Digging a Pirate’s Cave

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

In 1929, Modern Mechanix magazine gave boys advice on digging a pirate’s cave:

An important feature is the roof construction. This is of semi-trussed design and can be built from old lumber collected in the club members’ backyards. It will drain well and keep the cave warm and dry in the meanest kind of weather.

If you have any choice of location, select a site on a knoll, preferably where there is shrubbery but no large trees, since it will be a hard job to cut through the roots. Besides, that isn’t fair to the trees. In addition to good drainage at the start, the knoll assures a commanding view of surrounding territory.

Grade the excavated dirt away from the hole in an even slope. This helps to conceal its location. Piles of dirt would give you away in a hurry, and scouts from that tough gang over on Boiler Avenue would soon have your stronghold listed for future attack.

Save all the flat stones for the fireplace, unless bricks are available. The latter will make a better fireplace, however, without mortar. The roof or ceiling joists should extend at least a foot on each side of the excavation. The ridge support is made up of two two-by-fours laid one on top of the other, as shown in the diagram. The roof boards should be covered with tar paper or old canvas, or in a pinch, several layers of newspapers. At one end of the roof, tack heavy wire screen under the gable, and further protect this with a row of slats set at an angle. These are to partially support large stones placed against them to conceal the vent. If the stones are big enough they will not impede air circulation to any great extent. A trench is dug for the stove-pipe and, when this is laid, covered over again with dirt. Of course, it will be an advantage to have the chimney as far away from the cave as your supply of stove-pipe will permit. However, be sure that the top of the chimney is one or two feet higher than the stove. Otherwise your draft will be sluggish. Stones should be piled around the chimney to hide it, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to throw over the chimney itself some old junk, such as rusty washboilers, etc., that will not interfere with draft. In case a potential enemy sees smoke rising he naturally would assume it to be a rubbish fire.

Cover the roof with soil and then spread leaves and brush over it in a natural manner. Next spring new growth will spring up from the seeds thus sown. Dig a drainage trench around the “eaves” and fill with loose brush to hide it.

We’re a long way from 1929, as Cory Doctorow points out:

Articles like this fill me with sorrow and delight: sorrow because you couldn’t include such a place in a work of fiction (letalone a factual article aimed at children) today; delight at the adventure that those who followed these directions back in the 20s and 30s must have had.

Frostbite Is Your Friend

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Frostbite is your friend when you have modern cold-weather gear and the enemy doesn’t:

One of the generally unpublicized “secret weapons” American troops have in Afghanistan is much better Winter clothing. This often proves critical, especially in the hilly areas of Afghanistan, where it gets extremely cold. So cold, that the Taliban cannot handle it, while the better equipped Americans can.
The Afghans don’t normally have cold weather clothing for this sort of thing. There traditional solution, during these days, or weeks, of very cold weather, is to stay inside as much as possible, and try to keep the fires going. But when the Americans come out to fight in the Cold Weather, the Taliban gunmen have a choice between staying home and possibly getting arrested, or going out to the hills and getting frostbite, or worse. Some U.S. commanders pray for really cold weather when Taliban are being sought. That’s because the Taliban can stay hidden, up in the hills, for a while. But if it get cold enough, they either have to come down to the village (and risk capture or death), or stay up there, and endure cold injuries, or worse.

American Army cold weather gear has been getting better for decades. But it was about two years ago that it was realized that the latest stuff (the “Generation III” set) was really outstanding. It kept you warm, even if you were running around in freezing weather and working up a sweat. And it wasn’t bulky or itchy. It was good, no great, stuff.

No More Marriages, Only Weddings

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

W.F. Price examines changing expectations through the lens of Disney princesses:

Snow White, a girl who cheerfully cooks and cleans for short, stout and bald working men and brings some feminine grace and genuine kindness into the mix as well is an example of the old ideal wife. Not every man would get a Snow White, but he could at least expect that women aspired to be somewhat like her as wives and, most importantly, were expected to be so.

Just 13 years later, after the war that changed everything, Disney released another fairytale movie: Cinderella. Like Snow White, Cinderella was the victim of a cruel stepmother who forced her to work as a maid, but her attitude shows a marked difference. Not only does she bitch and moan about housework, she even indulges the household pests, bringing them food and protecting them from the cat.

