Why Don’t Surgeons Have Coaches?

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

After receiving some good tennis coaching, surgeon Atul Gawande wondered, why don’t surgeons have coaches?

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components. In sports, coaches focus on mechanics, conditioning, and strategy, and have ways to break each of those down, in turn. The U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.
[...]
Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice” — sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches — showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.

Gawande brought in a retired general surgeon, under whom he’d trained during his residency, as his coach:

He saw only small things, he said, but, if I were trying to keep a problem from happening even once in my next hundred operations, it’s the small things I had to worry about. He noticed that I’d positioned and draped the patient perfectly for me, standing on his left side, but not for anyone else. The draping hemmed in the surgical assistant across the table on the patient’s right side, restricting his left arm, and hampering his ability to pull the wound upward. At one point in the operation, we found ourselves struggling to see up high enough in the neck on that side. The draping also pushed the medical student off to the surgical assistant’s right, where he couldn’t help at all. I should have made more room to the left, which would have allowed the student to hold the retractor and freed the surgical assistant’s left hand.

Osteen also asked me to pay more attention to my elbows. At various points during the operation, he observed, my right elbow rose to the level of my shoulder, on occasion higher. “You cannot achieve precision with your elbow in the air,” he said. A surgeon’s elbows should be loose and down by his sides. “When you are tempted to raise your elbow, that means you need to either move your feet” — because you’re standing in the wrong position — “or choose a different instrument.”

He had a whole list of observations like this. His notepad was dense with small print. I operate with magnifying loupes and wasn’t aware how much this restricted my peripheral vision. I never noticed, for example, that at one point the patient had blood-pressure problems, which the anesthesiologist was monitoring. Nor did I realize that, for about half an hour, the operating light drifted out of the wound; I was operating with light from reflected surfaces. Osteen pointed out that the instruments I’d chosen for holding the incision open had got tangled up, wasting time.

That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Osteen has continued to coach me in the months since that experiment. I take his observations, work on them for a few weeks, and then get together with him again. The mechanics of the interaction are still evolving. Surgical performance begins well before the operating room, with the choice made in the clinic of whether to operate in the first place. Osteen and I have spent time examining the way I plan before surgery. I’ve also begun taking time to do something I’d rarely done before — watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.

A former colleague at my hospital, the cancer surgeon Caprice Greenberg, has become a pioneer in using video in the operating room. She had the idea that routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others. If we learned what techniques made the difference, we could even try to coach for them. The work is still in its early stages. So far, a handful of surgeons have had their operations taped, and begun reviewing them with a colleague.

I was one of the surgeons who got to try it. It was like going over a game tape. One rainy afternoon, I brought my laptop to Osteen’s kitchen, and we watched a recording of another thyroidectomy I’d performed. Three video pictures of the operation streamed on the screen — one from a camera in the operating light, one from a wide-angle room camera, and one with the feed from the anesthesia monitor. A boom microphone picked up the sound.

Osteen liked how I’d changed the patient’s positioning and draping. “See? Right there!” He pointed at the screen. “The assistant is able to help you now.” At one point, the light drifted out of the wound and we watched to see how long it took me to realize I’d lost direct illumination: four minutes, instead of half an hour.

“Good,” he said. “You’re paying more attention.”

He had new pointers for me. He wanted me to let the residents struggle thirty seconds more when I asked them to help with a task. I tended to give them precise instructions as soon as progress slowed. “No, use the DeBakey forceps,” I’d say, or “Move the retractor first.” Osteen’s advice: “Get them to think.” It’s the only way people learn.

And together we identified a critical step in a thyroidectomy to work on: finding and preserving the parathyroid glands — four fatty glands the size of a yellow split pea that sit on the surface of the thyroid gland and are crucial for regulating a person’s calcium levels. The rate at which my patients suffered permanent injury to those little organs had been hovering at two per cent. He wanted me to try lowering the risk further by finding the glands earlier in the operation.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down. It’s too soon to know for sure whether that’s not random, but it seems real. I know that I’m learning again. I can’t say that every surgeon needs a coach to do his or her best work, but I’ve discovered that I do.

