Jacob Sullum cites the Self-Refuting Drug Warriors‘ own numbers for the percentage of people who became “dependent” on various drugs within two years of trying them:
Inhalants: 0.9%
Tranquilizers (nonmedical use): 1.2%
Psychedelics: 1.9%
Sedatives (nonmedical use): 2.4%
Painkillers (nonmedical use): 3.1%
Alcohol: 3.2%
Cocaine Powder: 3.7%
Stimulants (nonmedical use): 4.7%
Marijuana: 5.8%
Crack Cocaine: 9.2%
Heroin: 13.4%
Chopping down trees to make books is good for the environment — provided you then line your walls with bookcases. I suppose lining all my interior walls has done very little to reduce my heating and cooling needs.
Paul Graham says, Be Good:
When you’re small, you can’t bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you’re big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it’s easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So “Don’t be evil” may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I’m sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.
Cringely lists the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants:
In Free Will, If Any, Fred Reed remarks that “One of the funnier illusions of mankind is that our behavior is rational”:
Teenagers begin their political existence by realizing that they understand everything far better than their parents do. They join crusades to retake Jerusalem or to save the world from the International Monetary Fund. They believe they are making principled choices. Their reasons are often persuasive: The young are not necessarily stupid, despite convincing simulations. They can both learn much about the IMF, and weave arguments both subtle and sanctimonious.But it’s always something, and always at the same age. If it isn’t the IMF, it’s stopping the war in Vietnam, or saving the baby seals, or ending international finance capitalism. These causes may be good ones, but only accidentally. When five hundred generations do the same things, one begins to suspect that the fix is in.
I don’t know if I’d call this “pulsating electrochemical reaction” a mercury beating heart, but it is interesting:
A drop of mercury in a watch glass is covered with a solution of potassium chromate in concentrated sulfuric acid. An iron nail is positioned so that it nearly touches the mercury. Eventually, the mercury drop starts to beat rhythmically, like a beating heart.
Thousands of people are losing their jobs on Wall Street — some before their first day of work:
Since August, the financial industry has shed more than 38,000 jobs as a result of the credit crisis and the collapse of Bear Stearns. Citigroup added to the misery on Friday, saying it would eliminate 9,000 more jobs. No one thinks the pain will end there.The angst is most acute at Bear. Many of its 14,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs in the coming months. JPMorgan is running what its chief executive, James Dimon, has called a “military operation” to decide which employees at both banks will stay and which will go.
For now, many of Bear’s might-have-beens say they will keep hunting for jobs on Wall Street, where the typical new college graduate earns a starting annual salary of $80,000 or more, plus bonus.
And JPMorgan is offering the student recruits consolation prizes, provided they play by its rules. They can keep hefty signing bonuses that Bear promised them — $10,000 for college seniors, and about $50,000 for M.B.A. students — if they sign contracts in which they agree not to sue the bank over their rescinded jobs. If they do not sign, JPMorgan says, they cannot keep the money, which many of the students received last fall.
JPMorgan is also offering to let the students use its career counseling center, where they can hone interview skills and brush up résumés. The bank will pay students who accepted summer internships at Bear Stearns, putting some to work in its own divisions and others to work at charities.
Before disaster struck, Bear Stearns — one of the most prestigious employers in campus career offices — signed on about 300 undergraduates and M.B.A.’s for full-time positions and about 300 interns for the summer. But those offers were thrown into question in March, when the 85-year-old company, undone by what amounted to a bank run, agreed to be acquired by JPMorgan in a controversial deal brokered by the federal government.
The students’ fate depended on which corner of Bear they were going to join. Those who had signed on in the equities, banking and fixed-income divisions generally lost their jobs. Those who had joined in the energy, prime brokerage and merchant banking division will go to work for JPMorgan.
Fred Reed wonders if we’ve given enough thought to The Feminization Of America:
In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power. Often nations have had queens, heiresses, and female aristocrats. These do not amount to much. Today women occupy positions of genuine authority in fields that matter, as for example publishing, journalism, and academia. They control education through high school. Politicians scramble for their votes. They control the divorce courts and usually get their way with things that matter to them.If this is not unprecedented, I do not know of the precedent. What will be the consequences?
