Idiocracy is not a good movie, but its premise could make for a good movie:
Idiocracy
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Russia’s Rambo of the Forest
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Russia’s Rambo of the Forest died in a police shoot-out:
A heavily armed recluse nicknamed Russia’s Rambo of the Forest has been gunned down in a shoot-out with police.Alexander Bichkov, had lived a semi-feral existence in the woods for 20 years, terrorising locals and the police if they ventured near him.
A giant at 6ft 7in with a wild straggly beard, the man lived in an old shack and self-made camps, hunted animals for food and only ventured out of the forest in summer when he wouldn’t leave footprints leading back to where he lived.
Russian police said he descended from a family of criminals who were exiled by Stalin to the Kostroma region 450 miles east of Moscow, in the 1940s.
At the end of Soviet times nearly 20 years ago he disappeared from his home in a village in the region after refusing a court order to pay alimony to his ex-wife following an acrimonious divorce.
He was declared dead by his family in 1997 because he had been missing for so long.
But now it is known the former forestry worker had fled into the dense Kologriv woods near his village, which were designated as a nature reserve a few years ago.
Terrified local police refused to go into the woods to hunt him down ever since he captured a local commander while out hunting and held him at gunpoint for hours before freeing him and then disappearing into the trees.
Even after he burned down 30 holiday homes in the area belonging to rich Muscovites, police refused to pursue the man they dubbed “Rambo”, after the popular action-film hero played by Sylvester Stallone, who was skilled in weaponry and survival.
They did not know — until killing him on March 14 — his true identity, which was obtained from documents they found and through checks with his family.
He was finally shot after the head of the Department of Natural Reserves in Moscow, angered by the inaction of local police, ordered a surveillance operation on him.
After finding out where he lived, six specialist policemen — including Afghan war veterans — from outside the local police and four armed Park rangers went into the forest on snowmobiles to hunt him down and try to arrest him.
But the hermit, who carried two shotguns and a home-made pistol, ambushed them and wounded two.
He then set alight a swathe of forest as a diversion, tracked behind the men and was apparently preparing to start firing on them again.
But a police sniper managed to shoot him in the head, killing him instantly.
One of the policemen, Andrei Potemkin, said: “He ambushed us and I told him to surrender and that we wouldn’t hurt him.
“He yelled ‘I’ve nothing to lose’ and opened fire.
“He hit two of the others and fired at me. My bullet-proof vest saved my life. He then set his place on fire, and everything was covered with smoke.
“He’s a real professional. While we were helping the wounded, he made a circle around us, hiding in the smoke, and cut us off.
“It was pure chance the sniper suddenly saw his figure in the trees and pulled the trigger. He shot him right in the head and he died in a flash.”
Police later found in his semi-destroyed lair more weapons, dozens of furs, hundreds of traps and books about hunting and survival.
Locals told of their relief that the man who had haunted the region for so long was dead.
Maria Muzhalova said: “Parents would not let their children go to school without dogs going with them.
“He would steal boots from outside people’s homes and steal potatoes from the fields. If you came across him in the summer, he was way too scary-looking to confront him.”
Director of the Kologriv nature reserve, Maxim Sinitzin said; “We were all sick and tired of him. He kept leaving traps for animals everywhere.
“We’d break them and he’d make more. Once he trapped three of our inspectors and told them he’d kill them if he ever saw them in the woods again.”
Sprints may be best for diabetes prevention
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Fitness orthodoxy shifts slowly. New research demonstrates that sprints may be best for diabetes prevention:
Timmons and his team found that young sedentary men who did just 15 minutes of all-out sprinting on an exercise bike spread out over two weeks substantially improved their ability to metabolize glucose (sugar). Traditional aerobic exercise programs can boost sensitivity to the key blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin. The high-intensity program did this too, but it also directly reduced the men’s blood sugar levels — something that standard exercise programs have not been shown to do.
Which political system is the most suitable for Russia?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Gallup asked Russians, Which political system is the most suitable for Russia?
