How the Easter Bunny Got So Soft

Sunday, April 5th, 2015

The price of plush Easter bunnies hasn’t changed since 1970 — the nominal price, that is, meaning they’re much, much cheaper in real terms — yet they’re much softer and higher quality:

“It’s a better product than it was years ago, and it’s not that much more expensive,” said Steven Meyer, the third-generation owner of Mary Meyer Corp., a toy company based in Vermont. Meyer joined the company in 1986, helping his father weather the tough transition to manufacturing in Korea. (“I grew up literally with a stuffed toy factory in the backyard,” he recalled. “It was 30 feet behind our home.”)

For example, Meyer explained that Korean and Taiwanese toymakers introduced safety procedures, later copied in China, to assure that toddlers’ bedtime companions didn’t contain hidden hazards. “Every one of our toys is put through a metal detector before it goes into a box, and that’s because a little shard of a sewing needle can break off and go into the toy,” said Meyer. “We never thought of that when we produced in the United States.”

More immediately apparent is how the toys feel. A stuffed animal that would have delighted a late baby boomer like me now seems rigid and rough. Today’s toys are stuffed with soft, fibrous polyester rather than the foam rubber, sawdust or ground nut shells of the past. That makes them squishier, as do plush outer fabrics that no longer have stiff backings; the yarns are knitted to one another rather than attached to a rigid fabric like a carpet. As a result, said Meyer, “The whole stuffed toy feels softer and slouchier.”

[...]

The secret to both wickable T-shirts and softer Easter bunnies lies in polyester microfibers. These high-tech textiles have replaced the acrylic and polyester plushes that used to cover stuffed toys as surely as they’ve nudged aside cotton for exercise apparel. They represent a remarkable technical and cultural achievement.

In the immediate post-disco era polyester was the epitome of textile yuckiness — synonymous with the cheap, uncomfortable and out of style. “Pity poor polyester. People pick on it,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Ronald Alsop in a front-page 1982 article chronicling manufacturers’ attempts to rehabilitate the fiber’s image. What brought polyester back into fashion wasn’t marketing but years of innovation, with textile engineers on three continents making extraordinary gains in producing ever-finer fibers.

Textile fibers, including polyester filaments, are measured in decitex or deniers, almost equivalent units unique to the business. For reference: Silk measures about 1.1 to 1.3 decitex, while human hair runs between 30 and 50. A microfiber is defined as anything less than 1 decitex.

Although polyester microfibers date back to Toray Industries Inc.’s development of Ultrasuede in 1970, they have only become widespread in recent years, thanks in part to massive plant investments in China that have swamped the polyester market and driven down prices. Back around the time that I was buying stuffed toys for my nephew, polyester fibers of around 3 decitex still “were considered fine,” said Frank Horn, president of the Fiber Economics Bureau, the statistical collection and publication arm of the American Fiber Manufacturers Association. But over the past decade or so, true microfibers have “become ubiquitous.”

Now, Horn estimated, the average is about 0.5 decitex — a reduction of about 85 percent — and some popular microfibers are as fine as 0.3 decitex. The finer the fiber, the softer the final fabric. That’s what makes today’s stuffed animals so extraordinarily silky.

Posted in Economics, Technology | No Comments »

Is it time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show again?

Saturday, April 4th, 2015

It’s time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show again:

ABC is filming a proof of concept for a revival of The Muppets, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady is co-writing the script for a pilot presentation that sources say could be unspooled at May’s upfront presentation to Madison Avenue advertisers.

[...]

For Prady, the revived Muppets — which landed at ABC after initial interest from Netflix — marks a return to his roots. The producer, who currently does not have an overall deal, started his career working for Henson in 1982 and ultimately started writing for The Jim Henson Hour, remaining on the series until a year after Henson’s death in 1990.