Eventually he does answer his original question, by explaining what happened after a lapse in his professional judgment:

My cheeks burned; I was mortified. I wished I’d never asked him along. I tried to be rational about the situation — the patient did fine. But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

This is why it will never be easy to submit to coaching, especially for those who are well along in their career. I’m ostensibly an expert. I’d finished long ago with the days of being tested and observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose myself to scrutiny and fault-finding?

I have spoken to other surgeons about the idea. “Oh, I can think of a few people who could use some coaching” has been a common reaction. Not many say, “Man, could I use a coach!” Once, I wouldn’t have, either.
[...]
I knew that he could drive me to make smarter decisions, but that afternoon I recognized the price: exposure.

For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept — or pay for — a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?

“Who’s that?” a patient asked me as she awaited anesthesia and noticed Osteen standing off to the side of the operating room, notebook in hand.

I was flummoxed for a moment. He wasn’t a student or a visiting professor. Calling him “an observer” didn’t sound quite right, either.

“He’s a colleague,” I said. “I asked him along to observe and see if he saw things I could improve.”

The patient gave me a look that was somewhere between puzzlement and alarm.

“He’s like a coach,” I finally said.

She did not seem reassured.

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Hornblower’s Nightmare

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

When the Iranians seized members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in Shatt-al-Arab, the British reaction turned into Hornblower’s nightmare:

To understand just how bad the whole business is, one must first know a bit about Hornblower’s navy. In the latter half of the 18th century, the Royal Navy developed and institutionalized what we now call maneuver warfare or Third Generation war. By the Napoleonic Wars, it was all there — the outward focus, where results counted for more than following orders or the Fighting Instructions; de-centralization (Nelson was a master of mission-type orders); prizing initiative above obedience; and dependence on self-discipline (at least at the level of ship commanders and admirals) . It is often personified as the “Nelson Touch,” but it typified a whole generation of officers, not just Nelson. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy lost it all and went rigid again, for reasons described in a wonderful book, Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game. But Hornblower’s and Aubrey’s navy was as fast-acting, fluid and flexible at sea as was the Kaiserheer on land.

I told Andrew Gordon that I would someday love to write the intellectual history of that first, maritime incarnation of maneuver warfare; he replied that the source material to do that may not exist, since Royal Navy officers of that time were not writing things down. He may be right, but I think one incident holds the key to much of it: the execution by firing squad, on his own poop deck, of Admiral John Byng.

In 1756, at the beginning of the Seven Year’s War, the French took the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean from the British. Admiral Byng was sent out from London to relieve the island’s garrison, then under siege. He arrived, fought a mismanaged battle with the attending French squadron, then retired to Gibraltar. Deprived of naval support, the garrison surrendered. Byng was court-martialed for his failure, found guilty, and shot.

The reason Byng’s execution played a central role in the development of maneuver warfare in the Royal Navy is the main charge laid against him. The capital charge was “not doing his utmost” in the presence of the enemy. In other words, Byng was executed not for what he did, but for what he did not do. Nothing could have done more to spur initiative in the navy. As Voltaire famously wrote, “Sometimes the British shoot an admiral to encourage the others.” Encourage the others to take initiative and get the result the situation demands is exactly what it did. Without Byng, I doubt there would have been a Nelson.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

Why do some people learn faster? Because they wring more wisdom from failure, Jonah Lehrer says:

In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.
[...]
It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mindset generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mindset were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
[...]
It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset ["You can get better at almost anything, provided you invest the necessary time and energy"] were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes.

(While those with an extremely fixed mindset ["You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it"] generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mindset were closer to fifteen.)

What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Tide Predictions for D-Day

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

The tide predictions for D-Day were (a) vital to the operation’s success, and (b) performed on Victorian-era brass analog computers:

As an Allied cross-channel invasion loomed in 1944, Rommel, convinced that it would come at high tide, installed millions of steel, cement, and wooden obstacles on the possible invasion beaches, positioned so they would be under water by midtide. But the Allies first observed Rommel’s obstacles from the air in mid-February 1944. “Thereafter they seemed to grow like mushrooms . . . until by May there was an obstacle on every two or three yards of front.”