New Procedure Uses Athletes’ Own Blood to Treat Injuries
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009A new procedure uses athletes’ own blood to treat injuries by injecting the “growth-factor cocktail” right where it’s needed — including poorly vascularized tissues, like ligaments and tendons:
Platelet-rich plasma is derived by placing a small amount of the patient’s blood in a filtration system or centrifuge that rotates at high speed, separating red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in the body’s self-healing process, doctors said. A teaspoon or two of the remaining substance is then injected into the damaged area. The high concentration of platelets — from 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — often catalyzes the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells. Because the substance is injected where blood would rarely go otherwise, it can deliver the healing instincts of platelets without triggering the clotting response for which platelets are typically known.“This could be a method to stimulate wound healing in areas that are not well-vascularized, like ligaments and tendons,” said Dr. Gerjo van Osch, a researcher in the department of orthopedics at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “I call it a growth-factor cocktail — that’s how I explain it.”
Dr. van Osch and several other experts said they had used the procedure as a first option before surgery for reasons beyond its early results. There is little chance for rejection or allergic reaction because the substance is autologous, meaning it comes from the patient’s own body; the injection carries far less chance for infection than an incision and leaves no scar, and it takes only about 20 minutes, with a considerably shorter recovery time than after surgery.
Because of those apparent benefits, the consensus among doctors is that the procedure is worth pursuing. However, several doctors emphasized that platelet-rich plasma therapy as it stands now appeared ineffective in about 20 to 40 percent of cases, depending on the injury. But they added that because the procedure costs about $2,000 — compared with $10,000 to $15,000 for surgery — they expected that with more refinement, insurance companies would eventually not only authorize the use of PRP therapy but even require it as a first course of treatment.
The Chinese Are Going to Kick Our Asses
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Shannon Love believes that the Chinese are going to kick our asses:
We’re going to power our economy with scavenged energy [PDF] from intermittent, low-density solar and wind power. The Chinese are going to power their economy with eight-packs of nuclear reactors that they roll off assembly lines in vast numbers.We have a culture that holds engineers and inventors in contempt and views new technologies first and foremost as threats to be mitigated. The Chinese nearly worship engineers and inventors and adopt new technologies with a reckless disregard of all but the most gross dangers.
Our best and brightest dream of going into politics or “non-profits” that exist largely to suppress commerce and invention. The Chinese best and brightest go into engineering and business and try to figure out how to make and sell things.
Our intellectual class spends its time trying to generate contempt of our institutions, history and traditions and to shatter our belief in our own capabilities. China’s intellectual class spend its time creating and instilling a fierce confidence in their institutions, history and traditions and building a belief that they can accomplish anything.
The Chinese have become the lean and mean, energetic barbarians sweeping down on a fat, decadent and leaderless civilization. They have the same cowboy attitude towards technology and commerce that drove America to the top in late 1800s. They are going to do to us what we did to Europe in the pre-WWII era and for the same reason. The difference this time is that the Chinese share no cultural bond to the rest of the world as America did to Europe.
They will face political challenges in the short term, especially in a global recession, but long-term they will dominate for the simple reason that they will be able to keep the lights on and we won’t.
I suppose we’ll learn to adopt an attitude of superior impotence just as the Europeans have done. China will do great things while we will claim we’re too wise and mature to attempt such things.
We shall live in interesting times.
Funny beliefs
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Alex Tabarrok makes fun of some funny beliefs about economics:
Mark Thoma makes fun of Judd Gregg for thinking that tax cuts pay for themselves. Mark is right to make fun. What a ridiculous thing to believe. All the good economists know that it is spending increases that more than pay for themselves.
Pepsi Throwback?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Beverage Industry reports that PepsiCo will be releasing versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew that are once again sweetened with real sugar, rather than High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS):
Typically, the only way to get soda from the “big guys” with real sugar is to import it (i.e., Mexican Coke) or wait till Passover (Kosher Coke, Kosher Pepsi).Pepsi has been experimenting elsewhere with sugar-sweetened drinks. We reported last February about two such entries… Pepsi Raw in the UK and Mexico’s Pepsi Retro.
I’m surprised that the UK and Mexico don’t already use sugar in their Pepsi products. The primary reason the US versions switched was price — sugar tariffs and corn subsidies convinced manufacturers to switch to corn syrup in the early 1980s:
A system of tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 significantly increased the cost of importing sugar, and producers sought a cheaper alternative. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the American and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price and the price of #2 corn is artificially low due to both government subsidies and dumping on the market as farmers produce more corn annually. HFCS became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. For instance, soft drink makers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to HFCS in the U.S. in 1984. Large corporations, such as Archer Daniels Midland, lobby for the continuation of these subsidies.Other countries, including Mexico, typically use sugar in soft drinks. Some Americans seek out Mexican Coca-Cola in ethnic groceries, because they feel it tastes better or is healthier than Coke made with HFCS, or because they believe it will have less effect on obesity.
