Unique Results from Swedish Study of HIV vaccine:
A Swedish HIV vaccine study conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet (KI), Karolinska University Hospital and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI) has produced surprisingly good results. Over 90 per cent of the subjects in the phase 1 trials developed an immune response to HIV.
Snake Oil Salesmen Were on to Something:
For centuries snake oil has been a folk remedy in Chinese medicine, used primarily to treat joint pain such as arthritis and bursitis. Its introduction to the U.S. most likely occurred with the arrival of Chinese laborers who came to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the mid 1800s. They may have offered snake oil to fellow workers as relief for suffering long days of physical toil.Richard Kunin, a California psychiatrist with a background in neurophysiology research, became intrigued with the idea of snake oil in the 1980s. He had been following early research on the importance of omega-3 fatty acids for health and it dawned on him that the much maligned snake oil might be a particularly rich source. Omega-3′s proliferate in cold-blooded creatures that live primarily in cooler environments because the fats don’t harden in chilly water like omega-6 fatty acids do (hence, the high level of omega-3′s in cold-water fish such as salmon). “Snakes and fish share one thing, they’re both cold-blooded animals,” Kunin says.
Kunin visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. He also acquired two live rattlesnakes and extracted their fat sacks. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. In comparison, the rattlesnakes had only 8.5 percent EPA. And salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3′s, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil.
Research since the 1980s has demonstrated the necessity — and efficacy — of omega-3 fatty acids. These acids not only reduce inflammation, such as arthritis pain, but also improve cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol and even depression.
Michael Grunwald is Down on The Farm — or at least on the farm bill:
Agricultural policy is not sexy. You probably don’t know the intricacies of “loan deficiency payments” or “base acreage,” and you probably don’t care. This was once an agrarian nation, but now there’s a less than 1% chance that you’re a farmer, and if you are, you’re probably part time; the average farm family gets 82% of its income from nonfarm sources. We’re not a people of the soil anymore, and for most of us, our eyes glaze over when we see farm statistics like the ones in that last sentence.But farms still cover most of our land, consume most of our water and produce most of our food. If you eat, drink or pay taxes — or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation — U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.
It’s also a horrible deal. It redistributes our taxes to millionaire farmers as well as to millionaire “farmers” like David Letterman, David Rockefeller and the owners of the Utah Jazz. It contributes to our obesity and illegal-immigration epidemics and to our water and energy shortages. It helps degrade rivers, deplete aquifers, eliminate grasslands, concentrate food-processing conglomerates and inundate our fast-food nation with high-fructose corn syrup. Our farm policy is supposed to save small farmers and small towns. Instead it fuels the expansion of industrial megafarms and the depopulation of rural America. It hurts Third World farmers, violates international trade deals and paralyzes our efforts to open foreign markets to the nonagricultural goods and services that make up the remaining 99% of our economy.
Ever since the 1980s, when a wave of foreclosures inspired those iconic Farm Aid concerts, the media’s sporadic reports from farm country have tended to focus on floods, droughts and other disasters. But the farm crisis is as over as Barbara Mandrell. Farm incomes are at an all-time high. The median farmer enjoys five times the net worth of the median nonfarmer household. Crop prices have soared–thanks largely to the Federal Government’s promotion of corn ethanol over more efficient renewable energies — and yet subsidies have as well.
Nevertheless, Congress is finalizing a $286 billion farm bill that will continue our basic farm policies, which means it will keep funneling money to farmers and pseudo farmers through a bewildering array of loans, price supports, subsidized insurance, disaster aid and money-for-nothing handouts that arrive when times are tough — or not tough. “What a joke,” grumbles Congressman Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat who led a failed bipartisan reform effort in the House. “You’re eligible as long as you’re breathing.” Actually, that’s not quite true. Since the vast majority of the cash goes to five row crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice — more than 60% of our farmers receive no subsidies. And a recent Government Accountability Office report identified $1.1 billion of subsidies whose recipients were no longer breathing.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration started farm aid in response to the Dust Bowl and the Depression, calling it “a temporary solution to deal with an emergency.” But in Washington, the emergency has never ended.
