Amazon has, as predicted, announced the Kindle 2; it will be released February 24.
It looks quite a bit sleeker, and they’re emphasizing that it’s just one-third of an inch thick. It also turns pages faster and displays images in 16 shades of gray, and the battery lasts longer.
I’m not sure how I feel about the text-to-speech capability. If you watch the demonstration video, it’s still quite Speak & Spell.
Mark Safranski discusses ten questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett about America and the world after Bush, and Barnett notes that Iran with nukes is not the end of the world:
We know how to deal with revolutionary powers who talk big; we did it before with the USSR and the PRC. The Shia bomb isn’t a new animal, so please, let’s avoid having our entire foreign policy held hostage to its threat. Instead, simply extend our nuclear umbrella to Israel and let Tehran know in no uncertain terms that if they make the slightest move in that direction — either directly or through proxies — that we will liquidate them completely and there’ll be no Iran on the far side of that stupid move, meaning we will strike pre-emptively on the side of caution. We should be very clear here: America can and will do this. We’ve done in the past and we got away with it and we can do it all over again and get away with it in the same manner. Iran wants to be in the “big boy” club? Well . . . that’s the rule-set they’ll encounter.Finally, as for nuclear disarmament, that’s just nonsense. Nukes are good. They killed great-power war. Going to zero is plain stupid. It’d make the first idiot dictator with a bomb the equivalent of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I see no reason whatsoever to go down that naïve and utopian path. That stuff is just peddled by old men who feel guilty about the past. Let them pass on in peace, but please, don’t endanger this world and its future by placating such foolishness.
Gun nuts say, do not mention firearms in the title line of any Craigslist post, because the “hoplophobes” will delete your post immediately:
Even though Craigslist does not allows firearms and ammunition advertisements, it is still beneficial to check the Sporting Goods section. In my my local Craigslist there are “47 speed bicycles, AK brand”, and similar items regularly for sale.
David Brooks laments that the rich are beginning to run afoul of Ward Three Morality:
The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.
For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.
The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).
Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.
In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.
Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.
Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.
In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.
Wal-Mart is testing two new hybrid trucks and two new alternative-fuel trucks:
I’m not sure how they’re measuring it, but they plan on doubling fleet efficiency by 2015; they’ve already improved it 25 percent from their 2005 baseline.
Here comes the e-book revolution, Mike Elgan says:
At what temperature do electronic books catch fire? We’re going to find out sometime this year. E-book sales are about to ignite.On Monday, Amazon.com is expected to unveil a new version of its Kindle reader. It will probably be a lot better and a little cheaper than the first version. But the real news already broke this week: A company spokesman announced that Amazon plans to offer Kindle books on cell phones.
This news countered Google’s announcement that the 1.5 million public domain books available on its Google Book Search offering will soon be available (free, of course) via a new cell phone application.
He lists six trends driving this growth, but I have to wonder about his very first trend:
1. The economy. The economy is in the tank, and people are looking to cut costs any way they can. An Amazon Kindle pays for itself after the purchase of 20 or 30 books, then starts paying dividends.
In a bad economy, people are going to make a big up-front expenditure that will pay back after they buy 20 to 30 books?
I found this analysis amusing:
The blog did the math and determined that the New York Times could buy every single subscriber an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it would still cost them half as much as it will cost them to send paper newspapers for just one year.
Kathy Kristof describes The Great College Hoax “that’s just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle”:
The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers.
Like many good cons, this one contains a kernel of truth. Census figures show that college grads earn an average of $57,500 a year, which is 82% more than the $31,600 high school alumni make. Multiply the $25,900 difference by the 40 years the average person works and, sure enough, it comes to a tad over $1 million.
But anybody who has gotten a passing grade in statistics knows what’s wrong with this line of argument. A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn’t have increased his income.
All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.
Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one–even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don’t pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn’t include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.
“I call it the million-dollar misunderstanding,” says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, of the prevailing propaganda.
Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt.
“There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud,” Sander says. “There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path.”
J. B. S. Haldane was quite a character:
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, FRS [1892-1964] was one of the three main founders of modern population genetics, along with Sir Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright.In his life he played many parts: biochemist, physiologist, geneticist, soldier, popularizer of science, and spy. On occasion, he was even a fictional character.
