This Time, He’ll Be Left Breathless

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

This Time, He'll Be Left Breathless looks at “endurance artist” David Blaine and modern free divers:

A century ago, Houdini was celebrated for being able to hold his breath for three and a half minutes. Today even a novice can quickly learn to last longer than that, as I discovered under the tutelage of Kirk Krack, the free-diving coach who has been training Mr. Blaine for his world-record attempt.
[...]
Researchers in the 1960s calculated, based on lung capacity and the effect of water pressure, that humans couldn’t dive deeper than 165 feet. Today free divers are going down more than 600 feet and returning in apparently fine shape. Most of the time.

The day before his attempt in the pool, Mr. Blaine was practicing in the ocean and told me he was headed down for a dive of 100 feet, so routine that he didn’t bother doing the usual preparatory ritual: a slow, steady “breathe-up,” followed by exhalations to purge carbon dioxide and then a final series of quick gulps of air called lung-packing.

I watched him disappear into the depths and then reappear about two minutes later, swimming smoothly upward next to a guide rope. But about 20 feet from the surface, he suddenly veered away from the rope and appeared to struggle upward with his arms flailing. His coach, Mr. Krack, recognized the symptoms of a blackout instantly and rushed to grab Mr. Blaine, supporting his head above the surface until he regained consciousness.

He’d succumbed, Dr. Potkin said, to one of the most common and sometimes fatal dangers of free diving — and one of the reasons you shouldn’t try any prolonged breath-holding unless someone like Mr. Krack is supervising.

“Divers rarely get into trouble at depth,” Dr. Potkin said. “But as the diver approaches the surface, the decreasing water pressure causes a drop in pressure of the oxygen in the brain. If the level in the brain gets too low, it’s like a switch: lights out.”

More:

The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in Brooklyn and at age 11 managed to hold his breath for three and a half minutes.

In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the thin air at 15,000 feet above sea level.

He has been concentrating on lowering his oxygen consumption by slowing his metabolism, partly through diet (he fasted for 18 hours before the breath-hold in the pool) and partly through relaxation. In a test by Dr. Potkin, Mr. Blaine on command quickly lowered his heart rate by 25 percent.

“David seems to have a phenomenal ability, like Buddhist monks, to control his body,” Dr. Potkin said.

When Mr. Blaine began his breath-hold in the pool, his heart rate during the first minute fell to 46 from 81, a drop that was not entirely his own doing. Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.

By exploiting that reflex, free divers can remain active underwater for more than four minutes, and much longer if they remain still. The world-record holders have exceeded nine minutes after filling their lungs with ordinary air, and more than 16 minutes after inhaling pure oxygen.

If you’re working in a big group, you’re fighting human nature

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Matt of 37signals cites British author Antony Jay to support his point that if you’re working in a big group, you’re fighting human nature:

Jay draws attention to units of around this size in many fields beyond the corporation. A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members and the Jewish minyan 10. In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten; the British army, the US army, the ancient Roman army and that of Genghiz Khan, in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.

That mention of the Roman army takes us back some two thousand years, and Jay traces the ten-group back still farther, back to the foraging communities. The ten-group, found today as a structural unit in successful corporations began, he argues, as the male hunting-group of pre-agricultural times, still with us and still functional.

I enjoyed these Antony Jay quotes on other topics:

He’s suffering from Politicians’ Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.

‘Referring the matter to a committee’ can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. Other people can cope with the waves, it’s his job to watch the tide.

You can stop focusing on extraneous collateral and pay attention to what matters instead.

The Suicide Of Marlboro Man

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Fred Reed recounts The Suicide Of Marlboro Man:

What happens is that, in an independent-minded rural county full of hardy yeomen, the density of population grows, either nearby or at distant points on each side. A highway comes through because the truckers lobby in Washington wants it. Building a highway is A Good Thing, because it represents Progress, and provides jobs for a year.

