Pilot: May have shot down Saint-Exupery

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Pilot: May have shot down Saint-Exupery:

A former pilot for Nazi Germany’s air force writes in a forthcoming book that he believes he shot down the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The aviation pioneer’s Lockheed Lightning P-38 disappeared July 31, 1944. In the book, former Luftwaffe pilot Horst Rippert says he believes that he shot down the plane — although he is not completely sure.

Le Figaro magazine published extracts of the book, “Saint-Exupery, the ultimate secret,” over the weekend. [...] Rippert says in the book that he is a fan of the author’s works.

“In our youth, at school, we had all read him. We loved his books,” he said. “If I had known, I would not have opened fire. Not on him!”

Posted in Media, War | No Comments »

Warners connected to the film ‘Bone’

Monday, March 17th, 2008

This could be good news. Warners connected to the film ‘Bone’:

Warner Bros. has picked up rights to “Bone,” the acclaimed independent comic book series from artist Jeff Smith. Dan Lin will produce.

Of course, the last time Bone looked like it might get turned into a film, things didn’t work out:

An animated version was in development at Nickelodeon Films but fell through, partly because Smith was displeased that the studio was aiming it for kids and wanted the film to include pop songs.

Why do you buy the rights to something like Bone if you don’t want to produce something like Bone?

Posted in Media | No Comments »

The Next Slum?

Monday, March 17th, 2008

The old slum was the inner city. Are our sprawling suburbs the next slum?

Sprawling, large-lot suburbs become less attractive as they become more densely built, but urban areas — especially those well served by public transit — become more appealing as they are filled in and built up. Crowded sidewalks tend to be safe and lively, and bigger crowds can support more shops, restaurants, art galleries.

Of course, developers are trying to produce the best of both worlds:

But developers are also starting to find ways to bring the city to newer suburbs — and provide an alternative to conventional, car-based suburban life. “Lifestyle centers” — walkable developments that create an urban feel, even when built in previously undeveloped places — are becoming popular with some builders. They feature narrow streets and small storefronts that come up to the sidewalk, mixed in with housing and office space. Parking is mostly hidden underground or in the interior of faux city blocks.

The granddaddy of all lifestyle centers is the Reston Town Center, located between Virginia’s Dulles International Airport and Washington, D.C. Since it opened in 1990, it has become the “downtown” for western Fairfax and eastern Loudoun counties; a place for the kids to see Santa and for teenagers to ice skate. People living in the town can stroll from the movie theater to restaurants and then back home. A 2006 study by the Brookings Institution showed that Reston’s apartments, condominiums, and office and retail space were all commanding about a 50 percent rent or price premium over the typically suburban houses, office parks, and strip malls nearby.

Housing at Belmar, the new “downtown” in Lakewood, Colorado, a middle-income inner suburb of Denver, commands a 60 percent premium per square foot over the single-family homes in the neighborhoods around it. The development covers about 20 small blocks in all. What’s most noteworthy is its history: it was built on the site of a razed mall.

Building lifestyle centers is far more complex than building McMansion developments (or malls). These new, faux-urban centers have many moving parts, and they need to achieve critical mass quickly to attract buyers and retailers. As a result, during the 1990s, lifestyle centers spread slowly. But real-estate developers are gaining more experience with this sort of building, and it is proliferating. Very few, if any, regional malls are being built these days — lifestyle centers are going up instead.

Lifestyle center may be an even worse term than sport utility vehicle.

Perhaps subtle zoning changes and the popularity of such lifestyle centers can sidestep the significant problem that “once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild”:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

On the Trail of the Cat, Scientists Find Surprises

Monday, March 17th, 2008

On the Trail of the Cat, Scientists Find Surprises:

Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia.

But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds. “We wanted to see whether breeds actually came from what was thought to be their geographical origins,” Lyons said.

The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere. “Either it didn’t originate in Japan or there’s been so much Western influence that they have lost their initial genetic signal,” Lyons said.

Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.

Some breeds differ by only a gene or two — too little to distinguish them, really — and many breeds are severely inbred — although many are not.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Engineered for Cuteness

Monday, March 17th, 2008

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Flocke the polar-bear cub was Engineered for Cuteness:

Posted in Animals, Cute | No Comments »

Arctic Meltdown

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Scott Borgerson notes that the coming Arctic Meltdown will have serious policy ramifications:

Thanks to global warming, the Arctic icecap is rapidly melting, opening up access to massive natural resources and creating shipping shortcuts that could save billions of dollars a year. But there are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region. Unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.