Son of Britain’s most prominent physiologist, (John Scott Haldane, another eccentric polymath) he worked in his father’s lab by age 8 and was already acting as a human guinea pig. He attended the Dragon School, Eton (which he hated) and Oxford, which he loved. He mastered Latin, Greek, French and German and received a double first in mathematics and classics, although his interest was already turning to science. He was fascinated by the newly rediscovered Mendelian theory of genetics and made a significant discovery before graduation – genetic linkage, which occurs when different alleles are inherited jointly because of their proximity on the same chromosome. He discovered this by analyzing his younger sister Naomi’s guinea-pig colony. That early work was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an officer of the Black Watch – a Scottish regiment known by the Germans as the “Ladies from Hell”, because of their kilted ferocity. JBS Haldane in no way detracted from the regiment’s reputation: he was often in combat and actually enjoyed it. In fact he reveled in killing the enemy, personally delivering bombs behind enemy lines. His commander called him the “bravest and dirtiest officer in my Army.”
After service in France and Iraq, with occasional time outs for recovery from wounds and experiments in which his father exposed him to chlorine gas in order to test new gas masks, he resumed his research work, first as a fellow at Oxford and then accepting a Readership in Biochemistry at Cambridge where he taught until 1932. During that time at Cambridge he did most of his systematic work on evolutionary genetics. He was the first to estimate the mutation rate of a human gene and introduced the concept of genetic load, the net effect of the substandard genes in a population.
In 1927, he showed that the chance of fixation – reaching 100% frequency – of a single copy of an advantageous allele with advantage s is 2s. This key insight explains why a very limited amount of hybridization with another species is bound to result in the acquisition of most of their favorable alleles, and also plays a role in our analysis of the recent acceleration of human evolution. The work of this period is summed up in his classic The Causes of Evolution.
Of course helping to found the central theory of biology could not fully occupy his time. He made major contributions to enzyme chemistry. He acquired a wife, not without some trouble and strife, since she (Charlotte Burghes) was inconveniently married to someone else at the time. He was the first to suggest the possibility of ‘test-tube babies’ and the currently fashionable ‘hydrogen economy’. His famous essay “On Being the Right Size” elegantly shows how size itself (through the square-cube law) determines fundamental biological features.
His speculative writings such as Daedalus inspired works of science fiction, in particular Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. He even shows up as the villain: Weston, in C. S. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, is thought to be modeled (in part) on Haldane.
Keep reading to learn about his time in the Communist Party.
Flu may not have killed most in 1918 pandemic:
Keith Klugman of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues looked at what information is available about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed anywhere between 50 million and 100 million people globally in the space of about 18 months.Some research has shown that on average it took a week to 11 days for people to die — which fits in more with the known pattern of a bacterial infection than a viral infection, Klugman’s group wrote in a letter to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
“We observed a similar 10-day median time to death among soldiers dying of influenza in 1918,” they wrote.
People with influenza often get what is known as a “superinfection” with a bacterial agent. In 1918 it appears to have been Streptococcus pneumoniae.
“Neither antimicrobial drugs nor serum therapy was available for treatment in 1918,” Klugman’s team wrote.Now there are also vaccines that protect against many different strains of S. pneumoniae, which cause infections from pneumonia to meningitis.
I suppose I first learned about Oppenheimer — beyond that he was the “father of the bomb” — a few years back, when I read E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation.
Born into a wealthy family, he was a frail but precocious boy, pampered and socially awkward, who grew up to be an arrogant and even cruel young man — but somehow he ended up running the Manhattan Project and running it well.
The latest episode of PBS’s American Experience, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, gives an extremely sympathetic portrayal of his life and the infamous loss of his security clearance years after the war.
I feel a great deal of sympathy for Oppenheimer, but I’m amazed how shocked — shocked! — we’re supposed to be that the military would not trust a man who almost married one (crazy) Communist, did marry another (crazy) Communist, had a brother who was a Communist, had good friends who were Communists, including one who asked him to pass along secrets, etc., especially after the Communists had already developed an atomic bomb using technical secrets stolen from Americans.
How dare they take away his security clearance!?
Can’t we admit that both sides were reasonable? Oppenheimer knew he wasn’t handing over atomic secrets, but the military had good reason to believe he might?
Anyway, watch the whole thing yourself online.
(Hat tip à mon père.)
On the site for their new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending share some “deleted scenes” that didn’t make it into the book, including this piece, which examines some simple population models and demonstrates an interesting result when you add a lethal disease — malaria, in this example — into the mix:
There is more than half again as many resources per person now than there was before malaria appeared. What this means on the ground is that people do not have to work very hard to get enough to eat, that there is fruit on the trees for plucking, and that there are not great labor demands on anyone.Gregory Clark (Clark 2007) points out that the medieval Englishman had a higher standard than a medieval Japanese because there was much more sewage and filth in England and so a heavier burden of disease. This extra disease translated, as in our malaria example, to a lower population density and higher standard of living.
