If I wanted to discredit the American Left, I might produce a piece of biting satire, like Why Mommy is a Democrat.
The punch line, of course, is that this is not a clever piece satirizing the Left but an attempt to promote the Democratic Party by satirizing the Right.
It looks like it really may be true that Republicans want the government to be your father, Democrats want the government to be your mother, and libertarians want to treat you as an adult.
Shannon Love says, We Will Mock The Brave And Wise, because we in the general public don’t share in the information that our leaders use to make national security decisions:
Nova on PBS ran an episode this week about the secret history of Sputnik. The show explored the real reason that the Soviets beat the Free World into space: Eisenhower desperately wanted spy satellites to forestall a nuclear Pearl Harbor, so he deliberately held back the U.S. launch and let the Soviets go first. Doing so required the Soviets to establish a legal precedent for satellite fly-over, something Eisenhower desperately wanted so that the U.S. could launch its own spy satellites.
If the Soviets had not gone first they no doubt would have employed their considerable propaganda power to raise powerful objections in international law to the orbiting of satellites. The law of space and subsequent development of space flight of all kinds would have evolved much differently, and most likely much more contentiously. Sputnik represented a subtle strategic coup for the Free World, one that arguably saved the entire world from nuclear destruction by reducing paranoia and fears of a surprise attack on both sides.
Yet the world, and especially the American public, saw Sputnik as a devastating defeat for America. It damaged Eisenhower’s presidency to such a degree that had he been in his first term, the event would have most likely cost him his reelection. It prompted a flurry of legislation that federalized education and scientific research. The sting of the perceived defeat led directly to the largest and most expensive work of political art in the 20th century, the Apollo moon missions.
How does a free and democratic republic hold its leaders accountable, when those leaders must keep crucial strategic information secret?
My advice for starting wingsuit BASE jumping is don’t — just enjoy the crazy videos:
Appendix B of that advice document is where things look a lot less fun — Wingsuit fatalities.
This Western Electric Telephone Ad is a fascinating piece of technology history:
Western Electric: we make Bell telephones.
We’re also making them smarter.* and # buttons are going into Bell telephones we make today. And someday, they will help telphones do things they never did before.
Like routing calls to follow you when you’re not at home. Or letting you talk to five people at once. Or signaling a busy phone when you have to get through.
Behind these services is the largest single communications development ever undertaken by Western Electric for the Bell System. The Electronic Switching System. We call it ESS for short. A revolutionary new computer-controlled electronic call routing system.
Designed by Bell Labs, and manufactured and installed by Western Electric, ESS will be the brains and backbone of tomorrow’s telephone service. It will route calls faster and more dependably than ever before. And it will offer you many more services at the push of a * or #.
Western Electric
Manufacturing and Supply Unit of the Bell System
This Doonesbury on Why Students Need Laptops is a little too accurate.
I’ve already discussed the KillaCycle once before — when the owner, who is not the usual rider, launched it into a mini-van — but now the Today show has aired a segment on the two-wheeled dragster, which goes from zero to 60 in one second and hits 150 miles per hour in the quarter-mile:
Electric vehicles make exceptional dragsters, because they have tremendous torque — and thus acceleration — off the line, and because their great weakness — an inability to store much energy without lots of heavy batteries — doesn’t come into play.
Bill Dube, the bike’s owner, calls it “a giant cordless drill with wheels” and a mix of “a stone-age motor and space-age batteries” — and the guys from the Speed Channel’s Speed Records show were “shocked” by its performance;
Geothermal Heat Pumps Make Sense for Homeowners:
On average, a geothermal heat pump system costs about $2,500 per ton of capacity, or roughly $7,500 for a 3-ton unit (typical residential size). In comparison, other systems would cost about $4,000 with air conditioning. When included in the mortgage, the homeowner has a positive cash flow from the beginning. For example, say that the extra $3,500 will add $30 per month to each mortgage payment. But the energy cost savings will easily exceed that added mortgage amount over the course of each year. On a retrofit, the GHP’s high efficiency typically means much lower utility bills, allowing the investment to be recouped in two to ten years.
Renee Friedman, writing in the Archaeological Institute of America’s Archeology magazine, describes the evidence for the Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis.
Read it for yourself.
Please recognize that it’s not too late to order the The Zombie Survival Guide.
