Synthetic cannabinoid causes new cell growth in the brain

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Marijuana might cause new cell growth in the brain, reads the headline, but the reality is that a synthetic cannabinoid (HU210) increases neurogenesis in the hippocampus in rats:

In mammals, new nerve cells are constantly being produced in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning, memory, anxiety and depression. Other recreational drugs, such as alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress this new growth. Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues decided to see what effects a synthetic cannabinoid called HU210 had on rats’ brains.

They found that giving rats high doses of HU210 twice a day for 10 days increased the rate of nerve cell formation, or neurogenesis, in the hippocampus by about 40%.

A previous study showed that the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac) also increases new cell growth, and the results indicated that it was this cell growth that caused Prozac’s anti-anxiety effect. Zhang wondered whether this was also the case for the cannabinoid, and so he tested the rats for behavioural changes.

When the rats who had received the cannabinoid were placed under stress, they showed fewer signs of anxiety and depression than rats who had not had the treatment. When neurogenesis was halted in these rats using X-rays, this effect disappeared, indicating that the new cell growth might be responsible for the behavioural changes.

In another study, Barry Jacobs, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, gave mice the natural cannabinoid found in marijuana, THC (D9-tetrahydrocannabinol). But he says he detected no neurogenesis, no matter what dose he gave or the length of time he gave it for.

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Monkey Talk

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

I would not say that Campbell’s monkeys have a language with syntax simply because they can string three sounds — boom, krak, and hok — together:

“Krak” is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix “-oo”: “krak-oo” seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context — when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.

The “boom-boom” call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of “krak-oos,” with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo” is the monkey’s version of “Timber!” — it warns of falling trees.

There is yet another variation on this theme, Dr. Zuberbühler’s team reports. Into the “Timber!” call, the Campbell’s monkeys insert a series of up to seven “hok-oo” calls. The combined call indicates the presence of other monkey groups and is heard most often when the monkeys are on the edge of their home range.

The meaning of monkey calls was first worked out with vervet monkeys, which have distinct alarm calls for each of their three main predators: the martial eagle, leopards and snakes. But the vervets did not combine their alarm calls to generate new meanings, unlike human words that can be combined in an infinite number of different sentences.

Posted in Animals, Linguistics, Science | No Comments »

Feeding Birds Could Create New Species

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Feeding birds could create new species:

Central European blackcap warblers that spend the winter in the birdfeeder-rich United Kingdom are on a different evolutionary trajectory than those that migrate to Spain. The population hasn’t yet split into two species, but it’s headed in that direction.

“This is reproductive isolation, the first step of speciation,” said Martin Schaefer, a University of Freiburg evolutionary biologist.

Blackcap migration routes are genetically determined, and the population studied by Schaefer has historically wintered in Spain. Those that flew north couldn’t find food in barren winter landscapes, and perished. But during the last half-century, people in the U.K. put so much food out for birds that north-flying blackcaps could survive.

About 30 percent of blackcaps from southern Germany and Austria now migrate to the United Kingdom, shaving some 360 miles from their traditional, 1000 mile Mediterranean voyage. Because they’ve less distance to travel, they tend to arrive home first in the summertime, and to live in prime forest-edge spots. All this makes the U.K. migrants more likely to mate with each other than with their old-fashioned brethren.


From these groupings, subtle differences are emerging. The U.K. birds tend to have rounded wings, which sacrifice long-distance flying power for increased maneuverability. Now that they don’t need wide bills to eat Mediterranean olives in winter, their bills are becoming narrower and better-suited to summer insect diets. They’re also slightly darker.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Will Big Business Save the Earth?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Will Big Business save the Earth? Maybe it will, says Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse), who until recently assumed corporations were environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits:

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

Let’s start with Wal-Mart:

Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.

Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.

Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.

One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.

Diamond found himself mightily impressed with Chevron:

Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.

First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.

Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.

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Great Demos of All Time

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

David Foster shares some of the Great Demos of All Time:

  1. In the early 1850s, elevators had been invented and were in limited use, but were generally–with good reason–considered unsafe. At the Crystal Palace exposition of 1854, Elisha Otis demonstrated his elevator safety device. He had himself hauled up to a considerable height in an open cage, and then directed his assistant to cut the hoisting rope. The safety mechanism, as designed, clamped its jaws to the elevator’s guide tracks and kept it from falling.