The obstacles came in a variety of shapes and sizes. In figure 1 we see rows of half-buried logs pointed upward at a low angle, some with explosive mines on them. There were also so-called hedgehogs, each consisting of three 2-meter iron bars crossed at right angles, and “Belgian gates,” 2- by 3-meter steel frames planted upright.

The Allies would certainly have liked to land at high tide, as Rommel expected, so their troops would have less beach to cross under fire. But the underwater obstacles changed that. The Allied planners now decided that initial landings must be soon after low tide so that demolition teams could blow up enough obstacles to open corridors through which the following landing craft could navigate to the beach. The tide also had to be rising, because the landing craft had to unload troops and then depart without danger of being stranded by a receding tide.

There were also nontidal constraints. For secrecy, Allied forces had to cross the English Channel in darkness. But naval artillery needed about an hour of daylight to bombard the coast before the landings. Therefore, low tide had to coincide with first light, with the landings to begin one hour after. Airborne drops had to take place the night before, because the paratroopers had to land in darkness. But they also needed to see their targets, so there had to be a late-rising Moon. Only three days in June 1944 met all those requirements for “D-Day,” the invasion date: 5, 6, and 7 June.

A 6-meter tidal range meant that water would rise at a rate of at least a meter per hour—perhaps even faster due to shallow-water effects. The times of low water and the speed of the tidal rise had to be known rather precisely, or there might not be enough time for the demolition teams to blow up a sufficient number of beach obstacles. Also, the low-water times were different at each of the five landing beaches (from west to east, they were code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword). Between Utah and Sword, separated by about 100 km, the difference was more than an hour. So H-Hour, the landing time on each beach, would have to be staggered according to the tide predictions. Tidal currents, the along-shore flow due to the changing tide, were another important consideration. Strong tidal currents could easily push amphibious craft down the beach, away from their intended landing spots. But tidal currents were much harder to predict than the tides themselves, because they were much harder to measure.

All the Admiralty tide and tidal-current predictions for the war effort were produced by Arthur Thomas Doodson at the Liverpool Tidal Institute. The 53-year-old Doodson was at that time the world’s leading authority on tide prediction. He used two tide-predicting machines: the Kelvin machine, built in 1872 but overhauled in 1942 (shown in figure 2), and the Roberts-designed machine, built in 1906.

Posted in Science, Technology, War | 2 Comments »

The Genesis of Hawkmoon

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock explains the genesis of Hawkmoon in the 1960s:

My old method of writing fantasy novels was to go to bed for a few days, getting up only to take the kids to school and pick them up, while the book germinated, making a few notes, then I’d jump out of bed and start, writing around 15-20,000 words a day (I was a superfast typist) for three days, rarely for more than normal working hours — say 9 to 6 — get my friend Jim Cawthorn to read the manuscript for any errors of typing or spelling etc. then send it straight to the editor unread by me.

I have still to read more than a few pages of the Hawkmoon books. The odd thing is that I’ve actually read almost none of my own books but I seem to remember the events as if I’d lived them. Some scenes are better remembered than others, of course. Similarly, I’ve reread almost nothing of the Elric, Corum or Eternal Champion novels.

For fine detail I tend to rely on friends such as John Davey, who has edited several books and is my bibliographer, so he can tell me pretty much everything I want to know.
[...]
I have to admit I remain amazed at Hawkmoon’s longevity. As I write there are current editions of his adventures in a bunch of languages, including of course the latest Tor editions, and more are appearing all the time. Not bad, I guess, for twelve days hard work!

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Meetings vs. Conversations

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

A curious fact about the American military, and American private industry, in the early 21st century is their insistence on holding formal meetings, William S. Lind notes:

The practice is curious because these same institutions spend a great deal of time and effort studying “good management,” which should recognize what most participants in such meetings see, namely that they are a waste of time. Good decisions are far more often a product of informal conversations than of any formal meeting, briefing or process.

History offers a useful illustration. In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic French Revolution and almost a quarter-century of subsequent wars, did what aristocrats usually do. It danced, it dined, it stayed up late playing cards for high stakes, it carried on affairs, usually not affairs of state. Through all its aristocratic amusements, it conversed. In the process, it put together a peace that gave Europe almost a century of security, with few wars and those limited.