Those shipping shortcuts could have huge effects:

The shipping shortcuts of the Northern Sea Route (over Eurasia) and the Northwest Passage (over North America) would cut existing oceanic transit times by days, saving shipping companies — not to mention navies and smugglers — thousands of miles in travel. The Northern Sea Route would reduce the sailing distance between Rotterdam and Yokohama from 11,200 nautical miles — via the current route, through the Suez Canal — to only 6,500 nautical miles, a savings of more than 40 percent. Likewise, the Northwest Passage would trim a voyage from Seattle to Rotterdam by 2,000 nautical miles, making it nearly 25 percent shorter than the current route, via the Panama Canal. Taking into account canal fees, fuel costs, and other variables that determine freight rates, these shortcuts could cut the cost of a single voyage by a large container ship by as much as 20 percent — from approximately $17.5 million to $14 million — saving the shipping industry billions of dollars a year. The savings would be even greater for the megaships that are unable to fit through the Panama and Suez Canals and so currently sail around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Moreover, these Arctic routes would also allow commercial and military vessels to avoid sailing through politically unstable Middle Eastern waters and the pirate-infested South China Sea. An Iranian provocation in the Strait of Hormuz, such as the one that occurred in January, would be considered far less of a threat in an age of trans-Arctic shipping.

Arctic shipping could also dramatically affect global trade patterns. In 1969, oil companies sent the S.S. Manhattan through the Northwest Passage to test whether it was a viable route for moving Arctic oil to the Eastern Seaboard. The Manhattan completed the voyage with the help of accompanying icebreakers, but oil companies soon deemed the route impractical and prohibitively expensive and opted instead for an Alaskan pipeline. But today such voyages are fast becoming economically feasible. As soon as marine insurers recalculate the risks involved in these voyages, trans-Arctic shipping will become commercially viable and begin on a large scale. In an age of just-in-time delivery, and with increasing fuel costs eating into the profits of shipping companies, reducing long-haul sailing distances by as much as 40 percent could usher in a new phase of globalization. Arctic routes would force further competition between the Panama and Suez Canals, thereby reducing current canal tolls; shipping chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca would no longer dictate global shipping patterns; and Arctic seaways would allow for greater international economic integration. When the ice recedes enough, likely within this decade, a marine highway directly over the North Pole will materialize. Such a route, which would most likely run between Iceland and Alaska’s Dutch Harbor, would connect shipping megaports in the North Atlantic with those in the North Pacific and radiate outward to other ports in a hub-and-spoke system. A fast lane is now under development between the Arctic port of Murmansk, in Russia, and the Hudson Bay port of Churchill, in Canada, which is connected to the North American rail network.

In order to navigate these opening sea-lanes and transport the Arctic’s oil and natural gas, the world’s shipyards are already building ice-capable ships. The private sector is investing billions of dollars in a fleet of Arctic tankers. In 2005, there were 262 ice-class ships in service worldwide and 234 more on order.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

Everything I know about X, I learned from Y.

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Everything I know about X, I learned from Y. Seriously, follow the link, and give it a try.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Inside Wall Street’s Black Hole

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker, The Real Price of Everything) looks Inside Wall Street’s Black Hole:

One of the revolt’s leaders is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness and a former trader of currency options for a big French bank. Taleb can precisely date the origin of his own personal gripe with Black-Scholes: September 22, 1985. On that day, central bankers from Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and the United States announced their intention to torpedo the U.S. dollar — to reduce its value in relation to the other countries’ currencies. Every day, Taleb received a list of his trading positions from his firm and a matrix describing his risks. The matrix told him how much money he stood to make or lose, given various currency fluctuations. That September 22, when the central bankers announced their plan to lower the dollar’s value, he made money but didn’t know it. “I didn’t know what my position was,” he says, “because the movement was outside the matrix they’d given me.” The French bank’s risk-analysis program assumed that a currency crash of this magnitude would occur once in several million years and therefore wasn’t worth considering.

Taleb made a killing that day, but it wasn’t thanks to a grand plan and it wasn’t happy money. “People in dark suits started coming from Paris,” he says. “They said that the only way I could have made that much was to have taken far too much risk.” But he hadn’t. They had simply failed to account for the true nature of risk in financial markets. “Then I started looking at the history of markets,” he says. “And I saw that these sorts of things happened all the time.” Taleb became obsessed with the way prices in the options market, based on the famous Black-Scholes model, underestimated the risk of extreme and rare events. He set up his trading to profit from such events by buying up disaster insurance that would, according to Black-Scholes, be considered overpriced. When October 19, 1987, arrived, he was prepared. “Ninety-seven percent of all the returns I ever made as a trader, I made on that day,” he says.

Posted in Business, Economics, Nassim Nicholas Taleb | No Comments »

Reading 17-Month-Old

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

This Reading 17-Month-Old is the daughter of two speech pathologists:

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills — unlike structured play or playing with elaborate toys:

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here’s the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids’ cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different.

“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”

Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.”

Children learn self-regulation during unstructured play through private speech:

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what’s called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

It sounds like role-playing games might build character.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

The Nukes of October

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

The Nukes of October looks at Richard Nixon’s secret plan to bring peace to Vietnam:

Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the “madman theory”: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.