  2. In the 1890s, most ships were powered by reciprocating steam engines (with commercial sail still holding a pretty respectable share). Charles Parsons, who had invented the steam turbine in 1884, set up the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company in 1893, with the objective of applying the invention to the propulsion of ships. He built a nifty little ship called the Turbinia, and, after initial trials, brought it unannounced to the Naval Review for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1893). Turbinia, which had an impressive top speed of 34 knots, raced between the lines of large ships, easily evading a Navy picket boat that had been sent to stop it, and indeed almost swamping the Navy vessel with its wake.

  3. In June 1914, Lawrence Sperry demonstrated his new airplane autopilot to the crowd assembled at the Airplane Safety Competition on the banks of the Seine. Flying with Sperry was his French mechanic, Emil Cachin. The Curtiss C-2 flew down the river, and directly in front of the judge’s stand. Sperry engaged his stabilizer device and passed in review with both his arms held high. The aircraft continued on a straight and steady course, with the pilot obviously not handling the controls. During the second pass, Cachin climbed out on the starboard wing and moved about 7 feet away from the fuselage, with Sperry’s hands still off the controls. As Cachin moved out on the wing, the aircraft momentarily banked due to the shift of weight, but the gyrostabilizer quickly corrected the attitudinal change, after which the Curtiss continued smoothly down the river. On the third pass, Cachin stood on one wing and Sperry on the other, with the pilot’s seat empty.

    The crowd and the competition judge were blown away by Sperry’s accomplishment, and the inventor was awarded the 50,000 franc prize. (The New York Times was less impressed, commenting snidely that “Of stability commonly understood, no heavier than air flight vehicles will ever have even as much as that dreadfully fragile monster, the dirigible.”)

  4. In 1952, the Remington Rand corporation proposed to CBS News that its Univac computer be used to predict the results on election night. CBS execs were skeptical about the idea, but went along with it.

    Most commentators were offering predictions ranging from a Democratic landslide to a tight race with Stevenson slightly ahead of Eisenhower. But at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, Univac predicted that Eisenhower would pile up 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93, with the odds of an Eisenhower win at 100-1.

    The CBS executive in charge did not believe these numbers, and adjustments to the assumptions were made. At 9:00 PM, the network announced that the machine was predicting 8-7 odds for an Eisenhower win.

    One of the Remington Rand staff members then discovered that he’d mistakenly added a zero to the Stevenson totals from New York State. With this error corrected (and I believe with the revised assumptions required by CBS still in place, though this isn’t clear from the sources), Univac gave the same prediction as before: 438 to 93 with odds of an Eisenhower win at 100:1.

    The final vote was 442 to 89. Late at night, CBS announcer Charles Collingwood made an embarrassing confession to his audience: Univac had made an accurate prediction hours before, but CBS hadn’t aired it.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Trial and Error

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Atul Gawande says something that Arnold Kling believes to be true — that transforming healthcare will require trial and error — and something he believes to be false — that we have no choice but to rely on government:

Gawande has no concept of the relative ability of government and markets to deal with ambiguity. He thinks that markets are unable to adopt new processes without government pressure. He thinks that government is well equipped to experiment.

There indeed are examples of markets that do not evolve effectively. There are examples of government-led experiments that pay off. But mostly it is the other way around. The incentives work much better in markets. In markets, the tendency is to reward success and to punish failure. In government, failed programs persist, and success receives no special reward.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Project Cybersyn

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

In the early 1970s, Chile’s Socialist government went to English eccentric Stafford Beer, looking for an alternative to Russian-style central planning, and he promised them a cybernetic synthesis, Project Cybersyn, made from old telex machines, an IBM 360 mainframe, and some Star Trek-inspired sets. Alex Tabarrok explains:

The military regime that overthrew Allende dropped the project and probably for this reason when the project is periodically rediscovered it is often written about in a romantic tone as a revolutionary “socialist internet,” decades ahead of its time that was “destroyed” by the military because it was “too egalitarian” or because they didn’t understand it.