Men have controlled the world through most of history so we know what they do: build things, break things, invent things, compete with each other fiercely and often pointlessly, and fight endless wars that seem to them justifiable at the time but that, seen from afar, are just what males do. The unanswered question is what women would, or will, do. How will their increasing influence reshape the polity?
Women and men want very different things and therefore very different worlds. Men want sex, freedom, and adventure; women want security, pleasantness, and someone to care about (or for) them. Both like power. Men use it to conquer their neighbors whether in business or war, women to impose security and pleasantness.
I do not suggest that the instinctive behavior of women is necessarily bad, nor that of men necessarily good. I do suggest that that the effects will be profound, probably irreversible, and not necessarily entirely to the liking of either sex. The question may be whether one fears most being conquered or being nicened to death.
Sillof’s Workshop is home to all kinds of custom figures based on well-known characters, but with a twist — like Steampunk Star Wars, Gaslight Justice League, and Victorian Avengers.
(Hat tip to GeekDad.)
IBM launches internal pilot program to test migration to Macs:
The first phase of the pilot program is said to have run from October 2007 through January 2008, in which 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers at different sites within the company’s research division.In the documents obtained by Roughly Drafted, the former PC-maker outlined a series of reasons for evaluating Apple notebooks as a replacement for the Windows-based ThinkPads currently used inside the company.
Specifically, it said Macs are less prone to security issues, are widely used in the academic world with which IBM Research has close ties, and that many new company hires have said they’re more comfortable with Macs and would like to use them as opposed to their ThinkPads.
During the initial pilot, participants were allowed to keep their ThinkPads, but were asked to use them only in the event that they needed to use software that was not yet available on the Mac. After the four month test period, the 14 research scientists, 8 software engineers, a director, and a VP staff assistant participating in the pilot program were asked to provide feedback.
Of the 22 of 24 who responded, Roughly Drafted reported that 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.” Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 said they had moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.
While all of the participants reported that it was easy to install IBM’s internal software on the Macs, several noted weakness or drawbacks associated with applications that were not yet suited for the Apple platform, or faced support issues. Among these were Microsoft’s Visio diagraming and NetMeeting software, and several of IBM’s own applications, such as its DB2 database and Websphere application server.
However, when asked if they would rather keep their MacBook Pro or return to using their familiar ThinkPad, only three chose the ThinkPad; the rest decided to keep the Mac notebook and obtain VMWare Fusion licenses to run Windows when necessary.
The McKinsey Quarterly has published an excellent interview with Pixar’s Brad Bird, in which he shares his “innovation lessons”:
The Quarterly: What attracted you to Pixar?Brad Bird: One thing that was unbelievably different about this company was that they were worried about becoming complacent. When I came here, they had made three movies — Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2 — that had all been big hits. I was coming off a film called The Iron Giant that was a highly regarded financial failure.
Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter said, in effect, “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency — feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.” For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, “Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up” — when do you run into that?
[...]
So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well. We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.
[...]
The Quarterly: Do angry people — malcontents, in your words — make for better innovation? Can you be innovative and also happy?Brad Bird: I would say that involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between — what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.
[...]
The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team that collaborates in the way you’re describing?Brad Bird: When I directed The Iron Giant, I inherited a team that was totally broken — a bunch of miserable people who had just gone through a horrific experience on a previous film that had bombed. When the time came for animators to start showing me their work, I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person.
For my reviews, I got a video projector and had an animator’s scenes projected onto a dry-erase board. I could freeze a frame and take a marker and show where I thought things should be versus where they were. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit. I’m going to take my shot at what I think will improve a scene, but if you see something different, go ahead and disagree. I don’t know all the answers.”
So I started in: “I think the elbow needs to come up higher here so that we feel the thrust of this action.” “I’m not seeing the thought process on the character here.” “Does anybody disagree? Come on, speak up.” The room was silent because with the previous director, anyone who dared to say anything got their head chopped off.
