well-endowed and beautiful country was broken-down and economically destitute to a shocking degree. A shard of mirror was a treasured possession; a day’s wages bought a man one egg on the open market. It was quicker to go to Europe than to telephone it. Nothing, not even the most basic commodity such as soap or salt, was available to most of the population.
At first I considered that the president, Julius Nyerere, who was so revered in “progressive” circles as being halfway between Jesus Christ and Mao Tse Tung, was a total incompetent. How could he reconcile the state of the country with his rhetoric of economic development and prosperity for everyone? Had he no eyes to see, no ears to hear?
But then the thought dawned on me, admittedly with embarrassing slowness, that a man who had been in power virtually unopposed for nearly a quarter of a century could not be called incompetent, once one abandons the preposterous premise that he was trying to achieve what he said he was trying to achieve. As a means of remaining in power, what method could be better than to have an all-powerful single political party distribute economic favors in conditions of general shortage? That explained how, and why, in a country of the involuntarily slender, the party officials were fat. This was not incompetence; it was competence of a very high order. Unfortunately, it was very bad for the population as a whole.
Slaughterhouse
Sunday, February 11th, 2007In Slaughterhouse, Adam Gopnik reviews David Bell’s The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It, which looks at, among other things, the Spanish guerrilla, or little war:
In fact, the Peninsula was the original intractable insurgency, which, in turn, shaped the modern model of counter-insurgency, and Bell doesn’t hesitate to draw parallels between our time and then: “Spain saw the development of a guerrilla war every bit as destructive as — and eerily similar to — the insurgency now under way in early-twenty-first-century Iraq,” he writes. Napoleon’s armies had taken Iberia at a time when it was not unlike the Middle East now: a culturally impoverished backwater, once grand but fallen on hard times, with a brutal, decadent ruling class and a fanatic clerical class, sandwiching a handful of liberals who at first welcomed the invading armies and went to work for them. In the beginning, Napoleon’s revolutionary army promised Spain reform and even democratic enlightenment. But, in short order, the insurgency grew, until the occupation of Iberia by the French became untenable; we see the nature of the insurgency, and its human consequences for victor and vanquished, in Goya’s series of etchings “The Disasters of War.”