It also makes the country accessible to the big city fifty miles away. A real-estate developer buys 500 acres along the river from the self-reliant character-filled owner. He does this by offering sums of money that water the farmer’s eyes.

First, 500 houses go up in a bedroom suburb called Brook Dale Manor. A year later, 500 more go up at Dale View Estates. This is A Good Thing, because the character-filled independent now-former farmer is exercising his property rights, and because building the suburb creates jobs. The river now looks ugly as the devil, but this is a wacko issue.

At Safeway corporate headquarters, way off God knows where, the new population shows up as a denser shade of green on a computer screen. A new Safeway goes in along the highway. This is A Good Thing, exemplifying free enterprise in action and creating jobs in construction. Further, Safeway sells cheaper, more varied and, truth be known, better food than the half-dozen mom-and-pop stores in the county, which go out of business.

Soon the mall men in the big city hear of the county. A billion-dollar company has no difficulty in buying out a character-filled, self-reliant farmer who makes less than forty thousand dollars a year. A shopping center arrives with a Wal-Mart. This is A Good Thing, etc. Wal-Mart sells almost everything cheaply.

It also puts most of the stores in the country seat out of business. With them go the restaurants, which no longer have the walk-by traffic previously generated by the stores. With the restaurants goes the sense of community that flourishes in a town with eateries and stores and a town square. But this is granola philosophy, appealing only to meddlesome lefties.

K-Mart arrives, along with, beside the highway, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Roy Rogers, and the other way stations on route to coronary occlusion. Strip development is A Good Thing because it represents the exercise of economic freedom. The county’s commerce is now controlled by distant behemoths to whom the place is the equivalent of a pin on a map.

This is A Good Thing. The jobs in these outlets are secure and comfortable. The independent, character-filled frontiersmen are now low-level chain employees, no longer independent because they can be fired.

A third suburb, Brook Manor View Downs, appears. The displaced urbanites in these eyesores now outnumber the character-filled etcs. They are also smarter, have lawyers among their ranks, and co-operate. They quickly come to control the government of the county.

They want city sewerage, more roads, schools, and zoning. The latter isn’t unreasonable. In a sparsely settled county, a few hogs penned out back and a crumbling Merc on blocks don’t matter. In a quarter-acre yuppie ghetto, they do. Next come leash laws and dog licenses. The boisterous clouds of floppy-eared hounds turn illegal.

Prices go up, as do taxes. The profits of farming and commercial crabbing in the river do not go up. The farmers and fishermen are gradually forced to sell their land to developers, and to go into eight-to-fiving. Unfortunately you cannot simultaneously be character-filled and independent and be afraid of your boss. A hardy self-reliant farmer, when he becomes a security guard at the Gap, is a rented peon. The difference between an independent yeoman and a second-rate handyman is independence.

People make more money, and buy houses in Manor Dale Mews, but have less control over their time, and so no longer build their own barns, wire their houses, and change their own clutch-plates. Prosperity is A Good Thing. Its effect is that the children of the hardy yeoman become dependent on others to change their oil, fix their furnaces, and repair their boats.

The new urban majority are frightened by guns. They don’t hunt, knowing that food comes from Safeway and its newly-arrived competitor, Giant. They do not like independent countrymen, whom they refer to as rednecks, grits, and hillbillies. Hunting makes no sense to them anyway, since the migratory flocks are vanishing with the wetlands.

Truth be told, it isn’t safe to have people firing rifles and shotguns in what is increasingly an appendage of the city. The clout of the newcomers makes it harder for the independent whatevers to let their weapons even be seen in public. The dump is closed to rat-shooting.

The children of the hardy rustics do not do as well in school as the offspring of the commuting infestation, and are slowly marginalized. Crime goes up as social bonds break down. Before, everyone pretty much knew everyone and what his car looked like. Strangers stood out. Teenagers raised hell, but there were limits. Now the anonymity of numbers sets in and, anyway, there’s no community any longer.