The plot in Cinderella revolves around a royal ball in which the prince must choose a wife at the insistence of his father. The ball therefore represents female competition along the lines of the modern mating ritual, where females deck themselves out in all manner of finery and compete for the alpha male’s attention. Again, here is another departure from Snow White. Rather than the modest, bashful young princess waiting for a prince to sweep her away, we have a horde of women descending on a giant dance floor competing for the prize, a desirable male who is reluctant to commit. It’s a scene one can see today in clubs in big cities.

After a catfight and some subsequent hocus pocus, Cinderella emerges victorious in the contest to win the prince’s affection, and the king tracks her down by means of one of the high-heeled shoes she left behind. A fabulous wedding in a palace ensues, and the movie is over.

Cinderella is the template upon which today’s girls structure their dreams. Their overriding goal is to win their reluctant prince and stand victorious over the other women at the altar. That’s it. Once it’s over and they are married, it’s all a big letdown. The man is no longer a groom and princely, there are screaming kids and filthy clothes and dishes, no more people are honoring her and the gown is in a box. Drudgery was never part of the bargain, and who the hell is this schlub sitting on the couch watching football to expect a princess to fix him dinner?

So there we have it: there are no more wives, only brides; no more marriages, only weddings. And this change in our society happened over half a century ago.

Election Riots

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

The lies are so obvious they’re embarrassing, Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) says, when the mainstream media describe election riots like this:

Authorities have however argued that the rioting was not based on religion or ethnicity but was instigated by those unhappy with the victory of incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian.

Not based on religion or ethnicity?

In other words, the rioting is by Northern Hausa Muslims angry at the fact that a Southern Christian won, but it’s not “based on religion or ethnicity.” That settles that. Maybe it was one of those cat-fancier vs. dog-lover riots you get in Beverly Hills on a Saturday night. Give me Shar Pei or give me death!

These third-world votes are much more like 1930s plebiscites — “Who are we going to be, Austrians or Germans?” — than off-year congressional races:

They amount to a head count to decide which group is Nigeria, the Christian Southeast or the Muslim North.

There’s no individual choosing — Hell, there’s not that much in any election, people vote by ethnic group even here — but in Nigeria, it’s strictly dueling lines on a graph, us and them.

And if you lose the head count, your whole tribe has been dissed. You’ve got a few options: You can believe it was rigged. Which it may have been, I don’t know. And even if it wasn’t, you’re better off believing it was than accepting that your people aren’t the people. And you can hit the streets to let the other bunch know you’re not going to take it, to let them know that, outnumbered or not, your people want it more — to the death, like.
[...]
When the Hausa of the North say the election was rigged, maybe they mean something a little more complicated than stuffing ballot boxes. The Hausa were accustomed to settling things by battle, like most people in the world did until this one-man-one-vote model got forced on everyone. Maybe “rigged” is warrior-tribe code for “I don’t accept that one little skulking clerk in Lagos gets the same weight as a man who’s willing to take up the machete.”

I’ve heard that Sikhs in India feel the same way: “My one vote counts no more than that of each skulking Bengali coward that I could lift with one hand, and who would be afraid to insult a stray dog?”

You’ll notice it’s always warrior or ex-warrior ethnic groups rioting against the tyranny of business-oriented, merchant groups.

Maybe this whole third-world problem with voting isn’t just because they’re primitive and they don’t get it; maybe they get it way too well and don’t buy it.

That shouldn’t be too hard for an American to understand. That’s what the South said in 1860. They knew they were outnumbered in the vote, and would be outnumbered on the battlefield; that’s why they went around writing and yelling that one Southron was worth a dozen Yankees. Because that’s a different kind of arithmetic, a different kind of way of counting your support.

Cry havoc! And let slip the maths of war

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

In 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson plotted the casualties from various wars and found that they followed a power law — there were lots and lots of little wars and a few cataclysmic World Wars.

Now Neil Johnson and his team have found another such lethal formula:

Dr Johnson’s proposal rests on a pattern he and his team found in data on insurgent attacks against American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the initial attacks in any given province, subsequent fatal incidents become more and more frequent. The intriguing point is that it is possible, using a formula Dr Johnson has derived, to predict the details of this pattern from the interval between the first two attacks.