This marks the second time Prady has attempted to revive The Muppets. The writer-producer shot some test footage before CBS’ The Big Bang Theory that Disney ultimately passed on. For his part, Prady earned an Emmy nomination in 1991 for writing tribute The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson in 1990 and has contributed writing to Disney’s Muppet-themed attractions. Should ABC order Muppets to series, Prady would juggle both that project and CBS’ The Big Bang Theory, which he exec produces.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Hand-to-Hand Combat

Saturday, April 4th, 2015

A recent analysis of US Army post-combat surveys found that hand-to-hand combat is surprisingly common:

Hand-to-Hand fighting is a common scenario, and often involves weapons.

“216 out of 1,226 Soldiers (19.0%) reported using hand-to-hand combat skills in at least one encounter. The Soldiers’ descriptions indicated that hand-to-hand combat occurred in a variety of tactical situations and that the most common skills employed were grappling techniques (72.6%), followed by the use of weapons (e.g., rifle butt strikes; 21.9%); with striking as the least reported skill (i.e., punching and kicking; 5.5%). These results further reinforce that hand-to-hand combat remains a relevant demand and the US Army should continue such training with an emphasis on grappling skills practiced across a variety of performance settings.”

Having hand-to-hand skills gives you the ability to use different levels of force as needed, instead of defaulting to lethal force.

“The primary focus of combatives training is to develop fighting ability and skills that Soldiers need in an operational environment (US Army, 2009). Combatives is an important component of a Soldier’s ability to employ different levels of force as the intensity and demands of the operational environment change. Additionally, combatives training develops the aggression and confidence necessary for Soldiers to close with an enemy and “seize the initiative to dominate, disable, or kill”

Grappling, either on the ground or in the clinch, is inherent to hand-to-hand fighting in the real world.

“First, grappling was an ever-present aspect of a hand-to-hand combat encounter. Although striking and weapons use were not absent from hand-to-hand combat encounters, Soldiers reported that grappling with an opponent was an integral aspect of any encounter.”

If you are carrying a weapon openly, or if your concealed weapon becomes exposed, you will be forced to fight for control of the weapon in the event of contact distance attack.

“The second lesson incorporated from the PAIs was that Soldiers in OEF and OIF reported that their hand-to-hand combat encounters revolved around a contest over the Soldier’s weapon (e.g., rifle). It appears that a Soldier’s opponent regularly attempted to wrest control of the Soldier’s weapon during hand-to-hand combat encounters.”

Any training for self-defense must establish fundamental skills and be geared toward the threats most likely to occur in your lifestyle.

“Finally, the fighting skills needed for success in a hand-to-hand combat encounter required development through a deliberate process that included: (a) initially establishing basic fighting skills followed by, (b) expanding such skills within a training setting that reflected the demands and context of the operational environment.”

You need skills that can be instantly and reactively adapted to account for the unpredictable nature of hand-to-hand combat. Also, you need to practice these skills against resistant opponents so you can learn to “read and speak the language” of the fight.

“A recent study (Jensen & Wrisberg, 2014) interviewing 17 Soldiers about their experiences of fighting in hand-to-hand combat suggests hand-to-hand combat occurs in a swift and unexpected manner. The results of this study reveal that hand-to-hand combat takes place in an open skill environment (Wrisberg, 2007) characterized as dynamic and unpredictable, which requires Soldiers to develop skills that can continuously and rapidly adapt to the ever-changing demands of the performance setting… …Training in such open environments necessitates skill development that teaches Soldiers to recognize key performance cues and adapt their skills to the quickly changing demands of the environment, many times influenced by a willful opponent.”

Fighting for your life while in physical contact with a determined threat is extremely stressful.

“Furthermore, these authors found that although hand-to-hand combat was one of the least frequently reported combat stressors, it was one of the seven (out of 30 possible combat stressors) most psychologically stressful combat experiences reported by Soldiers.”

Posted in Martial Arts, War | 2 Comments »

Mot and Baal

Friday, April 3rd, 2015

Passover was likely an agricultural holiday pre-dating Judaism:

Nearly all ancient Canaanites — Hebrews included — were farmers, and Passover takes place just at the most critical time of the year, at the end of the growing season, just before the harvest.