Device created for ‘red wine headache’ — or, more accurately, for detecting the compounds that cause red-wine headaches:
Chemists working with NASA-funded technology designed to find life on Mars have created a device they say can easily detect chemicals that many scientists believe can turn wine and other beloved indulgences into ingredients for agony.The chemicals, called biogenic amines, occur naturally in a wide variety of aged, pickled and fermented foods prized by gourmet palates, including wine, chocolate, cheese, olives, nuts and cured meats.
[...]
The prototype — the size of a small briefcase — uses a drop of wine to determine amine levels in five minutes, Mathies said. A startup company he co-founded is working to create a smaller device the size of a personal digital assistant that people could take to restaurants and test their favorite wines.The researchers found the highest amine levels in red wine and sake and the lowest in beer. For now, the device only works with liquids.
Mathies suggests the device could be used to put amine levels on wine labels.
Phoenix HyperSpace Bypasses Windows With Fast-Boot Technology:
There’s absolutely no reason you should be waiting the three-plus minutes it takes your computer to boot up Windows, says Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix Technologies. And indeed, if Hobbs has his way, you may not have to endure those waits much longer.Phoenix says its new technology, HyperSpace, will offer mobile PC users the ability to instantly fire up their most used apps — things like e-mail, web browsers and various media players — without using Windows, simply by pressing the F4 button.
“As Windows gets more and more complex, we’ve seen startup times get longer and longer,” says Hobbs. “If I go to the airport and try to connect to a Wi-Fi network, I’m waiting for five minutes just to connect. That’s ridiculous — people usually just give up and use their cell phones or PDAs.”
Phoenix Technologies is the company responsible for many computers’ basic input/output system, or BIOS, the firmware code that runs when your PC starts up. Usually, the BIOS identifies the hardware on your PC and initializes components, then lets the operating system handle everything else, from storing files to connecting with networks to running applications. In essence, HyperSpace is a simple operating environment, a layer on top of the BIOS, that runs side-by-side with Windows and can efficiently implement some of the most commonly used apps on a PC.
David Foster shares a story On Trusting Experts — and which experts to trust:
August 1, 1914. As Europe moved inexorably toward catastrophe, Kaiser Wilhelm II was getting cold feet at the prospect of a two-front war. When a telegram arrived suggesting that the war might be contained to a Germany-vs-Russia conflict, the Kaiser jumped at the opportunity.The telegram was from Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London, reporting on a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. As Lichnowsky interpreted Grey’s remarks, England would stay neutral — and promise to keep France neutral — if Germany would confine herself to attacking Russia and would promise not to attack France. (Which was a misinterpretation — but more on that later.)
Immediately, the Kaiser called in General von Moltke, the Chief of Staff, and gave him his new marching orders: turn around the troops destined for the attack in the west, and redirect them to the eastern front. Barbara Tuchman writes of Moltke’s reaction.
Aghast at the thought of his marvelous mobilization wrenched into reverse, Moltke refused point-blank. For ten years, first as assistant to Schlieffen, then as his successor, Moltke’s job had been planning for this day, The Day, Der Tag, for which all Germany’s energies were gathered, on which the march to final mastery of Europe would begin. It weighed upon him with an oppressive, almost unbearable responsibility…Now, on the climactic night of August 1, Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind of the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tacks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.“Your majesty,” Moltke said to him now, “it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised…Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete…and once settled, it cannot be altered.”
“Your uncle would have given me a different answer,” the Kaiser said to him bitterly.
It was not until after the war that General von Staab — Chief of the Railway Division and the man who would have actually been responsible for the logistics of the redirection — learned about this interchange between Moltke and the Kaiser. Incensed by the implied insult to the capabilities of his bureau, he wrote a book, including pages of detailed charts and graphs, proving that it could have been done.