The formula in question (Tn = T1n-b) is one of a familiar type, known as a progress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. Tn is the number of days between the nth attack and its successor. (T1 is therefore the number of days between the first and second attacks.) The other element of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to T1. It is calculated from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n, and the attack interval, Tn. The upshot is that knowing T1 should be enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely, changing b would change both T1 and Tn, and thus change that future course.

Though the fit between the data and the prediction is not perfect (an example is illustrated [left]), the match is close enough that Dr Johnson thinks he is onto something. Progress curves are a consequence of people adapting to circumstances and learning to do things better. And warfare is just as capable of productivity improvements as any other activity.

The twist in warfare is that two antagonistic groups of people are doing the adapting. Borrowing a term used by evolutionary biologists (who, in turn, stole it from Lewis Carroll’s book, “Through the Looking-Glass”), Dr Johnson likens what is going on to the mad dash made by Alice and the Red Queen, after which they find themselves exactly where they started.

Thomas Jefferson’s Advice to His Eleven-Year-Old Daughter

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

When he left Monticello for the Continental Congress in Annapolis, Thomas Jefferson left this schedule for his eleven-year-old daughter to follow:

From 8. to 10. o’clock practise music.
From 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another.
From 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter next day.
From 3. to 4. read French.
From 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.
From 5. till bedtime, read English, write, &c.

I love this 18th-century postscript:

Keep my letters and read them at times, that you may always have present in your mind those things which will endear you to me.

She apparently did not follow the schedule. In his next letter, her father complains that she hasn’t written, hasn’t sent samples of her artwork, etc.

From eDiscovery to Siege Weaponry

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

A group of sharp guys got together and decided to do a Silicon Valley start-up — but they weren’t quite sure what to do.

They started sketching out some ideas for email organization. Then Gmail released its priority inbox.

Then they started looking into automating the legal discovery process. Talking to potential customers was frustrating:

We built a pretty good prototype for a kind of problem we suspected lawyers might have, but we lost our way even as we found a target. We found ourselves going over the same questions with different potential clients and getting different answers, and not quite understanding why. We built features that made sense to us, but our test users just shrugged.

In those initial tests, what your users say doesn’t matter:

It’s how they say it.

Are they asking all kinds on inane questions, grumbling about the colors, and telling you everything you did wrong while you can’t pry them away from your demo? Success.

Are they smiling, nodding enthusiastically, telling you what a great idea it is, and then wandering off and not answering your email? It’s not working.

Apparently it wasn’t working. So, they pivoted to making
siege toys:

I didn’t realize that this was happening to us until we gave up on the legal software startup. Mike pulled out some plans he had for a snap-together trebuchet, and we started building it in TechShop on a lark. As we put it together, we started having back-and-forth idea sessions faster than we’d ever gotten anything done with the first company.
[...]
That happens because when you believe in your product, and you own the idea behind it, you’re reacting to your own mistakes on gut feel and getting it right faster than you can talk it through with your cofounder. You’re watching your test users use your product wrong and figuring out how to fix it even as they’re complaining about something else.

That’s not just a nice place to be, it’s a necessity. There are so many other things grabbing your attention when you’re trying to do a startup that you can’t painstakingly work out the right answer by careful analysis. You need to be able to think up and be confident in a new idea or improvement in the middle of doing six other things.

It’s more important than any other business indicator—addressable market, competitive advantage, disruptive technology—none of that matters compared to believing what you’re doing.

And that’s why we’re lucky that we moved from a $6,000,000,000 market to a $60,000 one, from serious software for real business to a simple toy for kids. Because we were flailing and we didn’t know it, and now we’re doing something, we’re doing it right, and we can feel it. Without that feeling, we wouldn’t have had the confidence to start a Kickstarter project, wander into important people’s offices holding laser-cut siege engines grinning like idiots, and bother random people on the Internet until they started passing our site around.

I’m not saying that just believing in your idea will magically make you successful. But I am saying that if you don’t have that simple, unshakable certainty, you’re looking at a nearly impossible uphill battle. And I would—and did—trade a “billion dollar” “opportunity” for a maybe-side-business that I know I can make work.