The Bentonville Mafia
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009The Bentonville Mafia has taken over Microsoft, and now that these former Wal-Mart execs are in charge, they want to open retail stores — which is not a bad idea, Cringely says:
So it seems inevitable to me that as Microsoft is operated more and more by executives from a giant retailer, that Microsoft will try doing some giant retailing of its own. And sure enough they are doing just that through this new plan to open Microsoft stores — a plan that could equally be laid at the feet of Apple as yet another Microsoft tactic copied from Cupertino.Only Microsoft stores are different from Apple, stories, we’re told, and that’s true: Apple needed distribution while Microsoft has distribution, in spades. In fact Microsoft has so much distribution that this chain of stores could be viewed very negatively by Microsoft resellers but probably won’t be because I doubt that Microsoft will be actually trying to sell much stuff, and what they do sell will be at full retail unlike everyone else. It’s like buying wine at the winery: you never get a deal, but the samples are free.
So you can try out that cool game computer at Microsoft but actually buy it at Best Buy, just as you would have before.
Why even do it, then? Why have these stores?
Propaganda.
Phil Schiller of Apple made the point back in January when he explained that Apple stores had 400,000 visitors per day or the equivalent of 20 Macworld shows every day. Microsoft wants the same thing. They want to bypass the press machine that they feel has tainted users against Windows Vista, making sure the same thing doesn’t happen to Windows 7.
If Microsoft can achieve that one goal — just that one — then the Microsoft stores will have been worth doing even if they never have a dollar of retail sales.
Every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state, Mencius Moldbug argues:
Most people get their opinions from others. If public opinion commands the power of the State, the power to inform is the power to command the State. Just as you will seldom find a stack of twenties on the sidewalk, this power will not just be waving around in the breeze. Someone will capture it, and hold it until it is torn from their hands.Even if you have not been reading UR long and remain a good democrat, it disturbs you to see the resemblance between political communication and commercial advertising. This is because you know the latter consists largely of psychological-warfare tropes (as per Bernays, Lippmann, and the like). Their goal is not to inform you, but to control your behavior. You know this. And yet…
1709: The year that Europe froze
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009No one can quite explain why 1709 became the year that Europe froze, but freeze it did:
In England they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy’s west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. “I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man,” wrote William Derham, one of England’s most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.
[...]
Why it was quite so cold is harder to explain. The Little Ice Age was at its climax and Europe was experiencing climatically turbulent times: the 1690s saw a string of cold summers and failed harvests, while the summer of 1707 was so hot people died from heat exhaustion. Overall, the climate was colder, with the sun’s output at its lowest for millennia. There were some spectacular volcanic eruptions in 1707 and 1708, including Mount Fuji in Japan and Santorini and Vesuvius in Europe. These would have sent dust high into the atmosphere, forming a veil over Europe. Such dust veils normally lead to cooler summers and sometimes warmer winters, but climatologists think that during this persistent cold phase, dust may have depressed both summer and winter temperatures.
Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009A now-ubiquitous piece of clever software called Auto-Tune explains why pop music sounds perfect, if uninspired, these days:
Auto-Tune’s inventor is a man named Andy Hildebrand, who worked for years interpreting seismic data for the oil industry. Using a mathematical formula called autocorrelation, Hildebrand would send sound waves into the ground and record their reflections, providing an accurate map of potential drill sites. It’s a technique that saves oil companies lots of money and allowed Hildebrand to retire at 40. He was debating the next chapter of his life at a dinner party when a guest challenged him to invent a box that would allow her to sing in tune. After he tinkered with autocorrelation for a few months, Auto-Tune was born in late 1996.Almost immediately, studio engineers adopted it as a trade secret to fix flubbed notes, saving them the expense and hassle of having to redo sessions. The first time common ears heard Auto-Tune was on the immensely irritating 1998 Cher hit “Believe.” In the first verse, when Cher sings “I can’t break through” as though she’s standing behind an electric fan, that’s Auto-Tune–but it’s not the way Hildebrand meant it to be used. The program’s retune speed, which adjusts the singer’s voice, can be set from zero to 400. “If you set it to 10, that means that the output pitch will get halfway to the target pitch in 10 milliseconds,” says Hildebrand. “But if you let that parameter go to zero, it finds the nearest note and changes the output pitch instantaneously”–eliminating the natural transition between notes and making the singer sound jumpy and automated. “I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,” he says.