And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can’t put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else’s wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development . People’s lives are run from afar.

What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman’s inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer’s possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.

I’d like to live again in Mr. Liddy’s world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitable exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can’t keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

Wozniak independently rediscovered something well known by cognitive psychologists — and systematically ignored by educators:

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren’t an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it’s possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is “one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,” the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title “The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research.” The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what’s been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.

The monetary value of liquid commodities

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Nick Szabo examines the monetary value of liquid commodities — like oil and gold:

In modern commodity markets one can exchange money for commodities at almost zero transaction costs. These markets thus reflect not just the supply and demand of the commodity, but also the supply and demand of the currency they are priced in.

Because they combine liquidity with short- and medium-term supply inelasticity, mineral commodities are a good way to hedge a falling currency. When the supply of money increases or is expected to increase, whether because of lower nominal or real interest rates, because the bank that issues the currency is buying government treasury bonds or (like John Law of Mississippi Bubble infamy) mortgage-backed securities[*], or for any other reason, a disproportionate amount of the expected or surprise increase in money supply is soaked up by commodities. Indeed the commodities with the most liquid markets and inelastic supply, such as oil and gold, tend to move in lock-step with each other. Such price movement is strong evidence for the movement being primarily a phenomenon of changing money supply or demand rather than of changing supply or demand for particular commodities. If oil prices were rising primarily due to rising industrial demand for oil, or primarily because oil was getting more expensive technologically to produce (e.g. “peak oil” theory), we’d expect them to move quite differently than gold, which is demanded for primarily non-industrial reasons and has a vastly greater inventory/production ratio on the supply side than oil. That’s not what we see — we see oil and gold moving together, and indeed the price of oil in terms of gold and silver has been practically flat in the recent commodity boom. This is almost entirely due to expected or actual increases in the supplies of the currencies they are traded in (and especially recently in the weak dollar) rather than to “real” factors.

More:

This inflation only slowly percolates into price rises in other goods and services, which tend to be far more rigid than commodities. Wages are particularly rigid. Because the U.S. Federal Reserve and most other central banks regulate their money supplies based on trailing indicators of inflation(e.g. consumer price indices) rather than leading indicators (commodity prices), it is no surprise that their decisions tend to produce boom-and-bust cycles in commodities, and that to a lesser and more delayed extent they cause both general inflation and recessions. No uncommon demand from China or the like is needed to explain the recent commodity boom, just as no such rise in demand or long-term fall in supply was needed to explain the very similar commodity boom in the 1970s. But since most people judge supply and demand of a commodity by nominal price, both in the 1970s and now we get a lot of irrational hysteria about “running out”, “peak oil”, how our energy industries and consumption are “unsustainable”, etc. I’ll believe that when oil per barrel doubles or more with respect to gold and silver. When they move together, we’re just being fooled by monetary instability, and most of the current disproportionate increase in investment in energy supplies and conservation, whether traditional or renewable, is malinvestment in response to highly distorted nominal price signals, as is the accompanying political bubble of “energy security”, conservation enforced through idiotic micro-regulations (e.g. banning traditional light bulbs), and so on.

Commodities are just another kind of money — a better kind, at least some of the time:

Another way of putting this is that, when currencies become unreliable as a store of value, commodities take on part of that monetary role. Both oil and gold increase in value by performing this monetary function better than the currency against which they are being traded, better than credit instruments denominated in that currency, and even better, in the short term, than stocks of companies that do business primarily in that currency. The joint movements in oil and gold reflect their value, relative to the currency they are priced in, performing the monetary function of a store of value. Global supplies and industrial demands for minerals are far less volatile than the change in their value in this monetary role. It’s the logical emergence of money from barter, but this emergence goes on every day that liquid commodities act as a better store of value than the currency in which they are priced. Contrariwise, as the currency becomes a better store of value than the commodity, these commodities move back down towards just being commodities valued only for their consumption. Thus their exaggerated moves, both upward and downward, in reaction to changing expectations of future increases or decreases in money supply.