So, what happened here? The Kaiser trusted his military expert, von Moltke — but the real expert in railway operations (and this was substantially a railway question) — disagreed. At the time of decision-making, von Staab’s personal opinion was never even solicited.
Clearly, what the Kaiser should have said when faced with Moltke’s opposition was “Tell von Staab to get his ass in here, and let’s talk about it.” (Or however a German Emperor would have phrased that thought.) Indeed, there was particular reason to do this, given that the Kaiser evidently had some serious concerns about Moltke — as evidenced by his passive-aggressive “your uncle would have given me a different answer” comment.
An executive, of course, must have confidence in his immediate subordinates, and trust them to have gotten the necessary information from their subordinates. Otherwise, it would be impossible to run anything. To continually demand information directly from people several layers down, using direct reports only as messenger boys rather than as evaluators and decision-makers, is destructive to any organization. But it is also bad to have an organizational culture in which any bypassing of the hierarchy — as in bringing von Staab directly into the conversation — is automatically viewed as undercutting someone’s authority (which is probably how Moltke would have viewed it.)
If you are an executive, then sooner or later you’re going to have to make decisions regarding matters about which you are not an expert, and indeed about which you may know very little. Make sure your decision-making process captures the knowledge of your von Staabs as well as your Moltkes. Be especially wary when dealing with plans that have been a long time in the making: their developers are unlikely to be very enthusiastic about changing them, however good the arguments for doing so.
Now, a few notes and caveats. Prince Lichnowsky, in his desire to avoid a catastrophic war, had apparently misinterpreted Edward Grey’s comments — what the foreign secretary had actually said was that he could guarantee Germany against attack by France if Germany would promise to attack neither France nor Russia. Yet even given this reality, von Moltke himself apparently later came to the conclusion that it would have been better to send the larger part of the army to the East, leaving only covering forces in the West, in an attempt to knock Russia out of the war in its early stages. Finally, was von Staab’s after-the-fact analysis really correct? It’s one thing to develop hypothetical train schedules in the peace and quiet of one’s study; it’s something else entirely to develop real train schedules in a compressed time window during a crisis. (But, presumably, in his analysis he attempted to consider the inevitable frictions involved in crisis-mode replanning.)
In any event, the Kaiser allowed himself to be put in a position where he made one of the most critical decisions of his life without the benefit of the deepest available expertise. Decison-makers of all types should learn from his mistake.
When you’ve read about how much effort went into wargaming the Schlieffen Plan, you can see why von Moltke would feel the way he did — but the wrong plan, wonderfully executed, can still be the wrong plan.
I really need to read The Guns of August.
David Foster shares an unsettling experience in the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Englishman in Germany, in 1934:
Patrick Leigh Fermor, then 18 years old, hiked around Germany shortly after the Nazi accession to power. He had many conversations with young Germans, mostly over mugs of beer:
In all these conversations there was one opening I particularly dreaded: I was English? Yes. A student? Yes. At Oxford, no? No. At this point I knew what I was in for.The summer before, the Oxford Union had voted that “under no circumstances would they fight for King and Country.” The stir it had made in England was nothing, I gathered, to the sensation in Germany. I didn’t know much about it. In my explanation—for I was always pressed for one—I depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion—“fight for King and Country”—was an obsolete cliché from an old recruiting poster: no one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” “Für König und Vaterland” sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably “pour épater les bourgeois,” I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “Um die Bürger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “Ein Scherz?” they would ask. “Ein Spass? Ein Witz?” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman’s rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for.
Tyler Cowen says, To Know Contractors, Know Government:
Private contractors may not respect virtue for its own sake, but like most businesses, they will respect the wishes of their most powerful customers, in this case governments. What is wrong with Blackwater may, most of all, mirror what is wrong with Uncle Sam.