In contrast, the conference of Versailles in 1919 was all business. Its dreary, interminable meetings (read Harold Nicolson for a devastating description) reflected the bottomless, plodding earnestness of the bourgeois and the Roundhead. Its product, the Treaty of Versailles, was so flawed that it spawned another great European war in just twenty years. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said from exile in Holland, the war to end war yielded a peace to end peace.

The U.S. military has carried the formal meeting’s uselessness to a new height with its unique cultural totem, the Powerpoint brief. [...] The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. [...] Why does the American military so avoid informal conversations and require formal meetings and briefings? Because most of the time, the people who actually know the subject are of junior rank. Above them stands a vast pyramid of “managers,” who know little or nothing about the topic but want their “face time” as they buck for promotion. The only way they can get their time in the sun without egg on their faces is by hiding behind a formal, scripted briefing. At the end, they still have to drag up some captain or sergeant from the horse-holder ranks if questions are asked.

How did the Germans do it, back in the day?

When General Hermann Balck was commanding 48th Panzer Korps on the Eastern Front with General F.W. von Mellinthin as his I-A, Mellinthin one day reproached Balck for wasting time by going out to eat with the troop units so often. Balck replied, “You think so? OK, tomorrow you come with me.”

The next day, they arrived at a battalion a bit before lunchtime. They had a formal meeting, Balck asked some questions and got some answers. Then, they broke for lunch. During the informal conversation that usually accompanies meals, Balck asked the same questions and got completely different answers. On their way back to the headquarters, Balck turned to Mellinthin and said, “Now you see why I go out so often to eat with the troop units. It’s not for the cuisine.”

When Generals Balck and von Mellinthin visited Washington in 1980, John Boyd asked them to reflect on their leadership of 48th Panzer Korps and how they would have done it if they had possessed computers. Balck replied, “We couldn’t have done it.” Boyd didn’t ask about Powerpoint, but I suspect General Balck’s reply would have been equally to the point.

Despite the situation in Berlin, the Wehrmacht did know how to think.

Posted in Business, War | No Comments »

California Bans Open Carry of Guns

Monday, October 10th, 2011

I remember being baffled years ago when I learned that you could own a gun in California, but you couldn’t leave the house with it — not with any ammo on you, at any rate.

When other states moved toward issuing concealed-carry permits to ordinary citizens who passed a background check — what’s become known as a shall-issue policy — California stuck to its old may-issue policy, where, as gun-activist Sam Wolanyk puts it, “If you haven’t made a healthy contribution into the Sheriff’s reelection fund, you’re not getting a concealed weapons permit.”

This led such gun-activists to an unusual protest tactic. They would legally “open carry” their handguns, holstered on their hips, with no ammo. I’m sure that seems terribly clever if you’re already pro-gun, but it comes across as, well, crazy to many police officers and ordinary citizens.

Anyway, California banned open carry last night:

Last night, California Governor Jerry Brown scribbled into the wee hours of the evening, signing into law more than 100 bills put onto his desk by the California legislature. This caps off a legislative session that saw a total of 464 bills signed into law, which means that the full force and power of the California government can now be used keep citizens safe from everything from school bullies, to self-service checkouts at the grocery store, to overly strenuous apprenticeships.

Among the bills signed into law is AB 144, which prohibits the ”open carry” of firearms under threat of a $1,000 fine and up to one year in jail. Reason.tv explored this very issue a few months ago, talking with the bill’s author Anthony Portantino, as well Sam Wolanyk, an Open Carry advocate and head of Responsible Citizens of California.

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 3 Comments »

Dahomey’s Amazons

Monday, October 10th, 2011

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the African kingdom of Dahomey, now the nation of Benin, fielded an elite unit of Amazons:

Women had the advantage of being permitted in the palace precincts after dark (Dahomean men were not), and a bodyguard may have been formed, Alpern says, from among the king’s “third class” wives — those considered insufficiently beautiful to share his bed and who had not borne children. Contrary to 19th century gossip that portrayed the female soldiers as sexually voracious, Dahomey’s female soldiers were formally married to the king — and since he never actually had relations with any of them, marriage rendered them celibate.