When Neighbors Become Farmers

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

What happens When Neighbors Become Farmers?

Unlike traditional home gardeners who devote a corner of the yard to a few rows of vegetables, a new crop of minifarmers is tearing up the whole yard and planting foods such as arugula and kohlrabi that restaurants might want to buy. The locally grown food movement has also created a new market for front-yard farmers.

“Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban,” says Roxanne Christensen, publisher of Spin-Farming LLC, a Philadelphia company started in 2005 that sells guides and holds seminars teaching a small-scale farming technique that involves selecting high-profit vegetables like kale, carrots and tomatoes to grow, and then quickly replacing crops to reap the most from plots smaller than an acre. “Land is very expensive in the country, so people are saying, ‘why not just start growing in the backyard?’”

Environmentalists embrace the practice because it cuts the distance — and the carbon dioxide — needed to get food from farm to consumer. It also means less grass to water and fertilize and fewer purely ornamental plants. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly a third of all residential water use goes to landscaping. Why not use it to grow food instead?

Although decentralized gardening may bring food closer to end consumers, that does not mean that it will reduce the energy used — or carbon dioxide produced — to transport that food to end consumers, because it is much, much more efficient to transport goods in large quantities over long distances via ship, train, or truck, than to transport small quantities over short distances via car or small truck. That is the localvore’s dilemma.

Here are some numbers:

Start-up costs for a one-eighth-acre farm run about $5,500, says Ms. Christensen of Spin-Farming. That includes a walk-in cooler to wash and store fresh produce, a rotary tiller and a farm-stand display. Annual operating expenses, including seeds and farmers-market stall fees, can add about $2,000. Such a farm can generate $10,000 to $20,000 in annual sales, she says. That’s “an entry point into farming to see if they have a talent for it,” Ms. Christensen says. “Those that do will eventually be able to expand and increase that income level quite substantially.”

Susan and Greg VanHecke planted a small, 6-foot-by-20-foot vegetable garden in the back of their house in Norfolk, Va., two years ago to help teach their two children to grow and eat more vegetables. Reaping a bumper crop last year, Mr. VanHecke asked the owner of a local restaurant called Stove for whom he once worked as a sous-chef, to buy vegetables. Soon, Mr. VanHecke was making weekly deliveries to the restaurant, averaging about $100 in sales per week. The VanHeckes have added another restaurant customer this year and are tearing up all their backyard flower beds to grow more vegetables.

They’re also trying to figure out how to more easily fit farming into their otherwise busy schedules. Even minifarms take a lot of time, and suburbanites with full-time jobs find themselves a little stretched.

The VanHeckes decided to be practical and replace their labor-intensive lettuce crop with easier vegetables. “My husband would come home from his all-day job [as a Navy officer] and snip leaves and wash them one-by-one,” says Ms. VanHecke, 43. “Things like tomatoes, you can just rinse them. You don’t have to spend your whole evening [on] them.”

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Formula 1 is not going hybrid

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Formula 1 is not going hybrid, but it is adding regenerative braking — without the Prius-like batteries and electric motors:

The KERS [Kinetic Energy Recovery System] is basically an efficient CVT [Continuously Variable Transmission] gearbox joined to a flywheel that rotates when the cars undergo braking. The stored energy can then be used to boost acceleration for overtaking and cornering, and will work like the power-boost button seen in the A1GP.

The variator-flywheel solution is being developed by a partnership of two companies, Torotrak and Xtrac:

Torotrak and Xtrac believe that the variator-flywheel solution provides a significantly more compact, efficient, lighter and environmentally-friendly solution than the traditional alternative of electrical-battery systems.