What’s in a Name? A strong gender identity, evidently:
Shirley Temple didn’t make many enemies, but Alleen Nilsen can think of a few people who loathed America’s sweetheart. Nilsen, a professor of English at Arizona State University and president (with her husband, Don) of the American Names Society, once met a Shirley from a family that used the name for four generations — for its men. As soon as Temple stamped it as indelibly girlish, Shirley IV disgustedly switched to Shirl. There was no Shirley V.Dozens of longstanding male names — Kim, Beverly, Ashley, etc. — have met the same fate. Linguists know the pattern well: not long after a boy’s name catches on with girls, parents shy away from christening sons with it. “We crowd them out,” Nilsen says. Consider some examples from the Social Security Administration’s baby-name database. Through 1955, “Leslie” consistently appeared among the 150 most popular boys’ names. About a decade earlier, it began to catch on among girls. And the “crowding out” Nilsen mentioned took place. “Leslie” fell out of favor, dropping from a peak of 81 in male popularity rankings in 1895 to 874 a century later, and will most likely never gain traction with men again. Dana, Carol and Shannon met similar ends.
The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory is “feloniously stupid” — and pretty cool, at least to your inner 14-year-old:
Most people remember The Cannonball Run as a campy ’80s road comedy featuring, among others, Roger Moore, Dom DeLuise, and Farrah Fawcett. But to gearheads, the Cannonball Run is the original outlaw cross-country road race, organized by legendary Car and Driver writer Brock Yates. Entrants drove everything from cheap beaters to high-priced tweakers, but all had an appetite for white lines, black tar, and speed.Officially known as the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash (and later as the US Express race) the race set the standard for outlaw driving. This was uniquely American car culture — free and fun and fast. And nobody was faster than Diem and Turner, who hammered their 308 Ferrari from a garage on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Newport Beach, California, in an unthinkable 32 hours and 7 minutes.
According to Yates and his fellow Cannonballers, trying to beat that record today is pointless. Their argument goes something like this: Cannonball records were set back when the free-wheelin’ ’70s hooked up with the greed-is-good ’80s for fat lines of cocaine and unprotected sex. But these, brother, are Patriot Act days — executive-privilege end times in which no rogue deed goes untracked, no E-ZPass unlogged, no roaming cell phone unmonitored by perihelion satellite. Big Brother is definitely watching. Big Speed, the old Cannonballers say, is a quaint, 20th-century idea, like pay phones or print magazines.
But nobody had telexed Roy or his new filmmaker pal, Welles, the memo on this one. Once again, Roy put his formula in motion. First, he planned for weeks. Then, with his high school friend Jon Goodrich as copilot and cameraman James Petersmeyer tucked in the backseat, Roy left Manhattan’s Classic Car Club on December 16, 2005, and drove west, fast. They arrived at the Santa Monica Pier in California bleary-eyed, exhausted, and frightened — and two hours and 39 minutes shy of the record.
David Foster looks at An Interesting Test:
In an old Heinlein SF novel, applicants to the Space Academy are required to take a variety of aptitude tests. One of these tests involves dropping beans into a bottle…with the eyes closed. Applicants are told that the test measures “spatial perception” or something along those lines — but it’s actually a test of honesty.
I was reminded of this scenario by an article titled For Love of the Game, which appeared in the 3/12 issue of Forbes. There’s an old test that was originally used by the military to find people with an aptitude for clerical positions. All you have to do look in a table for a four-digit number and circle it where it appears. It seems like it would be difficult for any literate person to fail at this. Yet this simplistic test turns out to have predictive power for career success across a wide range of fields, including those that have little or nothing to do with clerical ability.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveyed 12,700 people (ages 14-22) and then follwed them to see how well they were doing. The subjects were paid $50 to take several tests, including a traditional Army intelligence test and the coding-speed test described above. They had no particular incentive to do well on any of the tests.
Recent research by Carmit Segal of Harvard indicates that performance on the coding-speed test has significant predictive power for the individual’s income 20 years later. This is true even when holding IQ score constant. And for participants who never earned a college degree, the coding-speed measurement has more predictive power than does IQ score.
