Isegoria

Prof. Mark Perry notes that the 1040 Form and Instructions in 1913 were just four pages total, and the top tax rate was 6% — of all income over $500,000, equivalent to about $10 million today.

Andrew Sullivan cites an article on Drugs and Toxicity and makes the following observation:

The least toxic drug known to humans is now illegal. The most toxic is available at Safeway.

If you study the Top US Marginal Income Tax Rates, 1913–2003, you may find some surprises.

For instance, the top marginal tax rate in 1963 — not that long ago, really — was 91 percent, on all income over $400,000 (for a married couple).

In An 18th-Century Brain in a 21st-Century Head, Virginia Postrel says, “Surviving the 21st century with our sanity and civilization intact will require less Nietzsche and more Hume.”

Which raises another question: is Virginia Postrel an Ant Fan? From Room at the Top:

Made in England born and bred
An eighteenth century brain
In a twenty-first century head

Chest presses, not breaths, better CPR:

A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published in Friday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

Perhaps more importantly, bystanders are willing to perform chest compresses on a stranger.

Tokyo’s Irish fans parade for St. Patrick’s Day:

For a city with far more Sakamotos than O’Sullivans, Japan’s capital still manages to go all out to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Although many Japanese know little about Ireland — some even confuse it with chilly Iceland — the small European nation has nonetheless attracted a band of die-hard fans halfway around the globe.

A week earlier, Kyoto had its own St. Patrick’s Day parade, complete with Irish Setters and an Irish Wolfhound.

Thiago Olson is a new Radioactive Boy Scout:

For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion — an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.

Olson’s apparatus won’t work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a “star in a jar,” a tiny flash of hot plasma. “The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,” Olson says modestly, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”

The original radioactive boy scout was David Hahn, who built a crude breeder reactor in his backyard in 1994.

Despite its provocative title, The Great Global Warming Swindle seems reasonable. Watch the video.

(Hat tip to mon père.)

Why Apple is the best retailer in America:

Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

That astonishing number, from a Sanford C. Bernstein report, is merely the average of Apple’s 174 stores, which attract 13,800 visitors a week. (The Fifth Avenue store averages 50,000-plus.) In 2004, Apple reached $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history; last year, sales reached $1 billion a quarter.

Why your home isn`t the investment you think it is:

When most homeowners figure their returns, they don’t do much more than subtract the price they paid from the price they received. Then they come up with a really big return because they paid only a 10% or 20% down payment. So they figure they made a huge “profit.”

But they didn’t. That’s because the costs of owning a home — buying it with a long-term mortgage and then paying taxes on it, insuring it, repairing it, renovating it — sap most of what most homeowners think they make in price appreciation.

There really is something in the way she moves, according to Attraction ‘determined by walk’:

The team carried out a series of studies involving over 700 participants who were shown a variety of animations and videos of people moving.

Some showed shadow figures, where it was not possible to see if it was a man or a woman, while others obviously showed a man or a woman.

No matter which format was being used, the participants rated women or “female” figures as more attractive if their hips swayed as they walked, while men were more attractive if they had the characteristic shoulder movement.

The research also confirmed the waist-hip ratio assumption, with women’s attractiveness being rated higher if their waist-hip ratio was small and men’s being higher if their ratio was large.

The ideal waist-hip ratio for women is to have a waist measurement which is no more than 70% of their hip measurement.

Death and the salesmen looks at how changes in longevity are leading to new financial instruments — but longevity and finance go way, way back together:

The uncertainty about life span has existed since the start of modern finance. The very first time that the British state issued a bond — back in the 17th century to fund a war against France — it did so using a longevity gamble. Tucked in a glass case in the corridors of the Debt Management Office, the branch of the British government that sells national bonds, stacks of old leather files detail these bonds, known as “tontines” after a Lorenzo Tonti, a Neapolitan economist who first devised the scheme. “These were the first government bonds issued anywhere in the world,” says a senior DMO official, who has spent hours reading these dusty files, with all the passion of an amateur historian.

By modern standards, the structure of these tontines was macabre. The government raised money by selling a bond, and then paid bondholders a lump sum each year, divided among the investor pool. So far, this looks similar to how modern bonds work. However, there was a crucial catch: tontines had to be held by a single, named investor — and these instruments expired when that person died. So bond payments were divided each year among the remaining tontine holders, ceasing when the last tontine holder died. Whoever lived longest collected most money — subsidised by the dead.

The government issued the first tontine in 1693, and it proved so popular that they were soon being sold across Europe. Geneva had a particularly lively tontine market. However, as the tontines piled up, they became more controversial. One problem was that they provided an incentive for murder or fraud. And while historians have not found any tangible cases of this happening, the theme permeated 18th- and 19th-century literature and lore — even providing the plot for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box.

A second, more important, problem was that the government kept getting its estimates of longevity wrong. When it sold the first issue of tontines in 1693, it apparently expected tontine holders to live just a few decades. That seemed a reasonable bet at the time, and the dusty leather-bound files show that the early tontine holders included men and women of all ages. But by the middle of the 18th century, investors had become more canny, with the record showing most tontines being bought in the name of girls, usually around five years old. That was because girls lived longer than boys, and because there was a high level of infant mortality until about age four.

This produced great results for the tontine holders, some of whom kept collecting money until their nineties. But it was disastrous for government finances. And eventually, the tontine scheme became so costly that the government abandoned it.

In the 19th century, the word tontine vanished from popular use. But the issue of longevity and mortality risk did not die away. Nor did some of the principles behind the first tontines. They resurfaced in the new concept of life insurance, which paid out a lump sum when policyholders died.

Security expert Bruce Schneier explains Why Smart Cops Do Dumb Things:

Since 9/11, we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective. In short: Much of our country’s counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.
[...]
If someone left a backpack full of explosives in a crowded movie theater, or detonated a truck bomb in the middle of a tunnel, no one would demand to know why the police hadn’t noticed it beforehand. But if a weird device with blinking lights and wires turned out to be a bomb — what every movie bomb looks like — there would be inquiries and demands for resignations. It took the police two weeks to notice the Mooninite blinkies, but once they did, they overreacted because their jobs were at stake.

This is Cover Your Ass security, and unfortunately it’s very common.

Airplane security seems to forever be looking backward. Pre-9/11, it was bombs, guns and knives. Then it was small blades and box cutters. Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane, and suddenly we all have to take off our shoes. And after last summer’s liquid plot, we’re stuck with a series of nonsensical bans on liquids and gels.

Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense. The Transportation Security Administration wants to be sure that if there’s another airplane terrorist attack, it’s not held responsible for letting it slip through. One year ago, no one could blame the TSA for not detecting liquids. But since everything seems obvious in hindsight, it’s basic job preservation to defend against what the terrorists tried last time.

Fogonazos has compiled a gallery of photos and videos celebrating the amazing flight of manta rays.