At least one bit of evidence hints that Alpern is right to date the formation of the female corps to the early 18th century: a French slaver named Jean-Pierre Thibault, who called at the Dahomean port of Ouidah in 1725, described seeing groups of third-rank wives armed with long poles and acting as police. And when, four years later, Dahomey’s women warriors made their first appearance in written history, they were helping to recapture the same port after it fell to a surprise attack by the Yoruba — a much more numerous tribe from the east who would henceforth be the Dahomeans’ chief enemies.

What made Dahomey’s women warriors unique was that they fought, and frequently died, for king and country. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that, in the course of just four major campaigns in the latter half of the 19th century, they lost at least 6,000 dead, and perhaps as many as 15,000. In their very last battles, against French troops equipped with vastly superior weaponry, about 1,500 women took the field, and only about 50 remained fit for active duty by the end.

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Educational Theft

Monday, October 10th, 2011

In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, Michael Flaherty says, consider the latest crime to spread across the country — educational theft:

That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.

Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested — and await sentencing — for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can’t afford private schooling, they can’t access school vouchers, and they haven’t won or haven’t even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there’s the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they “belong” at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep “illegal students” from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides “the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document” children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company’s rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

Sichelschnitt

Monday, October 10th, 2011

William S. Lind learned some lessons on a staff ride through the Ardennes to Sedan, where he got to see firsthand the battlefields of the famous Sichelschnitt, or sickle-cut:

For me, the biggest lesson was the relationship between operational results and tactical risk. The German attack through the Ardennes, called Sichelschnitt or sickle-cut, promised to be decisive operationally. But until I actually saw the terrain I did not realize how risky it was tactically. While parts of the Ardennes are rolling, relatively open country, some of the sections through which XIX Panzer Corps had to pass were extremely constrained. They gave the French and Belgians repeated opportunities to turn Guderian’s Panzers into a world-class traffic jam. When one Belgian company did not get orders to withdraw, its resistance caused the Germans serious problems. But such resistance occurred only by accident; French doctrine called for delay, not defense, so the French threw opportunity after opportunity away. The French were defeated as much by their own doctrine as by the Germans, a point of some relevance since U.S. Army doctrine today remains largely French, especially in its focus on synchronization.

One of the mysteries of the 1940 campaign, as I read about it, was the rapid fall of the new, powerful Belgian fort of Eben Emael. As we walked through its kilometers of tunnels, a Cav officer solved the mystery: “It’s a blind giant,” he said. The fort had only a handful of small vision cupolas, which the Germans quickly took out with shaped charges. Why was it so designed? Because it was a “system of systems,” dependent on others to tell it what was going on. When that information did not come, its situation was hopeless.

The critical point in the campaign was the crossing of the Meuse River at Sedan. There, over and over, we saw the central difference between a Second and a Third Generation army. The Germans, focused outward, cooperated laterally and took initiative at every level to get the result the situation required, while the French, focused inward, could act only in response to orders from higher headquarters. The fact that the German senior commanders were all forward at the decisive points enabled them to see the real situation quickly and act on it.

In contrast, we visited the very comfortable, landscaped bunker that was the headquarters of the French 55 th Division, well to the rear of the fighting. As we reflected on that headquarters’ isolation, I asked one of the Cav officers if a modern U.S. Army division’s command element could fit in the same bunker. The answer was no, by a large margin. In the size and complexity of our headquarters, we have out-Frenched the French.

Our staff ride ended at the heights of Stonne, south of Sedan. Again, until I saw terrain, I did not appreciate how commanding it was. Here, what we learned dispelled one of the myths of the 1940 campaign; that the French did not fight. Stonne was captured and recaptured some seventeen times in one day, in actions where the French fought bitterly and the Germans, especially the Grossdeutschland Regiment, took heavy casualties. At one point, a single French Char B heavy tank entered the village, destroyed thirteen German tanks and then left, intact, despite taking 140 hits. That illustrated both the French superiority in equipment and the rarity of French initiative and cooperation. A bit more of both and the battle for the heights at Stonne could have gone the other way, which might have kept even Hurrying Heinz from turning west toward the English Channel and operational victory.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Brassinosteroids

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

In humans (and other animals) certain steroid hormones, like testosterone, are both anabolic (tissue-building) and androgenic (masculinizing). For years, the goal of ergogenic-drug researchers was to produce an anabolic drug without androgenic side-effects.

