Isegoria

A Girl Like Me is a short documentary video by a 16-year-old black girl named Kiri Davis.

The truly fascinating part comes about half-way through, when she repeats an old social psychology experiment from the 1950s and asks young black kids which doll they’d like to play with, the white doll or the black doll.

If you’ve been watching the History Channel’s Engineering an Empire series, which I recommend, then you know that Peter Weller, who hosts it, is on his way to becoming RoboCop, PhD:

He spent much of the past two decades in Italy and, on a lark, enrolled in classes at the Syracuse University program in Florence. He soon discovered he had a thing for the aqueducts of long-dead civilizations, and now he’s working toward a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history from UCLA. This is no vanity degree; Weller teaches courses, writes papers, and is doggedly climbing the academic ladder. Buckaroo Banzai, the polymath who was arguably Weller’s most famous character — acclaimed neurosurgeon, race car driver, particle physicist, and, of course, rock star — would be proud. “I’ve always followed my passions,” Weller says, “even when it didn’t seem to make much sense.”

It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller’s two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing. “The Romans were an unbelievably complex people, and we are an unbelievably complex people,” Weller says. “We can learn so much about why things are the way they are by looking at what they did.” He goes on to explain how the absence of the concept of zero in Greek antiquity laid the foundation for Western philosophical thought.

Lasersharking is combining two things that are cool on their own to make something stupid.

As someone named Jack Spencer said, in obvious reference to Austin Powers, “If a gamer had made Jaws it would not have been a shark but a shark with a laser on its head.”

Martin Cassini says, I like traffic lights, but only when they’re dismantled:

Think of all the hours in your life wasted as your car journey is stopped by lights to let non-existent traffic through. And then ask yourself this: who is the better judge of when it’s safe to go — you, the driver at the time and place, or lights programmed by an absent regulator? Traffic lights exist as a “cure” for a man-made malady — the misconceived priority rule. This rule confers superior rights on main-road traffic at the expense of minor-road traffic and pedestrians. To interrupt the priority streams, lights are “needed”.

Before 1929 when the priority rule came into force, a sort of first-come, first-served rule prevailed. All road users had equal rights, so a motorist arriving at a junction gave way to anyone who had arrived first, even the humble pedestrian. Motorists had a simple responsibility for avoiding collisions, and a duty of care to other road users.

In other walks of life the common-law principle of single queueing applies, but the law of the road, based on the priority rule that licenses queue-jumping and aggression, creates battlegrounds where we have to fight for gaps and green time.

But when lights are out of action — when we’re free of external controls and allowed to use our own judgment — peaceful anarchy breaks out. We approach slowly and filter in turn. Courtesy thrives and congestion dissolves. And when the lights start working again, congestion returns.

Henry Blodget explains why the world’s greatest stock picker stopped picking stocks:

First, in the seven decades since [Benjamin] Graham wrote Security Analysis, the stock market has gone from being a playground for amateurs to a battlefield dominated by full-time professionals. One result is that pricing errors that once might have gone unnoticed for months in Graham’s day are now discovered and exploited instantly. Second, the amount of information available about the most obscure stock today dwarfs what was available about even the bellwethers a half-century ago, making it harder to dig up information that other investors don’t know. The moment the information is released, moreover, it is dissected, discussed, and debated by thousands of analysts, until most reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from it have been. Today’s technology also allows even part-time investors to screen tens of thousands of stocks in dozens of markets in the time it would have taken a Graham-era analyst to compute the “net current assets” of a single company.

Third, inside information that used to be quite valuable is now illegal to trade on. And, finally, the establishment of research centers such as the Center for Research in Security Prices (CSRP) has allowed analysts to study markets and investing in ways that the young Benjamin Graham could only have dreamed of — and, in so doing, to assemble a body of knowledge that makes much of the “investment wisdom” of the early 20th century seem as primitive and unscientific as bloodletting.

Requiem for the Magic Bullets describes the rise and fall of antibiotics:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.

By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.
[...]
Developing and testing a new antibiotic can take 10 years and cost more than $800 million, and pharmaceutical companies face an ever-changing maze of federal regulations to successfully bring a product to market. Several major drug manufacturers — including Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly and Company — have either drastically reduced their development of new antibiotics or given up on antimicrobial R&D altogether as an unprofitable enterprise.