“The variator weighs less than 5kg in these applications and provides a high level of mechanical efficiency, enabling the overall mass of the mechanical KERS systems to be minimised,” says Chris Greenwood, technology director at Torotrak. “This mechanical efficiency, combined with the variator’s ability to change ratio very rapidly, helps to optimise flywheel performance.”

The two companies consider that the system is applicable to other motor sports and everyday vehicles and see the potential for wider applications — particularly on high-performance road cars — as an aid to performance and also as a means of developing future vehicles with reduced CO 2 emission levels.

The system supports the current trend in powertrain design for engine downsizing by providing a means of boosting acceleration, overall performance and economy independently of the vehicle’s engine and without the need for complex electrical-battery hybrid architectures.

A CVT-controlled flywheel is particularly suited to stop-start driving situations when real-world fuel economy is often at its worst. In these conditions, the variator-flywheel system can assist the launch of a vehicle which has slowed down or come to a standstill, by utilising the kinetic energy stored in the flywheel. In heavily congested traffic, where a car is frequently stopped and restarted, the system can help alleviate the heavy fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gasses normally associated with these conditions.

For the F1 applications, the stored kinetic energy can be applied by the driver on demand whenever required — at a rate and for a time period set by the regulations — to boost performance for rapid acceleration. The device is particularly beneficial when exiting corners or for tricky overtaking manoeuvres.

You Walk Wrong

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

According to Adam Sternbergh, You Walk Wrong — because you’re wearing shoes:

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans — i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers — had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

Shoe designers are starting to design minimalist shoes with extremely thin, flexible soles:

At first glance, this seems like a sensible and obvious approach — to work with the foot, not against it. But it represents a fundamental break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our arches up.

There are, of course, a thousand other factors that have influenced shoe design through the ages; for example, people like shoes that look nice. High heels have never, ever been comfortable, but they do make the wearer feel sexy. In fact, the idea of strolling idly through urban environments has only been fashionable, or even feasible, in Western society for about 200 years. Before that, cities had few real sidewalks, the streets were swimming in sewage, and walking as a form of locomotion was associated with poverty and the working class. “Only the upper classes, and especially women, could wear shoes that clearly defined an inability to walk very far,” writes Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello in the essay “Walking the Streets of London and Paris: Shoes in the Enlightenment.” Walking was for peasants, who were “barefoot and pregnant”; the rich, or “well-heeled,” took carriages.

Of course, more recently we’ve become interested in shoes that are promoted as being comfortable, whether they’re cushioned walking shoes or high-tech sneakers with pumps and torsion bars. Still, the basic philosophy — that shoes have to augment, or in some cases supersede, or in some cases flat-out ignore, the way your foot works naturally — has remained the same. We were not born with air bubbles in our soles, so Nike provided them for us.

Try this test: Take off your shoe, and put it on a tabletop. Chances are the toe tip on your shoes will bend slightly upward, so that it doesn’t touch the table’s surface. This is known as “toe spring,” and it’s a design feature built into nearly every shoe. Of course, your bare toes don’t curl upward; in fact, they’re built to grip the earth and help you balance. The purpose of toe spring, then, is to create a subtle rocker effect that allows your foot to roll into the next step. This is necessary because the shoe, by its nature, won’t allow your foot to work in the way it wants to. Normally your foot would roll very flexibly through each step, from the heel through the outside of your foot, then through the arch, before your toes give you a powerful propulsive push forward into the next step. But shoes aren’t designed to be very flexible. Sure, you can take a typical shoe in your hands and bend it in the middle, but that bend doesn’t fall where your foot wants to bend; in fact, if you bent your foot in that same place, your foot would snap in half. So to compensate for this lack of flexibility, shoes are built with toe springs to help rock you forward. You only need this help, of course, because you’re wearing shoes.

Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet — what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.