New research shows that plant brassinosteroids are anabolic in rats, without androgenic side-effects:

Brassinosteroids are plant-derived polyhydroxylated derivatives of 5a-cholestane, structurally similar to cholesterol-derived animal steroid hormones and insect ecdysteroids, with no known function in mammals. 28-Homobrassinolide (HB), a steroidal lactone with potent plant growth-promoting property, stimulated protein synthesis and inhibited protein degradation in L6 rat skeletal muscle cells (EC50 4 ?M) mediated in part by PI3K/Akt signaling pathway. Oral administration of HB (20 or 60 mg/kg/d for 24 d) to healthy rats fed normal diet (protein content 23.9%) increased food intake, body weight gain, lean body mass, and gastrocnemius muscle mass as compared with vehicle-treated controls. The effect of HB administration increased slightly in animals fed a high-protein diet (protein content 39.4%).

Both oral (up to 60 mg/kg) and subcutaneous (up to 4 mg/kg) administration of HB showed low androgenic activity when tested in the Hershberger assay. Moreover, HB showed no direct binding to the androgen receptor in vitro.

HB treatment was also associated with an improved physical fitness of untrained healthy rats, as evident from a 6.7% increase in lower extremity strength, measured by grip test. In the gastrocnemius muscle of castrated animals, HB treatment significantly increased the number of type IIa and IIb fibers and the cross-sectional area of type I and type IIa fibers.

These findings suggest that oral application of HB triggers selective anabolic response with minimal or no androgenic side-effects and begin to elucidate the putative cellular targets for plant brassinosteroids in mammals.

Expect to see BrassinoMax advertised in the muscle mags in 3… 2… 1…

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

What if Dr. Seuss wrote The Call of Cthulhu?

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

Mixing Dr. Seuss and H.P. Lovecraft seems like something the Internet would have done some time ago, but Deviant Artist DrFaustusAU just got around to it:

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Western civilization’s last chance of survival

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

Western civilization’s last chance of survival, William S. Lind says, was probably a victory by the Central Powers in World War I:

Their defeat let all the poisons of the French Revolution loose unchecked, which is the main reason that we now live in a moral and cultural cesspool.

History has not been kind to Kaiser Wilhelm, unfairly in my view (an assessment in which Martin van Creveld agrees with me). He may have been the brightest chief of state in early 20th century Europe. His chief fault was yielding too often to his advisors, when he in fact was right. Once he saw where events were headed in the summer of 1914, he desperately sought to avert war. I have seen the actual last telegram he sent to the Tsar (interestingly, it is in English). When war came, he wanted Germany to remain on the defensive in the west, abandoning the Schlieffen Plan, and take the offensive in the east, against Russia. Such a course would have kept England out of the war and almost certainly resulted in a German victory. His Chief of the General Staff, von Moltke the less, told him it could not be done (the plans were in the file). After the war, in exile in Holland, his response to the terms of the Versailles Treaty was prophetic; he said, “The war to end wars has given us a peace to end peace.” He was an implacable opponent of Hitler and the Nazis. When the Second World War came, Churchill, who has always admired the Kaiser, offered him refuge in England.

The Kaiser — and the German people — got caught up in the fad of navalism:

Germany’s decision to build a great navy was a strategic error of the first rank. It put her in opposition to her historic ally, Britain, to the point where it drove the British into alliance with their traditional enemies, France and Russia. But the Kaiser was not solely responsible for this blunder. Navalism had become a vast force in German public opinion. Nor did he need a navy of his own to play admiral, since he was already an admiral in the British, Swedish and Norwegian navies. As in Washington today, there was no shortage of admirals’ uniforms, though real admirals were and are another matter.

