Isegoria

There are two types of people in the world, Aretae claims:

People who know everyone is wrong a lot, and people who know everyone else is wrong a lot.

Things got a bit heated while discussing alternative energy over at Chicago Boyz, but one commenter concluded that I managed the situation well:

I have added another blog to my roll, Isegoria. He (I assume it’s a “he”) not just held on his own against [almost] entire bomb squad @ChicagoBoyz, but did it gracefully and in a dignified, reserved manner. Besides, everything he said made sense to me.

Thank you.

Nanopool’s marketers call its liquid glass — or SiO₂ ultra-thin layering — the world’s most versatile new technology:

If you walk around Ataturk’s Mausoleum in Ankara you are walking on it; if you visit certain hospitals in the UK you are touching it. If you see an unusually clean train you are probably looking at it, and if you wonder how your white settee looks so clean, you may be sitting on it. All of these surfaces have been coated with invisible glass.

The flexible and breathable glass coating is approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), and so it is completely undetectable. It is food safe, environmentally friendly (winner of the Green Apple Award) and it can be applied to almost any surface within seconds. When coated, all surfaces become easy to clean and anti-microbially protected (Winner of the NHS Smart Solutions Award ). Houses, cars, ovens, wedding dress or any other protected surface become stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water; no cleaning chemicals are required. Amazingly a 30 second DIY application to a sink unit will last for a year or years, depending on how often it is used.

But it does not stop there — the coatings are now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural and in-vivo application. Vines coated with SiO₂ don’t suffer from mildew, and coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals. This will result in farmers in enjoying massively increased yields . Trials for in-vivo applications are subject to a degree of secrecy, but Neil McClelland, the UK Project Manager for Nanopool GmbH, describes the results as “stunning”.

“Items such as stents can be coated, and this will create anti-sticking features — catheters and sutures, which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic.”

When asked about how the technology works, Neil, said “In essence, we extract molecules of SiO₂ (the primary constituent of glass) from quartz sand, and then we add the molecules to water or ethanol. Unfortunately, as they say in the movies , if I told you any more …”

There’s a small community that produces more NFL players than anyplace else in America — Football Island, or American Samoa:

From an island of just 65,000 people, there are more than 30 players of Samoan descent in the NFL and more than 200 playing Division I college ball. That’s like 30 current NFL players coming out of Sparks, Nev., or Gastonia, N.C.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley traveled 8,000 miles to American Samoa and found a people and traditions so perfectly suited to America’s game — it’s as if they’d been waiting centuries for football to come ashore.
[...]
It’s estimated that a boy born to Samoan parents is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.

The Samoan people are big. And big is beautiful, according to Togiola Tulafono, the governor of American Samoa.

Tulafono said it’s not just size that makes the Samoans such great football players. His people come from a farming culture that prizes hard work, reverence and discipline. And he thinks that’s why scouts and coaches are pulling out their atlases.

Steve Sailer, who often writes about biodiversity, says, Now, was that so hard?

Tyler Cowen asks, What are the odds that the best chess player in the world has never played chess?, which leads Steve Sailer to ask, What % of 7-footers play basketball?

Presumably, by “best chess player” in the world, Cowen means the most naturally talented. That raises the question of whether “overwhelming passion for the game” should be considered a talent or not. If somebody has the natural ability to be the best but lacks the urge to practice, they won’t be a top chess player.

Generally speaking, the people who claw their way to the top of something are fanatics about it. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were crazy about swinging golf clubs before their second birthdays.

In contrast, Wilt Chamberlain was never terribly enthusiastic about basketball: he always said he would have preferred to be an Olympic decathlete, and he retired from the NBA while still in his prime and played professional volleyball for several years instead. Despite boring easily, Wilt was, however, the best basketball player in the world at some point or points in his career (certainly in 1966-67). This shows how important genetics is to basketball. When Wilt entered the league, he was one of only three 7-footers, and vastly stronger and more athletic than anybody near him in height.

In contrast, it’s hard to imagine somebody who isn’t passionate about golf being the best golfer in the world — genetics aren’t as important relative to dedication as in basketball.