Although some sources at the time said the Chilean economy was “run by computer,” the project was in reality a bit of a joke, albeit a rather expensive one, and about the only thing about it that worked were the ordinary Western Union telex machines spread around the country. The two computers supposedly used to run the Chilean economy were IBM 360s (or machines on that order). These machines were no doubt very impressive to politicians and visionaries eager to use their technological might to control an economy. Today, our perspective will perhaps be somewhat different when we realize that these behemoths were far less powerful than an iPhone. Run an economy with an iPhone? Sorry, there is no app for that.

Indeed, you don’t have to read far between the lines of Andy “socialist internet” Beckett’s account to get a flavor of what was really going on:

Beer’s original band of disciples had been diluted by other, less idealistic scientists. There was constant friction between the two groups. Meanwhile, Beer himself started to focus on other schemes: using painters and folk singers to publicise the principles of high-tech socialism; testing his son’s electrical public-opinion meters, which never actually saw service; and even organising anchovy-fishing expeditions to earn the government some desperately needed foreign currency.

(Note the classic, ‘the visionary failed because others lacked idealism’ story. Meanwhile the visionary is off on an anchovy-fishing expedition.)

Jeremiah Axelrod and Greg Borenstein put together a 25-minute presentation emphasizing the sci-fi theatricality of the whole endeavor:

The control room is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in another respect — both are stage sets. Nothing about the room is real, even the computer displays on the wall are simply hand drawn slides projected from the other side with Kodak carousels.

Ironically, when rumors of the project began to circulate, the illusion of omniscience and omnipotence that Beer had created, the same illusion that so appealed to Allende and that had funded Beer’s visions and experiments, this illusion caused fear that an all-knowing big brother was on the way — and such fear may even have encouraged the coup.

After the coup, rather than destroying the project because of its “egalitarian” nature, the military regime was more likely to have been disillusioned and disappointed to discover project Cybersyn’s impotence.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

The Poor Are Getting Richer

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

The rich are getting richer — and the poor are getting richer too, by any reasonable measure:

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a study on the “Living Conditions in the United States, 2005” with detailed information on the “Percent of Households Reporting Consumer Durables,” and those percentages are displayed in the table below for: a) all U.S. households in 2005, b) households with income below the official poverty line in 2005, and c) all households in 1971.

Not surprisingly, the percentage of U.S. households owning basic home appliances increased between 1971 and 2005 for all appliances except traditional telephones, which have gradually been replaced by cell phones. Certain appliances such as air conditioning, clothes dryers, color TVs, and dishwashers that used to be luxury items owned by a minority of American households in 1971 became so affordable that by 2005 a large majority of households owned all of those appliances. And some household items such as microwave ovens, VCRs, computers, and cell phones that were virtually nonexistent in 1971 became so affordable by 2005 that more than two of every three American households owned those items.

But what is even more impressive is the comparison of the living standards of households living below the poverty line in 2005 to all U.S. households in 1971. By almost every measure of appliance ownership, poor American households in 2005 had much better living conditions than the average American household in 1971, since poor households in 2005 had much higher ownership rates for basic appliances like clothes dryers, dishwashers, color TVs, and air conditioners than all households did in 1971.

As economist Steve Horwitz commented recently about these improvements on the Austrian Economists blog, “Life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline.”

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Learn, Discover, Iterate, and Execute

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Steve Blank tells the tale of the second, more serious, time someone stole his startup idea:

We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. The initial hypothesis for Epiphany (from my much smarter partner Ben) was that as departments in the enterprise (manufacturing, finance, customer support sales) became automated, the marketing department would eventually get its turn.

I remember presenting our ideas for Marketing Automation to one VP of Marketing in a large Silicon Valley company. His enthusiastic response was, “This will revolutionize marketing departments!” He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.” I should have been suspicious when he said, “I’d like to take a copy of your presentation to show him.” Caught up in the enthusiasm of hearing what a great idea we had, I violated one of my cardinal rules, and left him a hard copy.

Fast forward nine months. After talking to tons of customers and almost as many VC’s, we got Epiphany funded as a company that was going to automate Marketing Departments. After a ton of unreturned phone calls, I had written off the enthusiastic VP of Marketing who wanted to show my slides to his boss and moved on with building our company.