Nixon and Kissinger put the plan in motion on October 10, sending the US military’s Strategic Air Command an urgent order to prepare for a possible confrontation: They wanted the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the US arsenal readied for immediate use against the Soviet Union. The mission was so secretive that even senior military officers following the orders — including the SAC commander himself — were not informed of its true purpose.
[...]
After their launch, the B-52s pressed against Soviet airspace for three days. They skirted enemy territory, challenging defenses and taunting Soviet aircraft. The pilots remained on alert, prepared to drop their bombs if ordered. The Soviets likely knew about the threat as it was unfolding: Their radar picked up the planes early in their flight paths, and their spies monitored American bases. They knew the bombers were armed with nuclear weapons, because they could determine their weight from takeoff patterns and fuel use. In past years, the US had kept nuclear-armed planes in the air as a possible deterrent (if the Soviets blew up all of our air bases in a surprise attack, we’d still be able to respond). But in 1968, the Pentagon publicly banned that practice — so the Soviets wouldn’t have thought the 18 planes were part of a patrol. Secretary of defense Melvin Laird, who opposed the operation, worried that the Soviets would either interpret Giant Lance as an attack, causing catastrophe, or as a bluff, making Washington look weak.
[...]
The madman theory was an extension of [the "flexible response"] doctrine. If you’re going to rely on the leverage you gain from being able to respond in flexible ways — from quiet nighttime assassinations to nuclear reprisals — you need to convince your opponents that even the most extreme option is really on the table. And one way to do that is to make them think you are crazy.

Consider a game that theorist Thomas Schelling described to his students at Harvard in the ’60s: You’re standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to another person. As soon as one of you cries uncle, you’ll both be released, and whoever remained silent will get a large prize. What do you do? You can’t push the other person off the cliff, because then you’ll die, too. But you can dance and walk closer and closer to the edge. If you’re willing to show that you’ll brave a certain amount of risk, your partner may concede — and you might win the prize. But if you convince your adversary that you’re crazy and liable to hop off in any direction at any moment, he’ll probably cry uncle immediately. If the US appeared reckless, impatient, even insane, rivals might accept bargains they would have rejected under normal conditions. In terms of game theory, a new equilibrium would emerge as leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana contemplated how terrible things could become if they provoked an out-of-control president to experiment with the awful weapons at his disposal.
[...]
Dobrynin recounted Nixon’s threatening words in his report to the Kremlin: The president said “he will never (Nixon twice emphasized that word) accept a humiliating defeat or humiliating terms. The US, like the Soviet Union, is a great nation, and he is its president. The Soviet leaders are determined persons, but he, the president, is the same.”

Dobrynin warned Soviet leaders that “Nixon is unable to control himself even in a conversation with a foreign ambassador.” He also commented on the president’s “growing emotionalism” and “lack of balance.”

This was exactly the impression that Nixon and Kissinger had sought to cultivate. After the meeting, Kissinger reveled in their success. He wrote the president: “I suspect Dobrynin’s basic mission was to test the seriousness of the threat.” Nixon had, according to Kissinger, “played it very cold with Dobrynin, giving him one back for each he dished out.” Kissinger counseled the White House to “continue backing up our verbal warnings with our present military moves.”

Posted in Policy, Thomas Schelling, War | No Comments »

Electric Cars Might Need No New Power Plants

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Electric cars might need no new power plants — if everyone recharges at night:

The report found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the automobiles Americans drive. In the worst-case scenario — if all hybrid owners charged their vehicles at 5 p.m., at six kilowatts of power — up to 160 large power plants would be needed nationwide to supply the extra electricity, and the demand would reduce the reserve power margins for a particular region’s system.

The best-case scenario occurs when vehicles are plugged in after 10 p.m., when the electric load on the system is at a minimum and the wholesale price for energy is least expensive. Depending on the power demand per household, charging vehicles after 10 p.m. would require, at lower demand levels, no additional power generation or, in higher-demand projections, just eight additional power plants nationwide.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

Posted in Economics, Technology | No Comments »

New stem cell technique improves genetic alteration

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

New stem cell technique improves genetic alteration:

Scientists today primarily use chemicals to get DNA into cells, but that method inadvertently can kill the cells and is inefficient at transferring genetic information. For every one genetically altered cell generated using the chemical method, the new growth factor/nucleofection method produces between 10 and 100 successfully modified cells, UCI scientists estimate.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Curious Genius of Twitter

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Fast Company finally looks at The Curious Genius of Twitter — which was just a side project:

It’s happened a couple of times where side projects have become the interrupting thing. Blogger and Twitter were both side projects. In both cases, they eventually became more compelling than the main thing we were working on. But because they were side projects in a company that was ostensibly doing something else, they didn’t need to be questioned a lot at first — other than, “Why aren’t we focusing on the main thing?” They didn’t need to be justified as whole businesses in themselves. A lot of ideas die when they’re questioned too much in their early stages.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams created Blogger, which was acquired by Google, where he then worked for over a year:

I’m just much more of a startup guy, and Google was pretty big by the time I left. Maybe I could have started something new there, but there wasn’t a lot of reason to — I could start something new elsewhere. Google has a lot of resources but to get those resources you also have to have skills that aren’t necessarily my skills.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Top 10 Secure Coding Practices

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Robert Seacord offers his Top 10 Secure Coding Practices — but the best part is the attached photo:

I like this photograph because it illustrates how the easiest way to break system security is often to circumvent it rather than defeat it (as is the case with most software vulnerabilities related to insecure coding practices).

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

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