What are the social consequences of this new disease for our population? The most important immediate consequence is that there are plentiful resources for everyone and so, following the nature of the creature, males withdraw from subsistence work as they find that they can simply parasitize women for food. In much of central Africa the result is societies in which men don’t do anything very useful and women provision themselves, their children, and the men. The euphemism in economics for this kind of society is “female farming system.” Left free of the demands of subsistence we expect the men will start hanging out together, perhaps even all moving into a village men’s house (not so common in Africa). This may soon lead to local and regional raiding and warfare and an entrenched culture of local violence.
The warfare itself may cause enough excess death that a female farming system is sustainable even in the absence of a killer disease. Highland New Guinea, for example, seems to have had a classical cad system for millennia or more. (Ethnographic shorthand for societies where males put a lot of effort into competition with other males is that they are cad societies as opposed to dad societies where male effort is directed to provisioning a male’s own family.) Of course there are other contributing factors here like the extremely broken terrain that makes the establishment of a larger polity with an effective constabulary difficult or impossible.
Japan’s big-works stimulus is a lesson — in how to spend money with very little return:
The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a two-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children’s art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing Beluga whales.
Nor is this remote port in western Japan unusual. Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.
Now, as the Obama administration embarks on a similar path, proposing to spend more than $820 billion to stimulate the sagging American economy, many economists are taking a fresh look at Japan’s troubled experience.
I shudder to think that this is not obvious to everyone:
“It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again,” said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. “One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future.”
People don’t like to accept the short-term pain of letting some businesses fail:
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.
Some economists — those popular with politicians, I suppose — claim that Japan’s stimulus would have worked if they’d just spent more. Others recognize the whole thing as a waste:
Dr. Ihori of the University of Tokyo did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.
Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park:
For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home.Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans.
Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars — four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes — had keys left in the ignition.
Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen.
“Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.”
When the market collapsed and the emirate’s once-booming economy started to slow down, many expatriates were left owning several homes and unable to pay the mortgages without credit.
“There were a lot of people living the high life, investing in real estate and a lifestyle they couldn’t afford,” one senior banker said.
Under Sharia, which prevails in Dubai, the punishment for defaulting on a debt is severe. Bouncing a check, for example, is punishable with jail. Those who flee the emirate are known as skips.
Electric Motorcycle Promises 150 MPH:
Mission Motors unveiled the bike, dubbed Mission One, at the TED conference and said it will begin selling them next year for $69,000 apiece. Although several electric motorcycles have been announced in recent weeks, Mission Motors sticks out because its 12 employees have worked for Tesla, Ducati North America and Intel, and the bike they’re building could set a new benchmark for EVs of all kinds.“As a motorcycle enthusiast and engineer, I knew I could combine my passion for motorcycles with my passion for innovation and create a motorcycle that truly sets a new standard in the perception of electric vehicles,” company founder and CEO Forrest North said at the Mission One’s launch.
The prototype, wearing bodywork designed by Yves Behar, was designed entirely in-house by Mission Motors. Power comes from a 3-phase AC induction motor and a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery the company claims delivers 150 miles and recharges in just two hours at 240 volts. That climbs to eight hours at 120 volts.
Top-shelf hardware includes Ohlins suspension at both ends, four-piston Brembo brakes and Marchesini forged wheels. The components — and the claimed 150 horsepower — put the bike on par with hardcore sportbikes like the Ducati 1198. That’s exactly what North had in mind.
“With Mission One, we’re writing the next chapter in motorcycle design, delivering a new riding experience without sacrificing performance or design in a zero emissions vehicle,” he said in a statement.
I don’t see why the makers of an electric vehicle would want to emphasize top speed, when their real strength is off-the-line acceleration.
From reading Christopher Dickey’s Securing the City, Dwight Garners learned the comical and scary degree to which terrorists (and would-be terrorists) have been in thrall to American action movies:
The scenes of Godzilla stomping across New York City, crushing everything in its path, were mesmerizing and inspiring. One captured terrorist later warned of an attack against “the bridge in the Godzilla movie.” Interrogators had to go rent Mr. Emmerich’s film to find out what he meant: the Brooklyn Bridge.
[...]
Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber, used the pseudonym Van Damme, after the B-grade martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Another terrorist was obsessed with “Air Force One,” the Harrison Ford president-in-peril film.Weirdest of all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the pudgy 9/11 plotter who will be forever remembered for his disheveled mug shot — was supposedly an amusing guy when he attended an agricultural state university in North Carolina. His nickname? “B’lushi.”