This was a time of great anxiety, since the rains that made their grains grow during the winter were no longer welcome. One particularly nasty storm could decimate wheat and barley fields, knocking down the ripe plants and rotting the grains, and the people would starve.

Somehow the ancients had to stop the rains, and this could be the original function of Passover.

The question is, how could eating a roast ruminant stop the rain? For that we have to learn something about the Canaanite religion, which the Hebrews practiced before a proto-Judaism took form.

The Canaanite rain god was Baal. He is mentioned in the Bible time and again, but no details are given about the myths associated with him. To learn about these, we must consult the library found in Ugarit, an ancient Canaanite city on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Syria.

There we find, written in a language very close to Hebrew, detailed accounts of the mythology and religion of Canaan. Among them is a story which explains why the rain stops each spring and returns every fall: the Canaanite god of death Mot kills Baal, each year anew. Baal spends his summers in the netherworld, Sheol, until being resurrected again in the fall.

“I it was who confronted mightiest Baal, I who made him a lamb like a kid in the breach of my windpipe,” Mot tells Baal’s sister Anath in the poem describing this myth.

Mot’s likening Baal’s killing to eating livestock may be key to understanding the original symbolism of Passover. Perhaps by eating a kid or lamb, the Canaanites were symbolically recreating Mot’s consumption of Baal, hoping that this would stop the rain on time.

This could explain the dictum that the bones of the Passover sacrifice must be kept intact, which the Bible does not explain. Maybe the ancient Hebrews thought that if the bones of the symbolic representation of the Baal were broken, this would adversely affect the resurrection of Baal in the fall, when rains are once again needed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Plugged Into The Matrix

Friday, April 3rd, 2015

The average American spends more than 10 hours a day willingly plugged into the Matrix:

There is a giant system that defines our reality for us, and the length of time that the average American spends connected to it just continues to keep growing. In fact, there are millions upon millions of us that simply do not “feel right” unless there is at least something on in the background.

Just think about it. How much time do you spend each day with all electronic devices completely turned off? Thanks to technology, we live at a time when more news, information and entertainment is at our fingertips than ever before, and we are consuming more of it than ever before. But this also gives a tremendous amount of power to those that create all of this news, information and entertainment. As I have written about previously, more than 90 percent of the “programming” that we absorb is created by just 6 enormously powerful media corporations. Our conversations, attitudes, opinions and belief systems are constantly being shaped by those entities. Unfortunately, most of us are content to just sit back and let it happen.

The following numbers regarding the media consumption habits of average Americans come directly from Nielsen’s most recent “Total Audience Report“. The amount of time per day that Americans spend using these devices is absolutely staggering…

  • Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
  • Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
  • Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
  • Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
  • Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into the Matrix.

You have heard the old saying “you are what you eat”, right?

Well, the same applies to what we put into our brains.

When you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.

[...]

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality. Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant. Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

[...]

If you listen carefully, you will notice that most of our conversations with one another are based on programming from the Matrix. We all love to talk about the movie that we just saw, or what happened on the latest reality show, or what some famous celebrity is doing, or what we saw on the news that morning. The things that matter to us in life are the things that the Matrix tells us should matter.

And if someone comes along with information that contradicts the Matrix, that can cause anger and confusion.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has said something like the following to me…

“If that was true I would have seen it on the news.”

To many people, the Matrix is the ultimate arbiter of truth in our society, and so anything that contradicts the Matrix cannot possibly be accurate.

Posted in Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

Draft No. 4

Thursday, April 2nd, 2015

John McPhee offers his advice on getting out Draft No. 1, the hardest draft to write:

Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life. A not always brief or minor form of it mutes all writers from the outset of every day. “Dear Joel… ” This is just a random sample from letters written to former students in response to their howling cries as they suffer the masochistic self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine. “Dear Joel… ” This Joel will win huge awards and write countless books and a nationally syndicated column, but at the time of this letter he has just been finding out that to cross the electric fence from the actual world to the writing world requires at least as much invention as the writing itself. “Dear Joel: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”

Draft No. 4 sound much more pleasant:

fter reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose things in boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.