Curvy mothers have brainier kids:
Curvier women may have smart children because hip fat contains polyunsaturated fatty acids critical for the development of the fetus’s brain.Using data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found a child’s performance in cognition tests was linked to their mother’s waist-hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips.
Children whose mothers had wide hips and a low waist-hip ratio scored highest, leading Lassek and Gaulin to suggest that fetuses benefit from a rich supply of useful fatty acids. (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.07.005)
Brazil announces new oil reserves:
The Brazilian government says huge new oil reserves discovered off its coast could turn the country into one of the biggest oil producers in the world.Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, says it believes the offshore Tupi field has between 5bn and 8bn barrels of recoverable light oil.
A senior minister said Brazilian oil production had the potential to match that of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
[...]
Brazil currently has proven oil reserves of 14 billion barrels, over half of which have been discovered in the past five years.
“Electronic Arts has donated the original ‘classic’ version of Will Wright’s popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It’s also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name “Micropolis“, which was SimCity’s original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create ‘frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.’ The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC’s Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert’s and Alan Kay’s ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program.”
In Exercise on the Brain, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang note that “computer programs to improve brain performance are a booming business”:
In the United States, consumers are expected to spend $80 million this year on brain exercise products, up from $2 million in 2005.
They are not convinced that artificial mental exercises help mental performance:
One form of training, however, has been shown to maintain and improve brain health — physical exercise. In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.Executive function starts to decline when people reach their 70s. But elderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age. This relationship might occur because people who are healthier tend to be more active, but that’s not the whole story. When inactive people get more exercise, even starting in their 70s, their executive function improves, as shown in a recent meta-analysis of 18 studies. One effective training program involves just 30 to 60 minutes of fast walking several times a week.
Exercise is also strongly associated with a reduced risk of dementia late in life. People who exercise regularly in middle age are one-third as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease in their 70s as those who did not exercise. Even people who begin exercising in their 60s have their risk reduced by half.
How might exercise help the brain? In people, fitness training slows the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex, which is important for executive function. In rodents, exercise increases the number of capillaries in the brain, which should improve blood flow, and therefore the availability of energy, to neurons. Exercise may also help the brain by improving cardiovascular health, preventing heart attacks and strokes that can cause brain damage. Finally, exercise causes the release of growth factors, proteins that increase the number of connections between neurons, and the birth of neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region important for memory. Any of these effects might improve cognitive performance, though it’s not known which ones are most important.
People have really bad timing when it comes to investing — really bad:
The New York Times summarizes a paper Dumb Money: Mutual Fund Flows and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns by two finance professors. The research, which covers the period 1980-2003, demonstrates that people tend to dump mutual funds just before the funds enter several-year periods of above-average performance, and to buy funds that are about to sag.The authors cleverly take the analysis down from the mutual fund level to the level of individual stocks, by calculating the change in ownership of a stock by mutual funds which is attributable investors switching into or out of particular funds. The stocks most sold by funds that investors were leaving showed a return of about 18% going forward, while those most bought by funds that investors were switching into came in at around 7.3%. The authors suggest that a strategy of buying stocks with the most negative flow while simultaneously selling short stocks with the most positive flow would have produced a 10.7% annual rate of return…while involving very low risk, since the strategy doesn’t involve a bet on the overall direction of the market. (Transaction costs excluded from rate of return; also, apparently, interest costs on the short positions.)
An economist solves the mysteries of dating — or at least some of the mysteries, as evidenced in speed dating:
With the obvious qualification that we’re talking here about a four-minute version of love and dating, we found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks from research assistants, who were hired for the much sought-after position of hanging out in a bar to rate the dater’s level of attractiveness on a scale of one to 10.By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point. In a survey we did before the speed dating began, participants rated their own intelligence levels, and it turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.
When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own. Women, on the other hand, care more about how men think and perform, and they don’t mind being outdone on those scores.
Another clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices.
Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating — but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.
Dolphins rescue surfer from shark:
The shark, estimated at 12 to 15 feet long, hit him first as Endris was sitting on his surfboard, but couldn’t get its monster jaws around both surfer and surfboard. “The second time, he came down and clamped on my torso — sandwiched my board and my torso in his mouth,” Endris said.That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.
The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.
The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.