Okay, but what about a good pair of athletic shoes? After all, they swaddle your foot in padding to protect you from the unforgiving concrete. But that padding? That’s no good for you either. Consider a paper titled “Athletic Footwear: Unsafe Due to Perceptual Illusions,” published in a 1991 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According to another study, people in expensive cushioned running shoes were twice as likely to suffer an injury — 31.9 injuries per 1,000 kilometers, as compared with 14.3 — than were people who went running in hard-soled shoes.

FightMetric Total Performance Rating

Monday, April 21st, 2008

The folks at FightMetric have decided to compile stats from mixed martial arts fights and to compute a Total Performance Rating from those stats.

For an idea of the stats they decided to use, take a look at their scoresheet:



From striking distance they score both jabs and power shots to the head, just power shots to the body, and neither to the legs. (All strikes, whether punches, kicks, knees, or elbows are divided into jabs and power shots.)

From the clinch they score just power shots to the head or body — and various takedowns.

From the ground they score just power shots to the head — and various submissions and grappling transitions.

What’s peculiar, from my perspective, is that they decided what was important simply by deciding what was important. They thought about it, and they surveyed some fans, but didn’t run any kind of analysis to determine what stats lead to a win — or they haven’t explained it if they did. The closest they came was normalizing the coefficients so that the average winner’s score would be 55 and the average loser’s score 45.



(Hat tip to John.)

An open letter to open-minded progressives

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Mencius Moldbug offers an open letter to open-minded progressives:

Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any consistent relationship to reality.

Let’s think about this for a second. As a progressive, you believe — you must believe — that conservatism is a mass delusion. What an extraordinary thing! A hundred-plus million people, many quite dull but some remarkably intelligent, all acting under a kind of mass hypnosis. We take this for granted. We are used to it. But we have to admit that it’s really, really weird.

What you have to believe is that conservatives have been systematically misinformed. They are not stupid — at least not all of them. Nor are they evil. You can spend all the time you want on townhall.com, and you will not find anyone cackling like Gollum over their evil plan to enslave and destroy the world. They all think, just like you, that by being conservatives they are standing up for what’s sweet and good and true.

Conservatism is a theory of government held by a large number of people who have no personal experience of government. They hold this theory because their chosen information sources, such as Fox News, townhall.com, and their local megachurch, feed them a steady diet of facts (and possibly a few non-facts) which tend to support, reinforce, and confirm the theory.

And why does this strange pattern exist? Because conservatism is not just an ordinary opinion. Suppose instead of a theory of government, conservatism was a theory of basketball. “Conservatism” would be a system of views about the pick-and-roll, the outside game, the triangle defense and other issues of great importance to basketball players and coaches.

The obvious difference is that, unless you are a basketball coach, your opinions on basketball matter not at all — because basketball is not a democracy. The players don’t even get a vote, let alone the fans. But conservatism can maintain a systematic pattern of delusion, because its fans are not just fans: they are supporters of a political machine. This machine will disappear if it cannot keep its believers, so it has an incentive to keep them. And it does. Funny how that works.

So, as a progressive, here is how you see American democracy: as a contest in which truth and reason are pitted against a quasicriminal political machine built on propaganda, ignorance and misinformation. Perhaps a cynical view of the world, but if you believe that progressivism is right, you must believe that conservatism is wrong, and you have no other option.

But there is an even more pessimistic view. Suppose American democracy is not a contest between truth and reason and a quasicriminal political machine, but a contest between two quasicriminal political machines? Suppose progressivism is just like conservatism? If it was, who would tell you?

How our frog was boiled

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Nick Szabo explains how our frog was boiled:

The expansion of power of the U.S. federal government was not primarily due to villians, crises, or revolutions, but far more resembled the proverbial boiling frog: it mostly happened by small and obscure steps that were not widely noted by lovers of freedom at the time, and have seldom been noted by us since. The slow rot of Constitutional protections against federal power stemmed from subtle but endemic flaws in the original frame of our federal government, the rise of an economy where large numbers of people earned income from auditable corporations (making the income tax, the most lucrative tax in history, practical), and the disappearance of frontiers of free land to which the overtaxed or overregulated could flee.