Also, the more obvious your genetic advantage at a particular sport, the more likely you will be steered toward it. Nobody can tell just by looking at somebody if he’ll have a talent for golf, so there are no doubt people with tremendous golf potential walking around who never seriously tried golf (two of the more successful golfers of the 1980s, Calvin Peete and Larry Nelson, never tried golf until they were in their 20s). But every 7 footer gets prodded about basketball.
[...]
There is a lot of effort put into finding very tall men all over the world. In 2007, John Amaechi became the first retired team sport athlete in the U.S. to voluntarily come out of the closet. Amaechi is a good example of how basketball relentlessly trawls for guys with the right body for the game. He grew up in England, a country where basketball is a very minor sport. He was gay and his interests were artistic rather than sports-oriented. But he was 6’10″ and 270 pounds, so when he was 17 somebody recruited him into trying basketball, and he wound up getting paid $9.5 million dollars for a truly awful career in which he repeatedly demonstrated his contempt for basketball.

There are very, very few of them. When I was at Rice, there were two 6’11″ students, the starting and backup center. (The basketball coaches were perpetually sore at the backup center because he was always sneaking off to the library or engineering lab. They had the nagging suspicion that he was just exploiting his height to get a Rice engineering education.) When I was at UCLA with 35,000 students, there were two seven footers on campus: the starting center (Stuart Gray) and the backup (Mark Eaton).

Rush Limbaugh infamously argued that the media was overrating black quarterbacks for political reasons — and it’s hard to say he was wrong:

Six years later, 2009 is turning out to be a bust for black quarterbacks in the NFL. Not a single one is having a good season.

Seven of the 36 most active quarterbacks are black. David Garrard is probably doing best so far: on Sunday, he got Jacksonville back to .500, but he’s only #20 in passer rating.

On Sunday, Jason Campbell got benched at halftime by the Redskins. Former #1 draft pick JaMarcus Russell did win a game for Oakland, by beating Donovan McNabb 13-9. Seneca Wallace is back on the bench in Seattle. In Tampa Bay, Byron Leftwich has been replaced by young Josh Johnson, who is 32nd in passer rating.

With 140 yards rushing in six games, Garrard is the only black quarterback with at least 100 yards on the ground 30% of the way into the season.

Meanwhile, white quarterbacks are having a great year, with seven with passer ratings over 100, versus only one at the end of last year, although presumably top end ratings will come down as sample sizes increase and the weather worsens.

You could argue that black quarterbacks did better 20 years ago in 1989, when Warren Moon finished 4th in passer rating and Randall Cunningham 14th.

Overall, it looks like the first half of this decade, 2000-2004, was the peak for black quarterbacks in the NFL, while 2005-2009 has marked a surprising regression.

Steve Sailer was not expecting that. In fact, he was expecting the crusty old white coaches to learn to work with gifted young black quarterbacks — as in Any Given Sunday:

What happened?

Well, I don’t watch enough football to have much of an opinion, but here’s a hypothesis. When my older kid played football in a league for 9 and 10 year olds, the coach came out into the huddle and called plays and the teams usually took about two minutes between plays to get themselves organized. Football is just really complicated. The best team in the league just simplified matters by putting their best athlete, a black kid, at quarterback and letting him do whatever he wanted with the ball.

Similarly, whenever my younger kid got roped into playing Madden, a game he never paid much attention to, he’d always pick Michael Vick as his quarterback and just have him run around with the ball, because that was a lot easier than trying to have a quarterback throw to receivers running routes.

From that perspective, all this “future of football” stuff about quarterbacks who can run is backwards: having one player Do It All isn’t the future of football, it’s the past. You can’t stop a great athlete in PeeWee Football, but you can in the NFL. They apply a lot of brainpower to the problem of stopping one man.

No, the future of football is like the present in the NFL, just more so: having all eleven players execute in tandem ever more sophisticated schemes.