The navalist idea which swept the world in the Kaiser’s time — that history turned on the outcome of great sea battles — came largely from one book: Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (America, too, now has a head of state who read a book). I first read Mahan in my teens, and to a teenager he speaks very convincingly. An adult reading gives a different impression. Despite the fact that Mahan is still worshipped by the United States Navy, which continues to build a fleet suitable for a great sea battle against Imperial Japan, his work is piffle when compared to Britain’s truly outstanding naval theorist, Sir Julian Corbett. While Corbett fully recognized the importance of seapower, he also understood that its most powerful influence was indirect. Great sea battles were only a small part of a much more complex picture.

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Mark Hamill

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

Mark Hamill is famous not only for voicing the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series but for appearing in some sci-fi serials, too:

We were a little film trying to get attention, and having no idea whether people would be interested. So I was a great champion in the early days, and then it took on a life of its own. It was like being in a pop band that had a No. 1 single, and you’re just swept up in it all. And again, I thought there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that was fine for me, but it never really ended. Because it stayed in the culture for so long, and then [George Lucas] did the prequels, which brought it all back. At a certain point, you think you’ve reached the saturation point where you can’t really find anything new to add to the myth of it all, but it’s new generations. So in that sense, it’s hard to be cynical about something that makes people so happy.

But like I say, it’s frustrating, because I’m not creatively engaged when he makes the special editions or… I guess it’s coming out in Smell-O-Vision now, where you can smell the wet Wookiee, and 3-D, and it’s a roller-coaster ride, and a breakfast cereal. It’s all these things. It’s almost like one of the original Mouseketeers being asked their opinion of Epcot Center. I mean, you’re tangentially connected to it, but not really hands-on. But it’s hard to say. I mean, I really related to George Harrison when they said, “What’s it like to be in The Beatles?” He says [imitates Harrison], “Well, what’s it like to not be in The Beatles?” ’Cause he didn’t know. He was in The Beatles, so he couldn’t imagine any other way.
[...]
What was it like not to be in Star Wars? I don’t know. What I like about the prequels is, they have their own identity. They’re of the CGI world in a way that we never were. We’re sort of the last vestiges of the old school of matte paintings, miniatures, and models. So this whole new world of CGI where everything was created, the buildings, the clouds and everything—it’s a different tone. They’re much more serious, and almost like religious epics, in a way. Ours were much more goofy, I think. It’s like Little Rascals in outer space, vs. The Greatest Story Ever Told.

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Fin de Siècle

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

When the Japanese reiterated their claim to the Senkaku Islands, that struck William S. Lind as the kind of trivial act that could kick off another fin de siècle conflagration:

To a historian, a crisis over the Senkakus would fit in a larger and not comforting pattern: the world before 1914. Then, an unstable European order blundered from crisis to crisis, just avoiding a general war in each, until some shots fired in Sarajevo brought down the whole house of cards and with it Western civilization. Today, we have the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian mess (the Balkans of our time?), the Balkans themselves, a threatened American attack on Iran, a resurgent FARC in Columbia and a North Korea that just declared itself a nuclear state. The fin de siècle feeling grows ever stronger; what small incident will it be this time that causes the house of cards to collapse, the house of cards that is a world of “unipolar” American dominance?

The tragedy here is that states continue to play the game of rivalry between states, paying no attention to the prime fact of a Fourth Generation world: when states fight each other, the likely winners will be non-state elements. Again, the analogy with 1914 is hard to avoid. Then, the ancient Houses of Hapsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern remained focused on each other, thinking only in terms of which would triumph over its rivals. In fact, the events they allowed to be set in motion destroyed them all. The real victors were a guy named Ulyanov sitting in a café in Zurich and a transatlantic republic, the United States.

So it will be today when states fight other states, regardless of which state “wins” the formal conflict. We see that already in Iraq, where the American victory over the Iraqi state created a new and fertile field for Islamic non-state forces. China could easily come apart internally as a result of war; God knows what might emerge out of a Japan that again suffered nuclear attack, or the ruins of Korea. Nor is the internal stability of the United States guaranteed in the event of military defeat and strategic disaster. Thanks to the cultural Marxism of “Political Correctness” and “multiculturalism,” we are no longer “one nation, under God, indivisible.”

The 21st century will be a time for what Russell Kirk called “the politics of prudence.” But prudence is seldom a cardinal virtue in national capitals, whether we are speaking of Tokyo, Pyongyang, Beijing — or Washington.

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