“In the career mode, you can rise from playing in park gazebos for church picnics to performing in the halftime show of the Harvard-Yale game,” Hendleman said. “If you score enough points, you can unlock the ultimate level: playing in the John Philip Sousa–led Marine Band at Grover Cleveland’s inauguration.”
“And if you like multiplayer gaming, you’re in luck,” Hendleman continued. “In Sousaphone Hero‘s cooperative marching-band mode, as many as 135 of your friends can play simultaneously.”
Flight of the Conchords can be uneven, but, as someone who studied French in high school, I absolutely loved “Foux Da Fa Fa”:
While “Foux Da Fa Fa” sounds like a stereotypical 1960s French pop song, “A Kiss is Not A Contract” clearly borrows quite explicitly from the old-school video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson (about 45 seconds in):
(Edit: The original YouTube video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson that I embedded is no longer available, and other versions, like this one, aren’t embeddable — by those of us who lack Serge’s certain je ne sais quoi, at least.)
When I first listened to “Foux Da Fa Fa,” I missed a few of the lyrics, so I looked them up. Unfortunately, HBO does not provide the French lyrics with accents. Of course, they’re not really in correct French to start with, either. As a public service, I’ve added the accents, fixed a few spelling and grammar errors, and provided a rough English translation:
Foux da Fa Fa(with English translation)
Je voudrais une un croissant (I would like a crescent roll)
Je suis enchanté (I am enchanted/delighted [to meet you])
Où est le la bibliotheque? (Where is the library?)
Voilà mon passeport (Here/there is my passport)
Ah, Gérard Depardieu (Ah, Gerard Depardieu [a famous French actor]) Un Une baguette, ah ha ha, oh oh oh oh (a loaf of French bread)
Ba Ba ba-ba Bow! (Ba ba ba-ba bow [gibberish])
Foux da fa fa (Foux da fa fa [no, it doesn't mean anything])
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Et maintenant le voyage à la supermarché! (And now the trip to the supermarket!)
Le pamplemousse (Grapefruit)
Ananas (Pineapple)
Jus d’orange (Orange juice)
Boeuf (Beef) Soup Soupe du jour (Soup of the day)
Le camembert (Camembert [cheese]) Jacque Jacques Cousteau (Jacques Cousteau [the undersea explorer])
Baguette (Loaf of French bread)
Mais oui (But yes/of course)
Bonjour (Hello/good day)
Bonjour
Bonjour
Bonjour, monsieur (Good day, sir)
Bonjour mon petit bureau de change (Hello, my little foreign exchange)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Voilà – le la conversation a la au parc. (Look, conversation at the park)
Où est le livre? (Where is the book?)
À la bibliotheque (At the library)
Et le la musique dance danse? (And the dance music?) Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub) Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
C’est ci, baby! (This is it, baby!)
Un, deux, trois, quatre (One, two, three, four)
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
Pardon moi? (Excuse me?)
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
…Uh…
Splish splash
…Uh…
Eh…
Je ne comprends pas. (I don’t understand.)
Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Eh?
Eh? Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Uh ….No.
Hmmm.
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
“Foux Da Fa Fa” won’t be on the new Flight of the Conchords EP, The Distant Future, but “Robots” obviously will.
I can’t believe I haven’t heard of the Pleo before. It’s Alive! — or it seems alive, because it moves like it’s alive:
What gives Pleo its emotional hooks and makes it seem so much like a sentient pet is how it moves. Chung has managed to faithfully capture graceful, animal-like locomotion. There is none of the jerky machinelike quality that mars most bots. “Nobody has ever done that,” Chung says. “They’ve spent $2 million and a year trying to get their robot dog to walk, and it’s still like this,” he adds, suddenly twisting his body into a scarily accurate imitation of a stiff-limbed automaton.
“It’s like, ‘Look at me! I’m a robot! I’ve got gears and motors inside me! Zzzzt! Zzzzzt!‘” Then, for good measure, Chung breaks into a disco “robot” dance, and the programmers clustered around Pleo start chuckling. That’s when I realize I’m looking at Ugobe’s secret weapon: Chung’s uncanny physicality.
Because how do you create the first robot that seems like it’s truly alive? By starting with an inventor who knows how to move.