Flash Mobs

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Not every flash mob brings together hipsters for an ironic rendition of performance art. Now that everyone‘s on Twitter, flash mobs are just mobs — like the Venice Beach flash mob that ended with a shooting:

“Venice beach bball ct going up tomorrow,” read the Twitter alert, which was retweeted with embellishments over and over as the day progressed, Thompson said.

Vasquez said he called in reinforcements as the crowd, including young men in gang attire and tattoos, swelled in the late afternoon. About 6:30 p.m., six to eight shots rang out at 17th Avenue and Ocean Front Walk, Vasquez said. The victim ran half a block to an alley where he collapsed, Vasquez said.

The crowd scattered through the neighborhood, with some hiding in nearby shops. The bus stops were mobbed with people trying to flee by public transportation, said Jessie Lieberson, a clerk in a vintage clothing store.

Thompson, 43, said some in the mob ran away backward so they could continue to watch the action.

“They were laughing. It was all part of the event for them,” she said. “There’s a kind of free-for-all down here. Everybody is trying to get away with as much as they can.”

A Better Way to Teach Math

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

John Mighton’s Jump Math appears to be a better way to teach math — which isn’t hard to imagine:

Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened out. One reason, says Mighton, is that teaching methods are not aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens.

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.

Mighton, who is also an award-winning playwright and author of a fascinating book called “The Myth of Ability,” developed Jump over more than a decade while working as a math tutor in Toronto, where he gained a reputation as a kind of math miracle worker. Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

This guided discovery process has yielded excellent results — but the teachers and the reporter don’t seem particularly math-savvy in describing those results:

“I was used to getting a bell curve in the past,” she told me, “but what I started seeing was all the kids getting between 90 and 100 percent on tests, and within months, they were all getting between 95 and 100 percent.”
[...]
Notably, the bell curve of the students’ scores shifted to the right and narrowed — which is to say that the performance differences between the “slow” kids and the “whiz” kids began to fade away.

Kosher Coke Lacks Small Things

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Kalim Kassam recently reminded me that Coca-Cola puts out Kosher Coke around Passover:

Kosher Coca Cola produced for Passover is sold in 2-liter bottles with a yellow cap marked with an OU-P, indicating that the Orthodox Jewish Union certifies the soda as Kosher for Passover, or with a white cap with a CRC-P indicating that the certification is provided by the Chicago Rabbinical Council.

While the usual Coca-Cola formula is kosher (the original glycerin from beef tallow having been replaced by vegetable glycerin), during Passover Ashkenazi Jews do not consume kitniyot, which prevents them from consuming high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

So, what’s kitniyot?

The Torah (Exodus 13:3) prohibits Jews from eating leaven (chametz) during Passover. Technically, chametz is only leaven made from the “five grains”: wheat, spelt, barley, shibbolet shu’al (two-rowed barley, according to Maimonides; oats according to Rashi) or rye; although there are additional rabbinic prohibitions against eating these grains in any form other than matzo.

Among traditional Ashkenazi Jews, the custom during Passover is to refrain from not only products of the five grains but also kitniyot. Literally “small things,” such as other grains and legumes. Traditions of what is considered kitniyot vary from community to community but generally include maize (North American corn), as well as rice, peas, lentils, and beans.

Hybrid Locomotives

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

The Economist reports that train-makers are shifting toward Prius-like hybrid locomotives, but it neglects to mention why until the last paragraph:

Emission regulations for railways have recently been tightened in Europe and will become even stricter in the future. From 2012 diesel trains will have to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxides by 39% and of soot by 88%. Hybrids may be the only way to meet these requirements.

It also neglects to mention that most diesel trains have been diesel-electric for quite some time; they just lack the massive array of batteries needed to run those electric motors without running the diesel generator.

One Dreadnought Buys 52 Dirigibles and 235 Aeroplanes

Monday, April 18th, 2011

One dreadnought buys 52 dirigibles and 235 aeroplanes, according to this diagram from 1911:

Sheep for Their Dogs

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Once upon a time, Americans got dogs for their sheep. Now they get sheep for their dogs:

Sue Foster knew what she needed to do when her border collie, Taff, was expelled from puppy school for herding the black Labs into a corner.

She rented some sheep.

Then she bought another border collie and rented some grazing land. Then she bought some sheep of her own. And a third border collie. Now, like the old lady who swallowed the fly, Ms. Foster keeps a llama to chase off the coyotes that threaten the lambs that go to market to finance the sheep that entertain her dogs.