The fact that antibiotics are usually prescribed for only a short time — seven to 14 days, long enough to beat the infection or fail — makes them unattractive investments. Instead, the big money in Big Pharma is flowing toward the development of lifelong treatments for chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and HIV infection. Only two truly novel classes of antibiotics have been brought to the marketplace in the past decade.

A new technology may allow guards to spot someone with a concealed bomb — or someone simply walking like a bomber:

A new radar-imaging technology expected to reach market later this year could solve the problem by directing low-power radar beams at people–who can be 50 yards or more away — and analyzing reflected radar returns to reveal concealed objects. And early research indicates that this method could one day be augmented with video-analysis software that spots bombers by discerning subtle differences in gait that occur when people carry heavy objects.
[...]
The first generation of the CounterBomber works by continuously steering a low-power radar beam toward the moving subject. The radar then repeatedly “interrogates” the subject. “The characteristics of the reflected radar beam are affected by weapons hidden beneath the clothing,” Burns says. Signal processing software can detect those weapons or bombs without creating an under-the-clothes image that could violate the person’s privacy, he says.

And this technology is helped by novel technology that tracks the subject — thereby enabling the radar to be continuously aimed at the moving person. Software developed by Rama Chellappa, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, uses a form of “gait recognition” to do this.

I did not realize that the iconic soccer ball was designed to show up on black-and-white televisions:

Most modern balls are stitched from 32 panels of waterproofed leather or plastic: 12 regular pentagons and 20 regular hexagons. The 32-panel configuration is similar to the polyhedron known as the truncated icosahedron, except that it is more spherical, because the faces bulge due to the pressure of the air inside. The first 32-panel ball was marketed by Select in the 1950s in Denmark. This configuration became common throughout Continental Europe in the 1960s, and was publicised worldwide by the Adidas Telstar, the official ball of the 1970 World Cup.

Years ago I meant to write a story in the same style as this Pareil Tale of Bridled Passion:

How I met my wife
by Jack Winter
Published 25 July 1994 – The New Yorker

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads and tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated — as if this were something I was great shakes at — and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d’oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation become more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

James Surowiecki says, Check Please:

It’s instructive to consider the sort of things that tippers actually respond to. In one study, a waitress received fifty per cent more in tips when she introduced herself by name than when she didn’t. In another, waiters sharply increased their tips by giving each member of a dining party a piece of candy and then, seemingly spontaneously, offering each person a second piece, too. Squatting by the table instead of standing, writing “Thank you” on the back of checks, and touching customers on their shoulders all measurably improved tips. And waitresses at an upscale restaurant who simply put flowers in their hair boosted their tips by seventeen per cent.

In Aztecs vs. Greeks, Charles Murray laments that we do not train our most gifted students to be wise, even though we expect them to end up in positions of great power and responsibility:

The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato’s Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.

Apple reports record 1Q profit:

For the final three months of 2006, profits surged 78 percent after the company sold a record 21 million iPod players, or about 50 percent more than it did in the same period the year before.

That’s an iPod sold for nearly every person in Texas. Sales of the iconic device accounted for $3.43 billion, or nearly half, of the company’s total revenue for the quarter.

Apple also shipped 1.6 million Macintosh computers, up 28 percent from the year-ago holiday season.
[...]
During its fiscal first quarter ended Dec. 30, the Cupertino-based company said it earned $1 billion, or $1.14 per share, compared with $565 million, or 65 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue for the quarter hit a record, reaching $7.1 billion, up 24 percent from $5.7 billion the previous year.

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly. In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

Everybody loves North Korean Propaganda Posters, right? The typical text:

“Bear this in mind, world. Those who mess with our great undertaking will become our target.”

Chris Rhoads describes The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch, the infamous “phone phreak” who is now toothless and living on the margins of society:

Mr. Draper spent three stints in jail in the 1970s for tampering with the phone system. A court-appointed psychiatrist once found him to be “psychotic,” although another found nothing wrong with him. Until a fall at a conference in Istanbul aggravated a back injury, Mr. Draper was a regular in the rave scene, where people gather in remote locations and dance through the night to electronic music. Mr. Draper once did $10,000 worth of Web-site design and other computer work for a Bay-area therapist in return for physical therapy on his back because he lacks health insurance.