He focuses on the procedural flaws in our Constitution:

The U.S. Constitution lists a number of enumerated powers, beyond which Congress was granted no power to legislate. In other words, the U.S. Congress was supposed to have a small, close-ended list of powers, and this is still recognized by the Supreme Court as theoretically true today. If this had remained true in practice, as well as legal theory, the U.S. federal government would be a radically libertarian entity today. That it is no longer practically true, is, more than any other factor, due to the long series of usurpations of power by Congress under the Commerce Clause, which in its words gives the Congress the power to regulate “commerce among the States.” At the time, this power was thought to be limited to power to regulate the transport of goods and persons across State boundaries, and indeed in the first century of the Constitution it was largely in practical fact so limited. (There are a number of other causes, such as the 16th Amendment of 1913 legalizing the income tax, but the Commerce Clause is the way in which Congress has most expanded its power to regulated, and an extremely vast expansion it has been).

It’s fairly obvious why Congress, by itself, has not and would not seriously let any kind of Constitutional text limit its own power. Less obvious is why the Supreme Court, which has the final word on interpreting Congressional power to legislate under the Constitution, would allow Congress to so greatly expand its powers. But that is just what it did, by many slow and incremental steps.

Under Chief Justice Marshall, there were a number of cases restricting the power of States to regulate what Marshall argued was interstate commerce, and thus under federal jurisdiction. In immediate effect these were libertarian decisions, since they overturned often burdensome State laws. The Marshall Court, and the Story Court that followed it, refused to find, even once, any limits on the federal Commerce Clause power. Although it was generally agreed that “commerce among the States” was limited to the transport of goods and persons across state lines, Marshall refused to define it in this manner, or indeed define any clear outer limited to the Commerce power. Indeed, in dicta (sentences in a legal opinion that are not legally binding, because they are not logically necessary for reaching the verdict), Marshall suggested that any activity that “effects” such transport might be regulated. Although Marshall’s nationalist ideology set the tone, overturning state laws and ignoring federal laws, this pattern of limiting state usurpations but ignoring federal usurpations was largely continued by future courts, for reasons of bias or conflicts of interest caused by court selection and structure which I describe here.

Although there were a handful of cases limiting the Commerce Clause in very narrow and specific ways at the end of the 19th century, the Swift v. U.S. case in 1905 greatly expanded the Clause’s scope to cover manufacturing, not just the transport of goods or persons across State borders, on the theory that the manufactured goods would end up in interstate commerce. This was part of the so-called “Progressive” movement, the rise of the modern religion of “the government”, an omnipotent deity called upon by the national press to solve any major problem deemed to be national in scope. This era saw the greatest expansions of federal power in U.S. history, including its basic tools of financial power, the Federal Reserve system and the 16th Amendment in 1913 legalizing the income tax. During this era, in which states also greatly expanded their powers, the Supreme Court was again far more active at limiting the states than limiting federal power. The “Progressive Era” was a very broad and general ideological movement, and most of it cannot be pinned on any particular politician. Drivers of the movement included the steam press and news wire agencies, which promulgated a national view (that vague godlike phrase, “the government”, came to refer to the federal rather than state government during this era). Under this new media system information transfer became dominated by the press releases of powerful governments and corporations. The spread of government-mandated education, again inculcating a very nationalist view, in the latter half of the 19th century also played a large role. The end of free arable land on the Western frontier and the rise of the auditable corporation also played crucial roles in facilitating much greater levels of taxation. During this era, except for a handful of minor victories, the federal courts did not prevent Congress and the President under the impetus of this movement from usurping vast powers not granted them under the original meaning of the Constitution.