Like other trends spawned by Cher, the creative abuse of Auto-Tune quickly went out of fashion, although it continued to be an indispensable, if inaudible, part of the engineer’s toolbox. But in 2003, T-Pain (Faheem Najm), a little-known rapper and singer, accidentally stumbled onto the Cher effect while Auto-Tuning some of his vocals. “It just worked for my voice,” says T-Pain in his natural Tallahassee drawl. “And there wasn’t anyone else doing it.”
The Coming Swarm
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009John Arquilla (Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military) argues that we should prepare for the coming swarm — that is, we should expect more Mumbai-style attacks:
Right now, most of our cities would be as hard-pressed as Mumbai was to deal with several simultaneous attacks. Our elite federal and military counterterrorist units would most likely find their responses slowed, to varying degrees, by distance and the need to clarify jurisdiction.While the specifics of the federal counterterrorism strategy are classified, what is in the public record indicates that the plan contemplates having to deal with as many as three sites being simultaneously hit and using “overwhelming force” against the terrorists, which probably means mustering as many as 3,000 ground troops to the site. If that’s an accurate picture, it doesn’t bode well. We would most likely have far too few such elite units for dealing with a large number of small terrorist teams carrying out simultaneous attacks across a region or even a single city.
Nightmare possibilities include synchronized assaults on several shopping malls, high-rise office buildings or other places that have lots of people and relatively few exits. Another option would be to set loose half a dozen two-man sniper teams in some metropolitan area — you only have to recall the havoc caused by the Washington sniper in 2002 to imagine how huge a panic a slightly larger version of that form of terrorism would cause.
So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.
We’ve actually had a good test case in Iraq over the past two years. Instead of responding to insurgent attacks by sending out large numbers of troops from distant operating bases, the military strategy is now based on hundreds of smaller outposts in which 40 or 50 American troops are permanently stationed and prepared to act swiftly against attackers. Indeed, their very presence in Iraqi communities is a big deterrent. It’s small surprise that overall violence across Iraq has dropped by about 80 percent in that period.
For the defense of American cities against terrorist swarms, the key would be to use local police officers as the first line of defense instead of relying on the military. The first step would be to create lots of small counterterrorism posts throughout urban areas instead of keeping police officers in large, centralized precinct houses. This is consistent with existing notions of community-based policing, and could even include an element of outreach to residents similar to that undertaken in the Sunni areas of Iraq — even if it were to mean taking the paradoxical turn of negotiating with gangs about security.
Times have changed. When a sniper struck Austin in the 1960s, the police asked ordinary citizens to provide cover fire with their deer rifles. That is now unthinkable.
Social Collapse Best Practices
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
In Closing the Collapse Gap, Dmitry Orlov argued that the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US — and that he expected the US to collapse soon. This is also the theme of his book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.
Now he offers what he calls Social Collapse Best Practices:
One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.
[...]
But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.
[...]
Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic — you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.
They Don’t Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009They don't make Homo sapiens like they used to — and they don’t all come in one make and model:
Bones don’t lie. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison likes evidence he can put his hands on, so he takes me on a tour of the university’s bone laboratory. There, the energetic 36-year-old anthropologist unlocks a glass case and begins arranging human skulls and other skeletal artifacts—some genuine fossils, others high-quality reproductions—on a counter according to their age. Gesturing toward these relics, which span the past 35,000 years, Hawks says, “You don’t have to look hard to see that teeth are getting smaller, skull size is shrinking, stature is getting smaller.”These overriding trends are similar in many parts of the world, but other changes, especially over the past 10,000 years, are distinct to specific ethnic groups. “These variations are well known to forensic anthropologists,” Hawks says as he points them out: In Europeans, the cheekbones slant backward, the eye sockets are shaped like aviator glasses, and the nose bridge is high. Asians have cheekbones facing more forward, very round orbits, and a very low nose bridge. Australians have thicker skulls and the biggest teeth, on average, of any population today. “It beats me how leading biologists could look at the fossil record and conclude that human evolution came to a standstill 50,000 years ago,” Hawks says.