Part of the problem is that getting a mobile black quarterback became a quick fix for having a lousy offense. Is your offensive line so porous that a 30 year old white guy would get killed? Put a fast young black guy in at quarterback and let him outrun the defenders. At minimum, it will excite your fans.

After a few years of this, maybe you’ve finally fixed your offensive line, but now your fast black quarterback is banged up and isn’t quite as fast anymore, but he’s been confirmed in his instinct to take off with the ball and run rather than to step up into the pocket.

This happens at lower levels, too. If you are a high school or college coach, why try to train a fast black quarterback to be an NFL pocket passer when you can win now by just letting him freelance?

In contrast, the white sideline dads of America with tall, strong sons have given up on basketball, and they don’t trust their coaches to take the long view of their sons’ potential. So, they are paying out of their own pockets to hire personal quarterbacking tutors. (When USC played Notre Dame this weekend, Matt Barkley of USC said he’d know Jimmy Clausen of Notre Dame for years because they have the same off-season quarterback coach, Steve Clarkson.)

Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old jobless man living on welfare, recently scoured the English countryside with his metal-detector and uncovered the Staffordshire Hoard — 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver dating back to the seventh century:

They said it surpassed the greatest previous discovery of its kind, a royal burial chamber unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. That find shaped scholars’ understanding of the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 1,300 years ago that ended up as the unified kingdom of England.

The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish.

Archaeologists tentatively estimated the value of the trove at 1 million pounds — about $1.6 million — but say it could be many times that. And they took a vicarious pleasure in noting that the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.

According to Time magazine in 1966, the homosexual in America was already halfway “out”:

It used to be “the abominable crime not to be mentioned.” Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity — but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him. A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate’s plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.

Homosexuality is more in evidence in the U.S. than ever before — as an almost inevitable subject matter in fiction, a considerable influence in the arts, a highly visible presence in the cities, from nighttime sidewalks to the most “in” parties. The latest Rock Hudson movie explicitly jokes about it, Doubleday Book Shops run smirking ads for The Gay Cookbook, and newsstands make room for “beefcake” magazines of male nudes. Whether the number of homosexuals has actually increased is hard to say. In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males are exclusively homosexual and that about two in five had “at least some” homosexual experience after puberty. Given Kinsey’s naive sampling methods, the figures were almost certainly wrong. But chances are that growing permissiveness about homosexuality and a hedonistic attitude toward all sex have helped “convert” many people who might have repressed their inclinations in another time or place.

Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband’s homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in the fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort — witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. Rich dowagers often have a permanent traveling court of charming international types who exert influence over what pictures and houses their patronesses buy, what decorators they use, and where they spend which season.

Apparently Nick Popovich is the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men:

Today Popovich, 56, is co-partner of Sage-Popovich, a repossession firm. (Sage is his wife, Pat, also the firm’s president.) Their clients include Citibank, Transamerica and Credit Suisse, and the firm annually earns, Popovich says, “into the low-to-mid seven figures.” That estimate isn’t ridiculous when you consider that the most difficult jobs can net Popovich anywhere from $600,000 to $900,000. Popovich’s specialty is big planes, jumbo jets, mostly; he’s repo-ed 1,300 of them in his career. And that’s just the solo gigs. Throw in the 65 repo men who work for him, and the number reaches closer to 2,000.

His mandate is simple. Someone misses a few payments. The bank wants to recover its plane. There will be an attempt to set up some kind of debt payment plan. Failing that, collateral has to be ponied up. If there is none, then an account executive reaches out to Popovich. But Jumbo Jets are expensive — a 747 will run you anywhere from $125 million to $260 million — and people who try to acquire such toys are loath to give them back. If the deadbeat gets wind that the bank is sniffing around his plane, he’s likely to spirit it away before anyone has a chance to grab it, and then it becomes a cat-and-rat game that can take months to complete.

And times have never been better.

Popovich’s first rule of firearms is pretty simple:

The man who tells you he’s going to shoot you will not shoot you.

Read the whole thing for the crazy stories.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

You’ve probably found something in the fridge and asked yourself, Keep it or toss it? I doubt you thought to consult an online database — but now you can.