For two months, I pushed and analyzed each person’s work in front of everybody. And they didn’t speak up. One day, I did my thing, and one of the guys sighed. I shouted, “What was that?” And he said, “Nothing man, it’s OK.” And I said, “No, you sighed. Clearly, you disagree with something I did there. Show me what you’re thinking. I might not have it right. You might. Show me.” So he came up, and I handed him the dry-erase marker. He erased what I did. Then he did something different and explained why he thought it ought to be that way. I said, “That’s better than what I did. Great.” Everybody saw that he didn’t get his head chopped off. And our learning curve went straight up. By the end of the film, that animation team was much stronger than at the beginning, because we had all learned from each other’s strengths. But it took two months for people to feel safe enough to speak up.
[...]
The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget — but never shows up in a budget — is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.
Researchers uncover details about how dietary restriction slows down aging:
Working in yeast cells, the researchers have linked ribosomes, the protein-making factories in living cells, and Gcn4, a specialized protein that aids in the expression of genetic information, to the pathways related to dietary response and aging. The study, which was led by [University of Washington] faculty members Brian Kennedy and Matt Kaeberlein, appears in the April 18 issue of the journal Cell.
Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution after Introduction to a New Home — but they don’t seem to grow to skyscraper height or breath atomic fire:
In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.“Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure.” Results of the study were published March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
IBM launches internal pilot program to test migration to Macs:
The first phase of the pilot program is said to have run from October 2007 through January 2008, in which 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers at different sites within the company’s research division.In the documents obtained by Roughly Drafted, the former PC-maker outlined a series of reasons for evaluating Apple notebooks as a replacement for the Windows-based ThinkPads currently used inside the company.
Specifically, it said Macs are less prone to security issues, are widely used in the academic world with which IBM Research has close ties, and that many new company hires have said they’re more comfortable with Macs and would like to use them as opposed to their ThinkPads.
During the initial pilot, participants were allowed to keep their ThinkPads, but were asked to use them only in the event that they needed to use software that was not yet available on the Mac. After the four month test period, the 14 research scientists, 8 software engineers, a director, and a VP staff assistant participating in the pilot program were asked to provide feedback.
Of the 22 of 24 who responded, Roughly Drafted reported that 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.” Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 said they had moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.
While all of the participants reported that it was easy to install IBM’s internal software on the Macs, several noted weakness or drawbacks associated with applications that were not yet suited for the Apple platform, or faced support issues. Among these were Microsoft’s Visio diagraming and NetMeeting software, and several of IBM’s own applications, such as its DB2 database and Websphere application server.
However, when asked if they would rather keep their MacBook Pro or return to using their familiar ThinkPad, only three chose the ThinkPad; the rest decided to keep the Mac notebook and obtain VMWare Fusion licenses to run Windows when necessary.
There's no room for football in Westbrook's heart. He has moved on from the NFL to jiu-jitsu:
There’s a weightlifting session at a health club in the morning. At night, he walks into that back room and becomes exactly what he and the Redskins had hoped for when he was drafted with the No. 4 overall selection out of Colorado. Here at 7:30 on most nights, Westbrook is the best athlete around, excelling with every movement, while totally at peace.In a room that looks like a basketball court without baskets, and a floor covered with blue mats, the guy who came up short of forecasts to be the best wide receiver ever, is well on his way to elite status in Brazilian jujitsu.
The sport is similar to wrestling in that it’s a ground-based fight, but is far more technical. Westbrook dabbled in martial arts during his football days, but didn’t really get into Brazilian jujitsu until his career ended in 2002. He’s won national and Pan-Am championships as a blue and purple belt and he hopes to soon become a brown belt. If all goes according to plan, he’ll be a black belt — the highest level in the sport — within a couple years. Generally, most black belts take eight to 10 years of intense training to reach that level.
Westbrook dabbled briefly in Ultimate Fighting, defeating former NFL player Jarrod Bunch in his only bout.
Imagine rolling with a guy with these physical attributes:
Westbrook walked away from the game after one last dismal season with the Cincinnati Bengals in 2002.“I could still jump over 40 inches, still run the 40 in about 4.3 and still bench press 400 pounds,” Westbrook said. “I still had my physical skills. But mentally — mentally — the game made me toast.”