Chung began his career as a mime. In his early twenties, teaming up with comedian Gary Schwartz, he performed everywhere from cruise ships to The Alan Thicke Show. A short, tightly muscled guy, Chung was famous for pulling off Cirque du Soleil-type feats. In one act, he pretended to be an astronaut lifting off into orbit: While seated on a chair, he slowly raised himself up by his hands, inverted his body, and rose into a handstand.
“He looked like he was floating in space,” Schwartz says. “He blew people’s minds.” Enamored of special effects and handy with tools, Chung made a sword out of spare sofa parts and duct tape – then used it as a calling card to break into stunt work. Being short and trained as a mime got him inside high tech movie costumes, including an orangutan suit for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. To the studios, he was a double threat: He could perform like a monkey and then fix the robots when they broke.
“What I learned from all the mime work and the suit work is that motion creates emotion,” Chung says. “How you stand, how you move, is a big communicator. We take it for granted, but it’s crucial to what makes us seem ‘normal’ to each other, right?”
OK, so he was a mime. How did he end up making toys?
In the mid ’80s, he left Hollywood to work in the R&D division of Mattel – “toy college for me,” he says. It was not a felicitous match. Mattel wanted him to crank out action figures from popular movies; Chung wanted to produce art. He posted a sign over his cubicle that proclaimed these things are not toys and began dreaming of making a robot so realistic that people would treat it like a household pet. His earliest sketches were of dinosaurs.
“They have this long neck and tail; they’re very expressive,” he explains. “Plus, all the people that don’t even like toys are going to say, ‘Cool dinosaur.’” He made a rickety prototype by repurposing a toy originally designed as a He-Man accessory. Mattel executives were intrigued – but recoiled when they discovered it would need eight motors; those cost $1 apiece, and a $30 toy couldn’t include more than one or two. He told them they should build it and charge more. They told him he was crazy and killed the project.
Disillusioned, Chung later left Mattel and went freelance, devising and selling inventions, like an “action man” and an automatic hair-curler. But he still hankered to develop a virtual pet, and in 1997 he brainstormed an idea with David Hampton, a programmer friend. They called it Furball: a tiny, tribblelike thing that would have eyes, ears, and a mouth – just enough to create the illusion of sentience (“the simplest haiku of a life-form you could get,” as Chung puts it). To keep it from being too expensive, Chung worked out a cunning set of gears that would drive the entire toy using a single motor. Tiger Electronics loved the concept and commissioned it.
Everyone knows how the story ended: Furby came out in 1998, and holiday consumers went berserk, buying $1.2 billion worth of the $30 toy. Chung made more than $10 million in royalties. He now had the freedom and money to do precisely what he wanted.
Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires — nose-to-the-grindstone people like Mr. Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few. Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry most people living paycheck to paycheck.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more.
When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.
“Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” said Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating service. “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Mr. Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. So he logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.
“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.
Sad — but that attitude fuels an engine of creation.
Kevin Fox is a disciple of Eli Goldratt (The Goal) and an expert on his theory of constraints. As a young consultant he devised his Blue Light heuristic as a way to spot opportunities to create extra capacity on the plant floor:
The plant produces heavy metal bumpers for semi-trucks, and they had a major bottleneck in their welding department. Orders were backed up, and they were running at capacity around the clock seven days a week. The space in the plant was already tight, and they had plans to expand the building to add room for 3 more welding bays, doubling the current capacity.
The plant manager informed me early on that they were running at 93% efficiency in the department, basically telling me there was no room for me to help them improve. It was my experience that there was always at least 25% more capacity that could be exposed in any plant. Moreover, I was young and brash enough to tell this 30-year manufacturing veteran this and that sight unseen it was true in his operation too. He must have thought my math skills were pretty bad because he reiterated that they were already at 93% efficiency, so this wasn’t possible.
I wasn’t fazed and finally convinced him to take me out to at least look at the welding operation, since I had driven out to see them. Whenever I go out to look at an operation I had made the habit of formulating in my mind a simple picture or image of “what good looks like.” In other words, what you would expect to see if an operation really was working to its maximum performance capability. As I am a completely non-technical person the image I put in my head as we walked onto the shop-floor was “blue light”.
I was pretty sure that if the welding torch wasn’t turned on, emitting its funky blue light, that the welders couldn’t be welding anything. So I decided to look first for how much of the time there was blue light coming from each of the three welding stations. (Yes I know that even this is not yet the indicator of optimal performance, but as you will see, it was way more than good enough in this case.)