[...]

You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. If there’s a box around “sensitive,” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.” With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one.

Make sure you’re using the right dictionary though.

Posted in Linguistics | No Comments »

How To Make Efficiency a Habit

Thursday, April 2nd, 2015

Imagine someone who is deeply efficient:

Their life is full of the best sorts of habits. They always take a break on Wednesday afternoon (unless there’s a crisis) and play a game of tennis or go swimming. They always get to their desk by 8.30; they always send polite thank you messages when people have been especially helpful or made a big effort. They always take time to fix the main outline of a document before elaborating the details. They always read through messages to check for silly spelling or content errors before sending. They always file important documents as soon as they get them or as soon as they are finished with them. They have set days when they clean up all their files.

We’ve got a tendency to see this as a personality type. We imagine this person who was always like this; that at kindergarten they always took their left shoe off before their right shoe; that they are maybe sometimes a bit admirable (their working life does seem more tranquil) but also somewhat freakish. You can’t learn from them, you can only watch and wonder.

In fact, human beings are generally very good at acquiring habits. It’s just that various cultural forces have conspired to make habit formation look like an unimpressive, unexciting undertaking.

How To make efficiency a habit:

  1. Have a higher opinion of habits
  2. Set a time
  3. Someone checks up

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

Traditional Anglo-Saxon Medicine

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015

A thousand-year-old medieval remedy for eye infections, from Bald’s Leechbook, a leatherbound Old English manuscript kept in the British Library, really works:

Anglo-Saxon expert Dr Christina Lee, from the School of English, at Nottingham University, recreated the 10th century potion to see if it really worked as an antibacterial remedy.

The ‘eyesalve’ recipe calls for two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek), wine and oxgall (bile from a cow’s stomach).

It describes a very specific method of making the topical solution including the use of a brass vessel to brew it, a strainer to purify it and an instruction to leave the mixture for nine days before use.

None of the experts really expected the concoction to work. But when it was tested, microbiologists were amazed to find that not only did the salve clear up styes, but it also tackled the deadly superbug MRSA, which is resistant to many antibiotics.

Mainstream medicine needs to take Traditional Anglo-Saxon Medicine seriously, ‘twould seem.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Making Time for Kids

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015

Do American mothers spend enough time with their children?

In fact, it appears the sheer amount of time parents spend with their kids between the ages of 3 and 11 has virtually no relationship to how children turn out, and a minimal effect on adolescents, according to the first large-scale longitudinal study of parent time to be published in April in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The finding includes children’s academic achievement, behavior and emotional well-being.

[...]

In fact, the study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious.

So, what does matter?

In truth, Milkie’s study and others have found that, more than any quantity or quality time, income and a mother’s educational level are most strongly associated with a child’s future success.

Hmm…

Posted in Education | 6 Comments »

Rainbow Lorikeets Eat Meat

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015

Australian rainbow lorikeets eat nectar and pollen — and meat:

For years, Bill, who owns the Elimbah property, has put out pets mince for magpies, currawongs and kookaburras.

He also puts out seed for vegetarian birds like galahs, king parrots and the lorikeets.

He feeds about a dozen birds each day and knows they are spoilt for choice when it comes to food.

Rainbow Lorikeets Eating Meat

Bill’s property is home to native trees and shrubs, and there is untouched forest nearby.

He is happy to offer a few scoops of mince and seed to the birds that come in for a free feed.

It was about seven years ago when Bill first noticed the lorikeets eating meat, and they have been eating it ever since.

“At first they went for the seed but then they started chasing the other birds away from the meat, which surprised me,” he said.

Professor Jones said the availability of food on the property made the lorikeet’s decision to eat meat mystifying.

Posted in Animals | 5 Comments »

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