The explanation suggested by Carmit is that what is really being measured by the coding speed test is intrinsic motivation: how much effort will someone put into the performance of a task when the only reward is the task itself? Just like Heinlein’s bean-in-the-bottle test measures what someone will do when no one is watching, the coding-speed test as performed by BLS measures what someone will do when no one is paying or otherwise rewarding good performance.
Superfast Laser Turns Virus Into Rubble:
A physicist and his biologist son destroyed a common virus using a superfast pulsing laser, without harming healthy cells. The discovery could lead to new treatments for viruses like HIV that have no cure.
[...]
In the latest research, Tsen and his son demonstrated that their laser technique could shatter the protein shell, or capsid, of the tobacco mosaic virus, leaving behind only a harmless mucus-like mash of molecules.The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells.
The virus-deactivating laser works on a principle called forced resonance. The scientists tune the laser to the same frequency the virus vibrates on. Then they crank up the volume. Like a high-pitched sound shattering glass, the laser vibrates the virus until it breaks.
The USP laser releases energy in femtosecond pulses — one millionth of a nanosecond — at a time.
Shell has patented a new method for wringing oil from a stone — from oil shale, that is:
Problem was, the prevailing production process — known as surface retorting — was dirty and inefficient. Federal subsidies masked the problems, encouraging companies to build businesses they never would have created on shareholders’ dimes. When oil prices collapsed, so did the economic rationale for shale oil. The day Exxon left town in 1982, turning some communities into ghost towns, is still remembered in northwestern Colorado as “Black Sunday.”The basic problem with surface retorting was that shale had to be mined, transported, crushed and then cooked at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Not only were there toxic waste byproducts, but the oil thus produced had to be purified and infused with hydrogen before it could be refined into gasoline and other products. Vinegar may be a physicist by training, but he thinks like an MBA, and to him such a labor- and energy-intensive process reeked of bad economics.
Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, if Shell could extract a liquid that could be pumped and pipelined instead of a solid that had to be mined and trucked? Upon visiting a Shell surface-retorting site for the first time in 1979, he came to a quick, life-changing conclusion: “Wow, we’re going to have to do this in situ.”
The term “in situ” is Latin for “in place.” In an engineering context, it means liquefying the oil shale while it is still underground. That is what Vinegar set out to do. The Eureka moment came in 1981. During a field experiment in Colorado, Vinegar and his colleagues set up camp on a patch of Shell-owned land where the oil shale was close to the surface. Then they drilled seven 20-foot wells within a 36-square-foot zone.
They inserted heating rods into six of the holes and positioned the seventh as a production well. “It was a very low-budget operation,” Vinegar chuckles. “The oil would drain into the production well, and every morning we used a fishing pole with a little bailer on the bottom to get it out.”
Most of the oil Vinegar and his colleagues collected was, in his estimation, “gunky.” However, Vinegar noticed that when temperatures in the ground were still comparatively low, the oil recovered was light and pure. “It was almost optically clear, and that fascinated me,” he says. “What was it that allowed us to make this beautiful-quality product early on but not later on?”
[...]
Vinegar and the Shell team of chemists, engineers and physicists eventually figured out why the oil they collected early in that 1981 field test was so light and clean and the later samples so dark and dirty. They found that a slower, lower-temperature process — 650 degrees Fahrenheit, versus the 1,000 degrees required in the retorting process — allows more of the hydrogen molecules that are liberated from the kerogen during heating to react with carbon compounds and form a better oil.This was a crucial discovery, because one of the hallmarks of a light oil — the most valuable kind because it costs less to refine — is its elevated hydrogen content.
Best of all, Shell was able to replicate the lab results in several field tests; the most recent one, in 2005, yielded 1,700 barrels of light oil. In that test, carefully engineered heating rods were inserted several hundred feet into the ground in order to gradually raise the temperature of the oil shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. Now Shell had a proven technology that it believed could produce a barrel of oil for $30.