This presents a business opportunity:

Each day, an average of 18 dogs visit Fido’s Farm outside Olympia, Wash., their owners paying $15 per dog to practice on the farm’s 200-head flock of sheep. Herding revenue at the farm is up 60% over the past five years, says owner Chris Soderstrom, who bought the farm in 2004.

“We get many people sent down here from the dog park in Seattle,” says Ms. Soderstrom, 63 years old. “They need to get their dog a job.” Newcomers get a 30-minute herding evaluation, to weed out biters and ovinophobes. One crucial test: Does the dog instinctively know it should circle around the sheep, not charge into the center of the flock?
[...]
Border collies appear willing to herd until they drop. In fact, they never appear to grow bored of organizing sheep. If they do, for an extra $5 dogs at Fido’s Farm can also herd ducks.

Food for Powder

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) has been reading Civil War memoirs by Ohio Men, like Grant:

Ohio was just far West enough to have a little wild in it, far north enough to be free of the cotton plague, but close enough to the center of gravity in DC/Philadelphia that these guys are well-connected to big power.

It was a huge world for these guys in some ways, because travel was hard before the railroads (“the cars” is what these guys call railroads) came along. But when it comes to networking, power, it was a small, downright tiny world, where all the young men of good family married each others’ sisters (Grant married his West Point roommate’s sister). The ones who hadn’t met before got to know each other at West Point, and if South Carolina hadn’t had the brilliant idea of seceding, that would’ve been that, except for the odd hotel-lobby and business-conference encounter.

But they’re all back together suddenly in 1861. They all joined up at once, mom and sis doing their best to guess what “Zouave” meant in tailoring terms. And they had to use a lot of cloth, because although men were skinny back then (they’d have split their sides if a pig like me had come onstage), they were tall and healthy, unlike the cannon fodder people expected to find wearing army uniform.

In fact, every time someone with peacetime-army experience sees the new recruits from the “best families in town” lined up in review, they’re shocked at how tall and healthy the men look. The peacetime army drew its manpower from immigrants and drunks, people who couldn’t find a job anywhere else, then beat them into submission. It made for organized marching but not a very impressive look on parade. Basic European tactics involved beating, like literally beating, a bunch of dregs into formation and sending them to intercept the first volley of another bunch of dregs in a different uniform. You didn’t need “a few good men,” you needed a lot of dregs, and the first reaction old-school army men had when they saw all these tall, healthy 19th-c. yuppies in uniform was, why are you wasting actual human beings as lead-absorbers?

One Army officer actually says that, in General Cox’s Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, when he sees the town’s leading yout’ who’ve switched from 90-day enlistments to the three-year hitch:

”Captain Gordon Granger of the regular army came to muster the re-enlisted regiments into the three years’ service, and as he stood at the right of the Fourth Ohio, looking down the line of a thousand stalwart men, all in their Garibaldi shirts (for we had not yet received our uniforms), he turned to me and exclaimed: “My God! that such men should be food for powder!”’

Greg Mortenson’s Incredible Story

Monday, April 18th, 2011

A friend recommended that I read the “incredible story” of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. The folks at 60 Minutes also found it incredible:

The heart of Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” is the story of a failed attempt in 1993 to climb the world’s second-highest peak, K2.  On the way down, Mortenson says, he got lost and stumbled, alone and exhausted, into a remote mountain village in Pakistan named Korphe. According to the book’s narrative, the villagers cared for him and he promised to return to build a school there. In a remote village in  Pakistan, 60 MINUTES found Mortenson’s porters on that failed expedition. They say Mortenson  didn’t get lost and stumble into Korphe on his way down from K2. He visited the village a year later.

That’s what famous author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer, a former donor to Mortenson’s charity, says he found out, too. “It’s a beautiful story.  And it’s a lie,” says Krakauer.  “I have spoken to one of his [Mortenson’s] companions, a close friend, who hiked out from K2 with him and this companion said, ‘Greg never heard of Korphe until a year later,’” Krakauer tells Kroft.  Mortenson did eventually build a school in Korphe, Krakauer says, “But if you read the first few chapters of that book, you realize, ‘I am being taken for a ride here.’ ”