After this, the New Deal simply delivered the coup de grace. In Wickard v. Fillburn, the Court proved it had no desire to limit the federal government in any serious way, using Marshall’s “effects” dicta to justify its holding that growing wheat on your own small farm for your own consumption is “commerce among the States.” Quite recently, the Supreme Court reconfirmed this absurdity: growing marijuana in your house is also “commerce among the States.” And thus the frog has been boiled.

Shape-shifting skin to reduce drag on planes and subs

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Shape-shifting skin to reduce drag on planes and subs:

It might seem counterintuitive to reduce drag by wrinkling the surface of a craft, but nature provides a precedent. “Dolphins induce their skin to wrinkle, so water won’t stick to them,” says Lagoudas.

After calculating that this approach would work, his team tested designs for an “active skin” that shifts to the shape of an ideal surface wave.

One design uses “legs” just beneath the skin that lengthen under the influence of an electric field, bending the skin upwards. By controlling the field around each piezoceramic leg, Lagoudas’ team can deform the skin into corrugations of right wavelength and amplitude to cut down drag.

The corrugations can be at most 30 micrometres high. “We measured flow velocities very close to the skin and derived the skin friction drag — we have seen reductions as much as 50%,” says researcher Othon Rediniotis.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Scientists unlock frozen natural gas

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Scientists unlock frozen natural gas — potentially lots and lots of frozen natural gas:

For a decade now, Dallimore and scientists from a half-dozen other countries have been returning to a site on Richards Island on the very northwestern tip of the Northwest Territories to study methane gas hydrates.

A hydrate is created when a molecule of gas — in this case, methane or natural gas — is trapped by high pressures and low temperatures inside a cage of water molecules. The result is almost — but not quite — ice. It’s more like a dry, white slush suffusing the sand and gravel 1,000 metres beneath the Mallik rig.

Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses.

More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 164 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas.

And gas hydrate fields are found in abundance under the coastal waters of every continent. Calculations suggest there’s more energy in gas hydrates than in coal, oil and conventional gas combined.

Getting that energy to flow consistently and predictably, however, has been the problem. Using heat to release the gas works, but requires too much energy to be useful. Researchers have also been trying to release the methane by reducing the pressure on it.

Last month, the Mallik team became the first to use that method to get a steady, consistent flow.

China Stocks, Once Frothy, Fall by Half In Six Months

Monday, April 21st, 2008

China Stocks, Once Frothy, Fall by Half In Six Months — after increasing six-fold over the last couple years:

The sharp decline in Chinese stocks is approaching a milestone: With a 4% drop Friday, the market has fallen by nearly half since its peak last fall. The decline has wiped out nearly $2.5 trillion of wealth and is testing the government’s apparent resolve to let the market find equilibrium on its own.

The plunge has slashed the savings of millions of Chinese investors who jumped into the market as it rose six-fold in two years. It is crimping expansion in the country’s nascent financial sector and may put a squeeze in corporate coffers. But so far, it has not slowed the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has lost 49% since topping out, along with other global markets, last October. The slide was triggered by the global economic slowdown combined with the lofty valuations of Chinese stocks. It accelerated recently as investors became convinced the government would not intervene to stop the fall. The index finished Friday at 3094.67, down 4%.

While Chinese shares have been among the hardest-hit anywhere, some other emerging markets have also had a tough time, falling 6% so far this year after rising an average of 32% a year over the past five years. The other big loser is India, which was the other big winner over the past few years. The Mumbai Sensex Index is down 19% so far this year.

The 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Cringely lists the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants:

  1. “This can only be accomplished through a large custom development project.”
  2. “Of course your data is safe.”
  3. “We’ll need a day or two for optimization and debugging.”
  4. “Yes, we’ve done this before. There are several companies using this product (or technology). They really like it.”
  5. “Server consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”
  6. “Storage consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”
  7. “The upgrade (or change) will be seamless and will not affect production.”
  8. “The upgrade (or change) will be transparent to users.”
  9. “Yes, we tested this thoroughly before installing it.”
  10. “If you install Tivoli it will solve all your support problems.”