It also knew it could recover a lot more oil than surface retorting did, since the heating rods and wells reach the entire deposit, not just the oil shale close enough to the surface to be mined.
What is the proper education for business?
Michael Hammer, the renowned management consultant, says this: I often recall advice once offered to me by a senior executive at a major pharmaceutical firm, an Englishman with the advantage of a traditional public school education. “All one need learn,” he said, “is Latin and computer programming — Latin for communication and programming for thinking.” He wasn’t far offIt’s very unlikely that this executive ever writes any computer programs at work, and it’s even more unlikely that he uses any Latin in his job. So why did he say what he did, and why does Hammer agree with him?
Hammer argues that learning programming is a good way to develop thinking skills of a particular kind. “…computer programming is nothing but an exercise in systems thinking. Each line of software that you write will interact with each and every other line of software. Unless you develop some big-picture thinking capability, your program will never work. The marvelous thing about a cognitive capability is that it operates across domains; the thinking style that one needs to write and debug a substantial computer program is the same one needed for solving problems in a business process. Once the synapses are put in play, they’ll snap on anything.” Exposure to other kinds of engineering can also help develop these cognitive skills, in Hammer’s opinion: “The heart of an enginering education is not learning and applying equations but learning how to create large systems built from small components…once again, I am not concerned with the content of the discipline but with the cognitive style it requires and engenders. I like the old definition of education: what remains when you forget what you have been taught.”
Hammer goes on to argue that the conceptual skills developed by programming/engineering are only part of the mental set needed by today’s businesspeople; ‘They must know how to ask why…Once again, I would submit that critical thinking operates across domains. Once learned in one area it can be applied to virtually any other. To this end, I maintain there is no better preparation for our technological age than a classical education…It might seem odd to suggest that the works of Plato and Madison and Joyce prepare one for the twenty-first century, but they are constants in a world of change…Wrestling with questions of good and evil, of democracy and justice, of personal and communal responsibilities is a quest without end. But, having engaged in this struggle, one is better prepared to deal with the more mundane, but nonetheless challenging, issues of the workplace.”
Hammer’s (rather contrarian) recommendation for aspiring businesspeople is this–a double major in computer science and classics. For those who don’t find this combination particularly appealing, he suggests alternative double-major possibilities:
- electrical engineering and philosophy
- mechanical engineering and medieval history
- aeronautics and theology
The general idea is one “hard” and one “soft” discipline. (I’m sure, though, that Hammer would be looking for humanities disciplines/programs which, while “soft” in the conventional sense, are taught in a highly-rigorous manner.)
Hammer goes so far as to say “If you aspire to a career in the business world, avoid an undergraduate major in business at all costs. You may learn some superficially useful skills, but not the fundamental capabilities needed for the long haul…There is plenty of time to develop expertise on the job or in a professional school.” This experise must include “An appreciation of the basics of business — the concepts of strategy, cost structure, market economics, cash flow, and capital utilization..”
I think Hammer’s argument is fundamentally sound: the student who pursues (for example) both an aeronautical engineering program and an intellectually-rigorous theology program is likely to develop conceptual skills that will serve him well in industries and jobs having nothing to do with either aviation or religion. When pursuing his first job out of school, however, he may well face a challenge in explaining to the hiring manager (and the HR people) why he is a better choice for the position than is the garden-variety undergraduate marketing major.
From the Washington Post‘s Unplugged, a few years ago:
True story: Several years ago, when Bethesda lost power for several days due to an ice storm, a highly educated lawyer discovered to his astonishment that a neighbor had made a cup of coffee. “How did you do that?” he asked. She said she boiled water. But how did you boil water? he asked. She said she had a gas stove. Stunned, he said he had a gas stove, too, but noted that it had an electronic ignition to create a spark. She said, “I used a match.” In a state of nature, this man would be eaten alive by field mice.
(Hat tip to David Foster’s Photon Courier.)