When we got to the welding area we watched for a few minutes quietly. The first thing I saw was one welder turning off his torch, taking off his protective gear and walking over to his buddy in the next booth. He waited until he got his attention and then he too stopped and took off his gear. Together they went back to the first guy’s booth and lifted the heavy finished bumper off the welding table and onto a pallet, and then put a new un-welded one from the queue onto the welding table. The other welder went back to his booth.
I then watched the first welder begin to peel the protective plastic coating off the bumper in the places he had to weld. It took a good bit of time picking with his fingernails to get it done. Then he grabbed the parts and clamped the onto the bumper, put on his gear and welder for no more than 30 seconds. before he was done. I looked at my watch, we had been there almost 5 minutes and he had welded for 30 seconds of it.
Meanwhile another welder had just returned to his empty booth pushing a trolley, which he used to jack up and move his finished pallet to the next operation. He returned after several more minutes and consulted his schedule to see what job was next for him to do. Of course it turned out to be the skid of bumpers located against the wall blocked in by two other skids he had to move. After finding the right skid he moved the two other pallets out, got his to his booth and then moved the other two back out of the aisle. All this time zero blue light.
He disappeared again with the trolley to go and get the parts he had to weld onto the bumpers from the store room, returning only several minutes later with them. Meanwhile the other two welders had repeated several times over the two-man bumper lifting dance described above. Just from this casual observation I estimated that the “blue light time” couldn’t have been more than 10% and was probably far lower.
As I watched all I could think about was “wow, did I sand bag this guy” (meaning the plant manager), I told him 25% more capacity. I missed it by one or two ZEROES! Just about then the plant manager turned to me and said something I have never forgotten. He said, “you see, they’re busy all of the time!” And he was right, the guys were working all of the time and working steadily and hard at that.
What amazed me is how the two of us could be looking at exactly the same things and see it entirely different. He had in his head an assumption of what good looked like that was based on the people being busy, whereas I looked at it from the perspective of the operation and the work it did, the blue light. His perspective totally blocked him from seeing any solution other than adding people, which was going to require him to invest in expanding the plant and worse still take months to implement during which they would anger more customers and lose hunderds of thousands in potential profits.
To make an already long story a little shorter, we ultimately brought them to implement a very simple solution. They had a summer worker in another department (a non-constraint area of course) who knew nothing about welding, that they moved into the department to be the “helper” for the welders. We gave him a simple image to know if he was doing a good job. We told him we wanted to see more and more blue light from the welders’ torches. His job was to lift bumpers with the welder, move pallets of bumpers around, stage the next jobs for each welder, and get all of the parts they needed ready for them. If he had extra time after this (which it turned out he did) he was to peel the plastic for the welder, and do anything else that would generate more blue light time.
In less than three weeks they had totally cleared the area of work-in-process. This big backlog shipped out along with the on-going flow that was coming to welding, producing a record shipping month. I don’t know how much capacity was actually created but it was more than enough to break the bottleneck, and if more had been needed it could have been generated just as easily.
What limits us as individuals and as organizations are the assumptions we hold, and are failure to recognize them as just that “assumptions” and not facts.
In the latest draft of his upcoming book, Cambridge physics professor David MacKay discusses Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air — and shares his “back of the envelope” calculations:
I’m concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle — twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone claims to be concerned, and everyone is encouraged to ‘make a difference’, but many of the things that allegedly make a difference don’t add up.
Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind or nuclear) and no-one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they choose them selectively to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.
This is a book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to policies and actions that really will make a difference.
Definitely give it a look — and realize that those consumption numbers far undershoot American consumption.
Starting in 1914, the Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company built and operated a fleet of nearly 100 electric cabs. Customers would often wait for a smoother, cleaner, more tasteful electric cab, even when a gas-powered cab was already on station.
At the turn of the 20th century, quiet, smooth, pollution-free electric cars were a common sight on the streets of major American cities. Women especially favored them over steam- and gasoline-powered cars.
In an era in which gasoline-powered automobiles were noisy, smelly, greasy and problematic to start, electric cars, like Jay Leno’s restored 1909 Baker Electric Coupe, represented a form of women’s liberation. Well-dressed society women could simply drive to lunch, to shop, or to visit friends without fear of soiling their gloves, mussing their hair or setting their highly combustible crinoline dresses on fire.