By now we had found a few customers and learned a lot more about the market from them and other prospects. Our business model changed as we realized that to become a large company, we needed to automate more than just a few marketers. As we were out looking for our Series B round, our company had gotten the attention of “name of big VC firm here” who wanted a play in enterprise software.

During the due-diligence process, I sat down with one of the partners who pulled out a set of slides and asked me: ”Have you seen these?” I quickly leafed through them and replied, “Sure they’re our original slides. Why?” He said, “Look again.” They had all my words from a year ago, but hey wait a minute, there’s someone else’s logo on my slides?! What’s going on? He said, “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. These guys just got funded, and they sound a lot like you guys.” Luckily I had the original slides and could prove who came first. Still the fact was a competitor had raised money using our idea and our slide deck.

And who was this competitor? The VP of Marketing who a year earlier had wanted a hard copy of our slides. He was now CEO of a new company in our market.

I felt like I had just been kicked in the stomach.

There’s a happy ending though:

Our competitor was executing on hypotheses we had developed 9 months ago, and their strategy remained static. We on the other hand, had moved on. We had discovered detailed information about what customers really needed and wanted and turned our original hypotheses into facts. We had validated our new assumptions by a set of orders, and we had pivoted on our business model. Our original idea had been nothing more than an untested set of hypotheses. Truth be told, we were no longer the company in those stolen slides.

While the common wisdom said that our success was going to be determined by which company executed better, the common wisdom was wrong. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover, iterate and execute.

Posted in Business, Steve Blank | No Comments »

Chevrolet Volt Sure Drives Sweet

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Chuck Squatriglia of Wired says that the Chevrolet Volt sure drives sweet — it’s attractive, practical and fun to drive:

A “sport mode” button on the dash boosts output from 90 kilowatts (120 horsepower) to 111 kilowatts (148). Push it and you’ll lose some efficiency, but the car accelerates with more authority. Our feel behind the wheel is the car’s claimed zero-to-60 time of around 8 second is in the ballpark.

The Volt is about the same size as the Toyota Prius and weighs a little more than the Chevrolet Cruze. The car’s final weight hasn’t been determined because GM hasn’t decided how big a gas tank to give it and there are other details to be worked out, but figure it’ll come in around 3,500 pounds.

It handles like any other small sedan. GM describes it as sporty. We’d describe it as nearly nimble. The ride is comfortable but not too soft, the steering is responsive, and the chassis is tight. The Volt isn’t a sports car, but it is reasonably fun to drive.

The Volt runs exclusively on electricity:

There’s also a 1.4-liter engine under the hood, but it isn’t connected to the wheels. Its only job is driving a 53-kilowatt generator that keeps the juice flowing when the battery runs down.

Battery performance is the obvious concern, both short-term and long-term:

Plug the cord into a conventional 110-volt, 12-amp socket and you’ll charge the Volt’s battery in 6 or 8 hours. Stick it into a 220-volt, 15-amp outlet like your dryer uses and Posawatz said you can do it in less than 3.

Although the Volt has a 16-kilowatt-hour battery, it only uses half that. GM overbuilt the pack to ensure it’s good for at least 10 years or 150,000 miles. The General is backing it with a warranty that long.

“We’re very confident that we have a battery pack that delivers the range, durability and performance consumers have a right to expect,” said Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman and the guy cracking the whip to get the Volt built. If the battery shoots craps before the car does, Lutz said replacing it shouldn’t cost more than an engine overhaul.

“I don’t see why it would cost any more than that,” he said.

That’s optimistic at this point. Automakers, least of all GM, don’t discuss how much lithium-ion batteries cost. That’s one reason Nissan says it will lease the pack in the Leaf EV. Most experts say they run $500 to $1,000 per kilowatt-hour. GM — which is building its own batteries at a factory in Detroit — is confident costs will come down as hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EVs become more common.

So the Volt is carrying an extra 8 kW-hours of battery storage, at $500 to $1,000 per kW-hour? That can’t help the price tag — or the weight of the car:

There’s only room for four people, because the car’s 400-pound T-shaped battery runs down the middle and under the back seats. That keeps the mass centralized, the center of gravity low and the pack safe.