Speakers invited to TED are directed to follow the TED Commandments:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

Is love colorblind? Not so much:

Just three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from appointment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that today seems not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and his wife had found their dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in that state: he was black and she was East Asian. Fortunately for the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in 1967 these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two years before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup poll found that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of Northern whites still wanted to ban interracial marriage.

Let’s fast-forward to the present and another black–Asian couple: retired Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Eldrick Woods Sr. and his Thai-born wife, Kultida. They are not hounded by the police — just by journalists desperate to write more adulatory articles about how well they raised their son Tiger. The colossal popularity of young Tiger Woods and the homage paid his parents are remarkable evidence of white Americans’ change in attitude toward what they formerly denounced as “miscegenation.” In fact, Tiger’s famously mixed ancestry (besides being black and Thai, he’s also Chinese, white, and American Indian) is not merely tolerated by golf fans. More than a few seem to envision Tiger as a shining symbol of what America could become in a post-racial age.

Interracial marriage is growing steadily. From the 1960 to the 1990 Census, white–East Asian married couples increased almost tenfold, while black–white couples quadrupled. The reasons are obvious: greater integration and the decline of white racism. More subtly, interracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence. Nor is it surprising that white–Asian marriages outnumber black–white marriages: the social distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the distance between blacks and whites. What’s fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites — especially Asian men and black women — have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage.

This is a painful topic to explore honestly, so nobody does.

Security guru Bruce Schneier points out that we routinely rely on the kindness of strangers, and that’s not a bad thing:

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

As it turns out, this is profoundly bad advice. Most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

The advice in each of these paragraphs may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

Another example:

If you’re sitting in a café working on your laptop and need to get up for a minute, ask the person sitting next to you to watch your stuff. He’s very unlikely to steal anything. Or, if you’re nervous about that, ask the three people sitting around you. Those three people don’t know each other, and will not only watch your stuff, but they’ll also watch each other to make sure no one steals anything.

Again, this works because you’re selecting the people. If three people walk up to you in the café and offer to watch your computer while you go to the bathroom, don’t take them up on that offer. Your odds of getting three honest people are much lower.

This concept also works in computer security.

Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, How Buildings Learn) shares a number of lessons learned from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, where volunteer rescuers in San Francisco’s Marina District outnumbered professionals three-to-one during the critical first few hours:

• Collect thoughts, then collect tools! These are some of the tools that have proven useful for earthquake search and rescue and for fighting fires while they’re still small:
  • Gas-powered saws
  • Hand saws
  • Axes
  • Ladders
  • Crow bars and pry bars
  • Bolt cutters
  • Wrenches for gas valves
  • Flashlights, miner’s lights, lanterns, extra batteries
  • Portable generator and power tools and work lights
  • Jacks, blocks, and shoring material such as 4 x 4 lumber
  • Rope
  • Shovels
  • Work gloves, boots
  • Loud hailers
  • Buckets

  “A lot of people don’t know it, but the best fire extinguisher in the world is a garden hose with a hand shut-off nozzle and enough hose to reach any part of your building. If you don’t have a hose, use a bucket.” — Bob Jabs

• In any collapsed building, assume there are people trapped alive. Locate them, let them know everything will be done to get them out.
• Searching a building, call out. “Anybody in here? Anybody need help? Shout or bang on something if you can hear my voice.”
• After an earthquake, further collapse is not the main danger. Fire is.
• If you want to lend your help, ask! If you want to be helped, ask!
• Fire fighting is a series of mistakes, corrected as soon as possible.
• Bystanders make the convenient assumption that everything is being taken care of by the people already helping. That’s seldom accurate.
• Join a team or start a team. Divide up the tasks. Help leadership emerge.

Some narrow-minded cultural imperialists might call this behavior primitive, savage, or barbaric. Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Deadly Threat in Tanzania:

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.
[...]
But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.
[...]
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because they believed they would catch more fish.

On the shores of Lake Victoria, in northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.

One traditional healer, a young man in a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor, said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.”