“These were women’s shopping cars,” said Mr. Leno, who is a serious hands-on collector of autos and motorcycles dating from the 1800s to the present. “There was no gas or oil, no fire, no explosions — you just sort of got in and you went. There were thousands of these in New York, from about 1905 to 1915. There were charging stations all over town, so ladies could recharge their cars while they were in the stores.”
Leno had a lot to say about the Tesla roadster too.
Altruism, according to the text books, has two forms. One is known technically as kin selection, and familiarly as nepotism. This spreads an individual’s genes collaterally, rather than directly, but is otherwise similar to his helping his own offspring. The second form is reciprocal altruism, or “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. It relies on trust, and a good memory for favours given and received, but is otherwise not much different from simultaneous collaboration (such as a wolf pack hunting) in that the benefit exceeds the cost for all parties involved.
Humans, however, show a third sort of altruism—one that has no obvious pay-off. This is altruism towards strangers, for example, charity. That may enhance reputation. But how does an enhanced reputation weigh in the Darwinian balance?
To investigate this question, the researchers made an interesting link. At first sight, helping charities looks to be at the opposite end of the selfishness spectrum from conspicuous consumption. Yet they have something in common: both involve the profligate deployment of resources.
That is characteristic of the consequences of sexual selection. An individual shows he (or she) has resources to burn—whether those are biochemical reserves, time or, in the human instance, money—by using them to make costly signals. That demonstrates underlying fitness of the sort favoured by evolution. Viewed this way, both conspicuous consumption and what the researchers call “blatant benevolence” are costly signals. And since they are behaviours rather than structures, and thus controlled by the brain, they may be part of the mating mind.
There is, of course, a lot of evidence for the first part of this conjecture. Everybody knows that fast cars attract fast women. The second, though, may come as a surprise. So the team did an experiment to compare them.
They divided a bunch of volunteers into two groups. Those in one were put into what the researchers hoped would be a “romantic mindset” by being shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex. They were each asked to write a description of a perfect date with one of these people. The unlucky members of the other group were shown pictures of buildings and told to write about the weather.
The participants were then asked two things. The first was to imagine they had $5,000 in the bank. They could spend part or all of it on various luxury items such as a new car, a dinner party at a restaurant or a holiday in Europe. They were also asked what fraction of a hypothetical 60 hours of leisure time during the course of a month they would devote to volunteer work.
The results were just what the researchers hoped for. In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money. Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away. Those women continued, however, to be skinflints, and the men remained callously indifferent to those less fortunate than themselves. Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works. Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off. Moreover, they do not waste their resources by behaving like that all the time. Only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful.
Pervitin, a stimulant commonly known as speed today, was the German army’s — the Wehrmacht’s — wonder drug. [...] During the short period between April and July of 1940, more than 35 million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan (a slightly modified version produced by the Knoll pharmaceutical company) were shipped to the German army and air force. Some of the tablets, each containing three milligrams of active substance, were sent to the Wehrmacht’s medical divisions under the code name OBM, and then distributed directly to the troops. A rush order could even be placed by telephone if a shipment was urgently needed. The packages were labeled “Stimulant,” and the instructions recommended a dose of one to two tablets “only as needed, to maintain sleeplessness.” [...] The effects were seductive. In January 1942, a group of 500 German soldiers stationed on the eastern front and surrounded by the Red Army were attempting to escape. The temperature was minus 30 degrees Celsius. A military doctor assigned to the unit wrote in his report that at around midnight, six hours into their escape through snow that was waist-deep in places, “more and more soldiers were so exhausted that they were beginning to simply lie down in the snow.” The group’s commanding officers decided to give Pervitin to their troops. “After half an hour,” the doctor wrote, “the men began spontaneously reporting that they felt better. They began marching in orderly fashion again, their spirits improved, and they became more alert.”
I was under the impression that amphetamines were used on a smaller, experimental scale.
The fifth of six children, Mr. Slim was born wealthy. His father, Julian Slim, made his fortune on a general store in downtown Mexico City called “The Orient Star.” His father died when Mr. Slim was only 13.