“We protect the battery as well as the second-row passengers,” Posawatz said.


No word yet on the price, but GM is widely believed to be trying to keep the cost below $40,000. Add in the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs and figure on a sticker price around $32,500.

Electric cars don’t need a “real” transmission with a gearbox:

The gearshift on the center console is essentially a big switch. There’s no gearbox, just a reduction gear. “Shifting” from drive to low almost triples the amount of regenerative braking when easing up on the accelerator. Take your foot off the pedal, and the car slows more quickly and returns more energy to the battery.

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Embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

New Yorker Marco Arment explains how to embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat:

Use a box fan to convert your passive radiator — in effect, a giant heatsink — into an active heatsink-with-fan combo.

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Stigma Makes Generosity Feasible

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

The stigma of using food stamps is fading, but stigma is what makes generosity feasible, Charles Murray reminds us:

Stigma is the only way that a free society can be generous, whether through private help or government programs. The dilemma is as old as charity: how to give help without creating a cycle in which more people need help. Stigma is the way out. Stigma does three things.

First, stigma leads people to socialize their children in ways that minimize the chance that they’ll need help as they grow up. When children are taught that accepting charity is a disgrace, they also tend to be taught the kinds of things they should and shouldn’t do to avoid that disgrace.

Second, stigma encourages the right kind of self-selection. People in need are not usually in a binary yes-no situation. Instead, they are usually somewhere on a continuum from “I’m desperate” to “Gee, a little help would be kind of nice.” Stigma makes people ask whether the help is really that essential. That’s good — for the affordability of giving help, and for the resourcefulness of the potential recipients.

Third, stigma discourages dependence — it induces people to do everything they can to get out of the situation that put them in need of help.

All of these benefits of stigma reflect tendencies. Of course there are lots of exceptions. But large-scale assistance is shaped by tendencies. The European model says that people should look upon assistance as a right. Once you say that, the tendencies you create commit you to a cradle-to-grave system of government-decided support systems and corresponding limits on the ability of people to make choices for themselves.

The American model holds up the ideal of individuals and families making lives for themselves as they see fit and accepting the consequences of their choices. We all understand that sometimes people get in trouble through no fault of their own and that getting in trouble even if it is their fault doesn’t mean they should be left to their fate. If we as a nation still believe in the American Model — and that’s an open question — then we have to accept that stigma is indispensable for providing help without destroying the model.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Zombie Pigs First, Then Hibernating Soldiers

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Remember, DARPA, zombie pigs first, then hibernating soldiers:

Military’s mad-science arm Darpa has awarded $9.9 million to the Texas A&M Institute for Preclinical Studies (TIPS), to develop treatments that can extend a “golden period” when injured war fighters have the best chance of coming back from massive blood loss. Odds of survival plummet after an hour — during combat, that kind of quick evacuation, triage and treatment is often impossible.

The institute’s research will be based on previous Darpa-funded efforts. One project, at Stanford University, hypothesized that humans could one day mimic the hibernation abilities of squirrels — who emerge from winter months no worse for wear — using a pancreatic enzyme we have in common with the critters. The other, led by Dr. Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, used nematode worms and rats to test how hydrogen sulfide could block the body’s ability to use oxygen — creating a kind of “suspended animation” where hearts stop beating and wounds don’t bleed. After removing 60 percent of the rat’s blood, Dr. Roth managed to keep the critters alive for 10 hours using his hydrogen sulfide cocktail.

The next logical step: Try the same thing on pigs. They’ve got a similar cardiovascular system to humans, and TIPS researchers Theresa Fossum and Matthew Miller think they can accurately predict human results from the swine trials. Using anesthetized pigs, the doctors are testing various compounds, some containing hydrogen sulfide, to find one that can safely keep the hemorrhaging animals “as close to death as possible.”

With a 15-person team working exclusively on the project, the institute anticipates successful results within 18 months. “Darpa wants this to happen yesterday, because it was needed yesterday,” Dr. Miller told Danger Room. Once the team comes up with the right elixir, it’ll undergo federally mandated safety testing. After that, the zombie vaccine will be sent to the battlefield for human application.

Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they’ll be “re-animated” and — hopefully — as good as new.

Posted in Science, War | No Comments »

Happy Isoroku Yamamoto Appreciation Day

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Shannon Love wishes everyone a happy Isoroku Yamamoto Appreciation Day, as he describes what might have happened if the Japanese hadn’t attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor:

American public opinion remained stubbornly isolationist until February 14th 1942 when the American cruiser Indianapolis was torpedoed by an unknown submarine with substantial loss of life. Using the incident, FDR narrowly won a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan on March 7th 1942. Many have since argued that FDR hoped that Hitler might follow through on his Tripartite treaty obligation and declare war on the U.S but Hitler never rose to the bait.

The declaration of war was followed by a series of stinging and humiliating defeats for America. Japan seized Guam on March 9th and destroyed two battleships and cruisers that had been sent to defend the island. Following a long established plan, the entire U.S. Pacific fleet of 13 battleships and four aircraft carriers had previously moved from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines. They sailed to the relief Guam on March 21st and encountered the combined Japanese fleet on March 24th.

Unfortunately, the U.S. forces were commanded by the inept Kimmel who was a big gun battleship man to the core. By contrast, the Japanese commander, Isoroku Yamamoto was a world class innovator in the use of naval air power. Yamamoto deployed seven of Japans 9 carriers in the battle against Kimmel five carriers. The warnings of the Col. Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers in China about the quality of Japanese aircraft and the skill of their pilots were ignored. The Enterprise, Lexington,Hornet and Wasp were sunk and the Yorktown badly damaged against the loss of just one carrier for the Japanese. The Japanese competence with battleships likewise surprised the Americans during the subsequent night actions.

Kimmel limped back to the Philippines just in time to suffer a surprising and devastating air attack by long range Japanese bombers from Taiwan. Two carrier based attacks soon followed. Shorn of air cover, the American battleships fled the Philippines leaving the islands open to invasion on April 14th. The battleships were harassed by Japanese carriers all the way to Australia and by submarines all the way back to Pearl Harbor.

Yamamoto placed a capstone on his brilliant actions by launching a long range carrier strike on Pearl Harbor on June 5th 1942. He caught two of the last three remaining American Carriers, the Ranger and the Saratoga in port and destroyed them. (They had survived the battle of Guam by being in transits from the Atlantic at the time.) Then, almost as an afterthought, he seized Midway Island.

In a span of three short months, the Pacific had become a Japanese lake. Although five American aircraft carriers were being built at the time, only the wrecked Yorktown was still afloat and it could not possibly stand against Japan’s seven fleet carriers and their superb pilots and aircraft.

In August, faced with the very real possibility of an invasion of Australia, the British sued for peace. America soon followed. America had entered the war sharply divided and a stunning series of defeats in open battle had proved to many that isolationism was the way to go. Few Americans saw anything in the Pacific worth fighting for and Japan had proved itself a worthy and honorable foe. The peace was signed in December 1942 and America’s 9 month participation in WWII came to an end. FDR lost resoundingly to the isolationist Dewey in 1944.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Requiem for the Dollar

Monday, December 7th, 2009

James Grant sings his Requiem for the Dollar — which has only existed in its pure-paper form for 38 years:

For most of this country’s history, the dollar was exchangeable into gold or silver. “Sound” money was the kind that rang when you dropped it on a counter. For a long time, the rate of exchange was an ounce of gold for $20.67. Following the Roosevelt devaluation of 1933, the rate of exchange became an ounce of gold for $35. After 1933, only foreign governments and central banks were privileged to swap unwanted paper for gold, and most of these official institutions refrained from asking (after 1946, it seemed inadvisable to antagonize the very superpower that was standing between them and the Soviet Union). By the late 1960s, however, some of these overseas dollar holders, notably France, began to clamor for gold. They were well-advised to do so, dollars being in demonstrable surplus. President Richard Nixon solved that problem in August 1971 by suspending convertibility altogether. From that day to this, in the words of John Exter, Citibanker and monetary critic, a Federal Reserve “note” has been an “IOU nothing.”

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

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