Early on, Mr. Slim showed an aptitude for numbers that would help his career. He taught algebra at Mexico’s largest public university while finishing his thesis, titled “Applications of Linear Theory in Civil Engineering.” His love of numbers also drew him to baseball, a lifelong hobby. “In baseball…numbers talk,” he once wrote. Even today, he enjoys discussing baseball, telling a reporter that slugger Barry Bonds should be remembered more for his walk ratio than his home runs.
After college, Mr. Slim and some friends became stockbrokers in the country’s fledgling market. Trading by day and playing dominoes by night, the clique became known as “Los Casabolseros,” or “The Stock Market Boys.” Despite the success, friends say Mr. Slim, less of a party boy and more private than the rest, wanted to run companies rather than trade. “He never liked money as much as the rest of us. He just wanted to be a good businessman,” says Enrique Trigueros, one of the casabolseros.
Mr. Slim soon got his chance. After turning around a soft-drink company and a printing firm in the late 1960s and mid 1970s, he made his first big move in 1981, buying a big stake in Mexico’s second-biggest tobacco company, Cigatam, maker of Marlboro cigarettes in Mexico. The company generated the cash Mr. Slim needed to go on a buying spree.
A good time to buy came in 1982, a year that would shape Mr. Slim’s destiny. That year, the collapsing price of oil threw Mexico into a tailspin. When departing president José López Portillo nationalized Mexico’s banks, the traditional business elite feared the country was becoming socialist, and ran for the exits. Companies were selling for as little as 5% of their book value. Mr. Slim picked up dozens of leading firms for bargain-basement prices, a move that paid off when the economy recovered in the following years. He bought Mexico’s largest insurer, Seguros de México, for $44 million. Today, the company is worth at least $2.5 billion.
“Countries don’t go broke,” an unflappable Mr. Slim told friends at the time. Indeed, Mr. Slim always says his inspiration to invest during the downturn came from his father, who bought out his partner in their general store during the worst days of the 1910-1917 Mexican revolution — a bet that made his father a fortune when the fighting ended.
Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world’s annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment.
A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.
But there are downsides:
A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Also, rocks tapped by drilling would lose their heat after a few decades and new wells would have to be drilled elsewhere.
In Chicken of the Sea, Steven Shaw points out the silliness of many dietary rules for pregnant women:
When my wife was pregnant with our son, her obstetrician gave her a list of food dos and don’ts. Chief among the don’ts: alcohol, unpasteurized cheeses and raw fish. Meanwhile, every French mother I know consumed alcohol and unpasteurized cheese in moderation during her pregnancy, and my friends in Japan laugh at the notion of avoiding sushi when they’re expecting.
Indeed, in Japan, eating raw fish is considered part of good neonatal nutrition. The Japanese government is fanatical about public health, and Japanese medical scientists are among the best in the world. You can be sure that, were there documented complications resulting from pregnant women eating sushi in Japan, there would be swift government intervention. Yet, in the United States, it is taboo for a pregnant woman to eat raw fish.
But this isn’t because scientific research has concluded that unborn children have been damaged by sushi. Rather, it’s because the speculative risk of food-borne illnesses, especially parasites, has captured the public imagination.
There are several reasons, however, that these fears are unfounded.
While Americans tend to associate raw fish with sushi and Japan, we have been eating raw seafood for centuries — namely, oysters and clams. And it is these raw mollusks, not the fish typically used in sushi, that are responsible for the overwhelming majority, about 85 percent, of seafood-related illnesses. As the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine concluded in a 1991 report on illness from eating seafood: “Most seafood-associated illness is reported from consumers of raw bivalve mollusks. …The majority of incidents are due to consumption of shellfish from fecally polluted water.”
If you take raw and partly cooked shellfish out of the equation, the risk of falling ill from eating seafood is 1 in 2 million servings, the government calculated some years back; by comparison, the risk from eating chicken is 1 in 25,000. (Over all, 76 million cases of food poisoning are reported a year.)
This week’s episode of Flight of the Conchords was fairly weak, but Murray’s first music video, “Leggie Blonde,” more than made up for the rest of the episode.
Last week’s episode was stronger — especially for any Bowie fans out there. I love Jemaine’s imitation of “1972 David Bowie from the Ziggy Stardust tour”:
BusinessWeek notes that The Pet Economy amounts to $41 billion a year:
That’s double the amount shelled out on pets a decade ago, with annual spending expected to hit $52 billion in the next two years, according to Packaged Facts, a consumer research company based in Rockville, Md. That puts the yearly cost of buying, feeding, and caring for pets in excess of what Americans spend on the movies ($10.8 billion), playing video games ($11.6 billion), and listening to recorded music ($10.6 billion) combined.
“People are no longer satisfied to reward their pet in pet terms,” argues Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Products Manufacturers Assn. “They want to reward their pet in human terms.” That means hotels instead of kennels, braces to fix crooked teeth, and frilly canine ball gowns.
I did not realize this:
APPMA reports that 42% of dogs now sleep in the same bed as their owners, up from 34% in 1998.
Or this:
About 77% of dogs and 52% of cats have been medicated in the past year, according to APPMA, an increase of about 20 percentage points from 1996. [...] Americans now spend $9.8 billion a year on vet services. That doesn’t include the over-the-counter drugs and other supplies, which add $9.9 billion in costs.
I can only imagine what people in the less-developed world must be thinking:
As many as 40% of dogs are estimated to be overweight or obese, with similarly high rates among cats, thanks to the indulgent habits of their owners.
gaikokumaniakku: The 19th century glorified robber-baron capitalism along with other myths of individual heroes. They forgot that Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants — and of course they also forgot that when Newton said that, he was referencing a long string of writers who had used the phrase for hundreds of years, back to Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by...
Harper’s Notes: RAND developed the Delphi Method during the early Cold War for estimating thermonuclear warfare casualties among other things. It works well under the right circumstances. Uses anonymity and sequential polling. But the right circumstances are generally difficult and rare. Most recently the Super-forecaster Project (Tetlock) has resulted in several the high-scorers participating in (betting) prediction markets, in which there are both advantages and disadvantages in non-anonymity.
Gaikokumaniakku: I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link: Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)
Gaikokumaniakku: This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake. I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.
TRX: Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank. Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that. While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a...
Isegoria: Lower attendance is what we’re going for.
Bob Sykes: The problem facing all colleges and universities is that the number of white 18 year-olds, the primary consumers of college, is declining rapidly both relative to other races and absolutely. Many small liberal arts colleges are decidedly second rate academically, and so are the students they cater to. So, neither the loss of the schools nor the loss of the students is really a big deal. The health of the college system and the meaningfulness of the degrees awarded is actually better off...
Isegoria: Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park. The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Kentucky Headhunter: Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
TRX: Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones. I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Isegoria: Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.
Lucklucky: “battleship Sheffield” It was a mere destroyer not a battleship…
Buckethead: Adjacent to Atomic Rockets is ToughSF. Well researched and fascinating speculation on space. He posts only every so often, but he did do an interesting series on stealth – and piracy — in space.
Isegoria: Thanks for putting in the work, George. Grok also kept pointing to this blog. Apparently AI struggles with comments repeated across multiple pages.
George: Gemini claims (and I haven’t confirmed) that it’s: …a classic historical description written by the Scottish physician and traveler Dr. John Macculloch in his 1824 book, The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland.He used this vivid phrase to describe the famous and treacherous pass of Glencroe… After searching all three volumes as PDFs, I’m pretty sure Gemini is hallucinating. And substantial time spent searching keeps leading me back to this blog. Cough up the...
Isegoria: I don’t think you’re alone in your struggle, Handle.
Grymalkin: Rudolf Jung (b.1882 – d.1945) was the first principal theoretician of National Socialism, a Sudeten-German trade-unionist and railway engineer who joined the Austro-Hungarian German Workers’ Party (later German National Socialist Workers’ Party, DNSAP) in 1909 and was heavily responsible for both building up the early successes of the movement and for establishing close links in the post-WWI era with emerging National Socialist parties in other German-speaking areas...
Handle: I liked Cal Newport’s World Without Email, but I have proven to be poor evangelist for its message. The default mode of email of permissionless universal access is bad (compare to needed to get affirmative consent for “direct liaison authority” like in the military) and everybody says they hate it but no one is willing to give up even a little bit of that capability, even though it’s essential to any system of attention preservation and disciplined communications. Sorry...
Activision Reports Sluggish Sales For Sousaphone Hero:
Kevin Fox is a disciple of Eli Goldratt (
In the latest draft of his upcoming book, Cambridge physics professor David MacKay discusses 
Jay Leno goes 